RichT

Saw that video earlier. Love the look of it, very cool design 😎

A few years ago I saw a (then) premier league footballer driving his matt black Mercedes AMG GT near where I live. I'm not a car person, but it was an amazing looking thing. In that moment I was put in mind of both Ford Prefect and Nigel Tufnel. "It's so... black! Light just seems to fall into it." "It's like, how much more black could it be? And the answer is none. None more black." A stealth bass in that finish would be awesome, but it would also need a dark fingerboard. For this particular SR5, I'd vote for teal 😁

That's beautiful! My Vox Starstreams have that same AG-4M and OBP-2 combo. Has a great range of usable tones, and so easy to get a good sound out of it. Sounds like your 'blend' mod is effectively giving you single coil options - that's a feature on the short scale Rays! It would be right that you'd get a little bit of a scoop in the centre with both coils running together, same as any bass with 2 pickups running together. The particular placement and proximity of the 2 coils running in parallel on a Ray gives it the signature MM sound. Oh and side jack every time. I know you started by saying you wanted it close to stock as possible, but IMO you've ended up with some great mods to that bass.

Funnily enough this lot did have a keys player! But that video clarifies that the basis of the line he played (which is in just about every youtube bass cover) is actually the guitar line. I'd somehow never come across anyone playing that as the bassline before that night.

At an open mic a month or so ago, one of the bands played Heroes by David Bowie. The bassist proceeded to play mostly an overly busy version of something I've since seen people all over youtube claiming to be the bass part (I'm sure it really isn't), but even that wasn't enough for him so he interspersed it wherever he could with slap breaks and double tapping. It was horrendous. He was a lovely chap though.

It seems to me like the E string has a very bright and 'chorusy' sound compared to the others, lots of warbling harmonic information but not so much fundamental. As a result, the tuner is slightly struggling to track it. It'd probably give you a more accurate reading if you try it only through the neck pickup with the tone rolled back. May possibly be due to the strings it came with. Don't know if you're usually a short scale player, but (IME) harmonics on the lower notes of the E string can often be weird with bright strings on short scale basses. I mostly use Ernie Ball strings now because they seem to suppress those weird harmonics well while keeping the rest of the tone intact. Also check how high the pickup is under the E string. Only time I've really had strings sound quite that unintentionally chorusy is when the pickup is set too high.

That actually looks pretty low to me! I generally set my basses up at 7/64 (2.77 mm) on the E string to 5/64 (2 mm) on the G. Others like it lower, but any lower than that for me and I'm liable to start getting buzzing and rattling on the frets. You'll experience this effect more so on a 30" short scale bass like the Junior Jet, because the same string gauge will give you lower tension, and hence 'looser' feeling strings than at 34", so they'll vibrate in a wider arc and be more prone to hitting the frets. There are a few options to compensate: 1) Use heavier gauge strings to get higher tension. 2) Play more gently. 3) Set your action higher. I play mostly short scale basses, I'll never be a gentle player and I don't like heavier gauge strings, so I use slightly higher action and problem sorted. Regarding weather related neck changes, once I've settled on a set of strings, then I find I really only have to set height and intonation once, because after that, all the heat/cold/humidity changes are subsequently doing is either making the neck bow a bit forward or a bit back. Effectively this means the truss rod just needs to be tweaked a touch to compensate and put the neck back to where it started, then the action and intonation sorts itself out again. You shouldn't usually need to go through the full rigmarole of setting saddle height and intonation every time unless you change to different strings with different gauge and/or tension. Otherwise, if it's just neck movement from changing weather then probably about a 1/4 turn truss rod tweak should be all you need to rectify it.

I have a short scale Maruszczyk Jake 4P 30. Styled like a P with a slightly scaled down body, albeit with the pickup more in the Mustang position. It has the Haussel PB4 pickup and to my ears sounds like the kind of vintage P tones I hear on records - caveat being that I've never had a full scale P bass so can only compare with what I hear in recordings. Prices on them seem to have increased significantly recently though. I got mine only just over a year ago from Bass Direct for £1250. They have a couple in stock now and since then the prices have gone up to £1700! Honestly that seems rather steep. I'd recommend one at £1250. It's a much harder sell at £1700.

