RichT

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!

I've posted on here on the past about how I liked D'Addario rounds and I kill EB Slinkys within a week... however, a couple of years have passed and as is often the way I've now done a complete 180 on this opinion! I've been putting EB Slinkys on everything where I need rounds and have come to love their sound, including crucially the way they age. It may be due to me moving almost exclusively to short scale, but at 30" scale I now find D'Addarios and Elixirs are a bit pingy and insubstantial on the lower frets of the E string, like they produce odd harmonics that overshadow the fundamental or something. The Slinkys sound a lot more solid in that range. Plus they also have the smoother feel so less finger noise and chewed up finger tips.

Really? I've had a couple of sets of LaBella white tapewounds before now and they're the most flexible strings I've ever used by a country mile. They make TI Jazz flats look stiff.

From my limited experience of flats (never played a LaBella set) the EB Cobalts are less stiff than D'Addario Chromes, but not as flexible as TI Jazz flats. I switch back and fore between two almost identical basses with EB Cobalt flats and EB Slinky rounds with no problem at all. The Slinkys are certainly more flexible but my arthritic fingers are still capable of bending the flats.

Have you tried EB Cobalt flats? I spend half my life playing various kinds of dance music and for me they're the best strings by far for those kinds of genres, albeit I'm playing it mostly on Stingray (and other MM pickup basses) rather than a P bass. They have the solid punch and bite of roundwounds but do away with all the metallic clank and fret noise, which I find works well for emulating basslines that are often synth or sequenced to start with. They can also get pretty dark and mellow for the soul stuff with the tone rolled back.

This is how I received a bass the last time I bought via Reverb almost 4 years ago, sold by some idiot who could only be bothered to post it 3 weeks after I'd paid for it. Once unwrapped ('unboxed' would be entirely inappropriate) I found it unpadded, dirty and covered end to end in flecks of white paint, with the worst setup I've ever seen. As Wolfram said above, I've used the site to browse since but I've then tried to find the retailer's own website to buy direct. I'm extremely hesitant to ever buy privately off Reverb again. Awful experience.

And be wary of even using a damp cloth to wipe Elixirs down. When I tried that once it made the coating feel sticky, took days of playing to start feeling normal again. You actually don't need to clean them.

The W will definitely be for Wide. I can't get on with the narrow spacing on most 5 strings, so I very briefly bought a SR2405W a few years ago, the W being specifically for it's 18mm string spacing. Unfortunately it turned out to have a total dog of a setup which I didn't trust to be resolvable so it got sent back pretty sharpish. I do remember the Aguilar Super Double pickups being very nice though. I eventually settled on a non-ms EHB1505 as my single 5 string, again the 18mm spacing on the EHB's being a primary draw, along with significantly lower weight than the SR fivers I tried. The neck specs on the EHB1505 and the 'Atlas-5' carve on the SR2405W look extremely similar on paper, with only the radius really being different, so probably fair to think of the SR 'W' models with the Atlas neck carve as almost an SR body & headstock with EHB style neck dimensions.

Just experiment with what feels and sounds best. The lower you go the more mwah you'll get, but you'll need to balance it. Fretless mwah is a novelty at first but it can actually get a bit annoying when constantly unintentionally mwahing due to the action being too low. I had to raise the action on my fretless a touch to get better control over it. But then I tend to be a little heavy handed and typically set my fretted basses up at 7/64 on the E String, so horses for courses.

Ooh let me see... - I had one bass for 30 years. A Hohner B2A. Played it to death until the electronics and controls slowly gave up. Still have it but it barely works. - My now favourite "if I could only have one" bass is my EBMM short scale Stingray. - But it's too expensive to take out to dives, so have a cheaper Vox Starstream with MM pickup. - And I liked that one so much I bought another, "one for flats, one for rounds" - And I liked those two so much I bought another one with jazz config pickups & controls - But they're all active and modern sounding, so a Hofner Club for vintage vibes. - But that's bit one extreme or the other, so short scale Maruszczyk P-style Jake - But they're all a bit short scale, so Ibanez SR500e in case I ever need those 4 extra inches of fretboard. - But they're all a bit 4-stringed, so 5 string Ibanez EHB in case I need those 5 extra notes - But they're all a bit fretted, so Ibanez Portamento fretless in case I need a bit of mwah. And I think that's where I am currently. I think I'd struggle to to come up with reasons to justify more right now. Unless of course it was a short scale fretless... and then of course I'd need a 5 string one... and something with T-Bird pickups would be nice... and I don't have a true hollowbody bass... and...

Unfortunately I think they're all gone, I'm pretty sure mine was the last one available (for now anyway). Worth keeping an eye open to see if any come up 2nd hand. I paid £700 each for my two refurbished A1H basses and don't regret spending that amount on them for a second, they're really worth that much and more. The A2S at £299 was almost like they were giving the last ones away. Talking of Starstreams, I saw this on the Vox website. They're no longer available and were ridiculously expensive, but oh how I'd love a short scale version!

Yeah that's the one thing with the Starstreams. The passive tone on my A1H (with the single Aguilar MM style pickup) is easily altered by just reducing the volume slightly. You can get quite a decent range of tone darkening with barely any perceived drop in volume. Not sure whether the A2S behaves in a similar way, albeit slightly more of a faff having 2 volume controls to balance. But active basses are my comfort zone so I run mine active all the time anyway.

NBD! 3 and a bit months later, I finally folded! A bass with jazz pickups was the one glaring omission from my collection and it's been quietly nagging at me that if I wanted to try one, I'd likely never again find anything else short scale, of Japanese-made quality, with these sorts of hardware specs, and this light a weight, at this kind of price. So I finally returned to the Vox website yesterday morning. Found they had one last black A2S left and they'd dropped the price to an insane £299... Grabbed it there and then. It's fate I tells ya. It turned up today and it sounds sooo good, far better than any bass has a right to for £299. At current prices just the Aguilar pickups & preamp would usually come in at more than the cost of the bass on their own! Absolutely crazy bargain.

I can recommend the 4" Leathergraft Softy bass straps. As the owner of an arthritic dodgy left shoulder, I've tried a few different wide/padded straps including Neotech, Planet Waves and other Leathergraft stuff, but haven't yet found anything I prefer to these. They're thick and comfortable with a suedey backing but no sectioned foam padding so it's not obviously unusual looking, they just look like a wide leather strap. Between basses and guitars I must have about 10 of them.

I'm not sure £1500 gets you that much new now, compared to the pre-Covid pre-inflation pricing of just 5 years ago. e.g. You can spend £1500 on an Indonesian Sterling Stingray at the top end now. With £1500 5 years ago, you'd have only been a few hundred short of an American EBMM Stingray. The increases in bass & guitar prices over the last few years have been something else. I'd echo some of the other comments and encourage you to look 2nd hand. You can get some really nice gear 2nd hand in that price range.

If it was that important to them, maybe they shouldn't write 'SquiEz' on their instruments. No wonder people get confused! 😉

You've got 14 days to return anything bought online in this country, just be prepared that you'll be paying for the return if it's simply because you don't like it and there's no fault with it. Someone like Parcel Force will charge you about £25 and pick it up direct from your house. About as easy as it gets. Thomann say they'll give you free returns but I've read so many tales of woe around that, I'm personally very wary of buying from them (or any other non-UK retailers for that matter) due to the complete PITA if it needs to go back.

I don't know if it's just some trick of the camera lens, but that headstock looks enormous!

Yes, Hofners technically require medium scale 32" strings, so most sets listed as short scale are too short, but those Rotosound and GHS sets happen to be wound long enough to fit. The LaBellas I've linked to are sets made specifically to fit Hofners. The Cobalts are 40-95 gauge and they fit through the tuners no problem, but as they're 34" strings then some of the wound string is also wrapped around the posts. That doesn't bother me, and the sound is exactly what I was looking for so I've stuck with them.

It's misleading of them to suggest that the bass will only accept Hofner CT strings, there are several LaBella Hofner sets you can buy which will fit it fine, such as these flats, these rounds, and these tapewounds, all of which I'd recommend over the Hofner CT sets. I've currently got light gauge Ernie Ball Cobalt flats on my HCT Hofner (also Chinese) which are long scale strings but crucially fit through the tuners ok, and I've seen other people report putting Pyramid flats on them with no issue. The thing with Thomastiks not fitting the Chinese made models seems to be a deliberate choice, other companies can manage it fine. Edit: Remembered that I've also successfully fitted Rotosound RS77S flats and GHS 7700 Pressurewounds to my Chinese HCT in the past as well. Both these sets are listed as short scale, but I can confirm the winding lengths do fit Hofners correctly if you want a few more options.

Several mentions of Ibanez Talmans above, but as weight is one of your concerns I have to say I never found Talmans particularly light. For their size they're often surprisingly heavy. The Ibanez EHB line are more pricey but generally very light for their size. Peach Guitars have a 1505S short scale 5 string on their site currently weighing in at 6lb 10oz although they're not the cheapest option for them. If you're indeed a lefty as your name suggests, you're unfortunately out of luck as far as short scale EHB's go. I believe the only lefty they make is a multiscale 5 string. Still fairly light comparatively though, I have a 1505 34" 5 string which weighs 7lbs.

My Club bass is very light and great at what it does, but some important things to be aware of before choosing one. Firstly the string spacing is 14mm, if you've only ever played Precisions this is going to be quite a change; and secondly you're really limited on string choice with Hofners. The tuners have tiny holes which you can only get light gauge strings through, and officially* they take medium scale (not short scale) strings due to the extended tailpiece, which limits you even further. *I've currently fitted standard 34" scale 40-95 EB Cobalt flats to mine, but some people are wary of doing that sort of thing.