I'm not so sure, they all seem to be gone now so scarcity may well push 2nd hand values up again. I suspect those of us who've clicked with them would happily pay more if we needed one, we know what they're worth. I know I'd pay handsomely to replace an A1H if I needed to now. I paid in the region of £700 each for my two A1H models and don't regret either for a second. I'd pay that much again without questioning it if I needed one. The A2S I got was more sort of a curio for me because I'd never had a jazz bass (single coil hum allergy), and that £299 offer was just too low to turn down. If it hadn't gone so low at the end I'd probably never have bought it at all, all because of my wariness of hum. I've actually been mulling whether I should try getting the Aguilar 4J HC hum cancelling pickup set for it. I love the sound of the 4J 70 set, but I still wonder if I might love hum-free more? edit - Meant to add that I agree it's a mistake for Vox to go 34" scale. As has been discussed, they're Marmitey and as well as the brand's history, I think short-scale players are naturally more open to quirky designs overall.

The original Artist line Starstreams (A1H & A2S) are also Japanese made, and come with Gotoh hardware and Aguilar pickups & preamp. They then had the cheaper Indonesian made versions, which from what I hear were nowhere near the same level of quality. I bought my last A2S back in March directly from Vox for £299. It was such a ridiculous bargain, just the price of the Aguilar gear it contains would have cost me more than I paid for the entire bass! I'd love a headless one but those new ones are 34" scale and yep much too pricey for me.

Welcome to the Starstream owners club! I love the artist Starstreams, I've got 3 of the buggers now, 2 A1H with the MM style pickup and 1 A2S with the jazz config. I've got short scale EB Cobalt flats on one A1H, and they're perfect for it. They basically sound like played in rounds, with enough tension to work well at 30" scale but not too stiff either. That particular bass has become my goto for almost everything. Can highly recommend them.

Lots of people appear to think that the starting point for active controls is that they should be maxed out, and that seems to be why Stingrays for example have a reputation in some quarters as being ridiculously bright and trebley. They're only ridiculously bright if you turn the treble up to a ridiculous setting! You should always start with the controls centred and work slowly from there. In practice I usually end up with a slight bass boost, then on a 2 band eq I'll use the treble like a tone control to brighten/darken to suit the song. This often means my treble ends up below centre in a 'cut' poisition. If you have a 3 band then the Mid control is your "poke through the mix" control. Turn the mids up to be more prominent in the mix, turn them back to sit back inside it. Nothing wrong in changing that from song to song either. When I have a 3 band I do tend more to set the treble once and then leave it alone, and then the Mid becomes my 'tone' control instead. No point in making things unnecessarily complicated.

I sort of thought the opposite to that, in that as I became more in the market for spending a bit more money on instruments, I lost interest in going to PMT in recent years when the instruments in stock were reduced to nothing but cheaper end Fender/Squier, Sterling Subs, lower end Ibanez and Cort related stuff. If you're in that mid to higher market, it's preferable to have the opportunity to go into a physical shop and spend time trying things out to find that mythical one that feels just right before laying down well over a grand (or more), but PMT took the option of selling only the cheap mass produced identikit far eastern stuff that you can easily buy literally everywhere else online, giving them no USP. I'm sure they used to have interesting higher end stuff. When I properly got back into playing and thought I should buy myself a new bass for the first time in 30 years, I went to PMT Cardiff in early 2019, tried a few basses and spent £600 on a nice enough Ibanez. I remember the guy next to me at the till was buying a £2K EBMM Stingray. I also remember admiring all the USA made Les Pauls and PRS hanging on the wall. All that higher end stuff completely went out the window in recent years (or they never ever had it in the Cardiff branch at least, nor the couple of times I visited the Bristol and Portsmouth shops), leaving them competing with the likes of Amazon in terms of what was actually available to buy in store, and you can obviously never outcompete Amazon in shifting huge volumes of cheap mass produced gear, you shouldn't even try. edit: tl;dr - If they hadn't decided to purge their in-store stock of anything vaguely interesting or higher spec in a race to the bottom which they could never win, they might still be in business.

Love the look of it, but oof that's a wide pickup spacing! It'd be interesting to hear what kind of tones it can produce. The only bass I have with anything like that sort of spacing is my Hofner, and they're famously rather specific tonewise.

The white tapes I used are the light gauge ones sold for Hofners. Those are so bendy I actually had to be careful not to knock the strings off the edge of the fretboard. I guess the black tapes are somewhat stiffer!