twentyhertz

If you're after something a bit more budget, the Squier Pete Wentz signature does that. It's pretty much exactly what I'd want in my ideal custom Precision (maple Jazz neck, quarter pounders, nae tone control), but with a stupid graphic painted on it.

I just got one as a Christmas pressie... loving it in lots of ways, but the bridge and the low E are such a load of crap, completely spoil what could've been an amazing instrument. I've just sourced a .95 D'Addario single string for the low E, and although it's a bass string with a full size ball end, it sits on reasonably nicely. I'd tried a .105 EB Slinky that I had lying around on it very briefly, but it just felt a wee bit too much - .95 seems just about right. £5 for that single string definitely seems a lot more financially acceptable than the price of a set of LaBellas! That's definitely solved some of the issues, but next month's pay is going to include buying a Staytrem bridge. I've been having most difficulty adapting to using a pick, I don't find it's that much use as a finger style bass. I think it's definitely well suited to playing like a guitar... I've been having a lot of fun with one of those new EHX Crayon overdrives and a wee Mooer Skyverb Reverb pedal shamelessly ripping off that MBV-ish guitar sound with the trem. Talking of the trem, I found I really needed to wind in some tension on the spring to make it play ball, but now I've got it where I like it, I'm pretty happy.

I picked one up on the mega cheap from a pal who had one sitting at the back of a cupboard and was reasonably pleasantly surprised too. I've christened mine the Barry-tone, tuned it to guitar-like BEAD with four taken from a set of six strings intended for a Bass VI.

[quote name='Stylon Pilson' timestamp='1413910261' post='2583507'] I've got a BBG4S2 from the late '90s. Similar in appearance to the BB-350 that twentyhertz posted a photo of up above, but with soapbar pickups, active electronics and 4 knobs (volume, pickup blend, bass cut/boost, treble cut/boost). Very light (3.6kg) and a fairly slender neck too. S.P. [/quote] A guy I used to know had a BBG 5 of some sort, had a flame maple top with active electronics and Jazz-style pickups. Pictured here: There was also the BBN 4 III, which looked like the BBN 4 II with soapbars (not sure about the electronics, but I'd assume active?) There was also the BB604, which I remember being the "deluxe" version of the BB404, with the same body & neck but with gold hardware and active electronics:

Holy crap. Just found this thing while I was googling various Yamaha BB Basses, I MUST HAVE IT. Arrrrrgggghhhh.

Yeah, I like the look of the Matt Freeman one. Also, controversial choice, but I keep toying with the idea of the Pete Wentz one. It has the stupid stupid graphic on the body and the fretboard, but ultimately, it's a Precision with a Jazz Neck, maple fingerboard and a (Duncan Designed) Quarter Pounder pickup, with no tone control... pretty much exactly what I'd spec on my ideal bass. 90's Korean Squiers are pretty cool too. I've got a 96 Korean Precision and a 94/95-ish Jazz and they're great once you give them a bit of TLC - you can usually get them dirt cheap, if usually pretty neglected. Make good project basses in my experience.

I'm a big fan of the BB Jazz Bass style basses. I guess you can trace a kind of lineage from the BB350, to the BBN4 to the BB404, but after that they seemed to vanish. BB-350 that I very nearly bought off Gumtree a wee while back: And this wee family album picture shows my BB404 from 2003 (far left, natural finish), and my BBN4-II from sometime before then (second from left, walnut finish). The BB404 has always been my favourite bass, it's got a really lovely slim neck on it, and the pickups sound great too. Never really found any evidence of Yamaha jazzy basses after the BB404 (with the exception of the Nathan East basses), which is kinda sad, that was round about the time they resurrected the "classic" precision-style BB. Always fancied trying out one of the newer ones, but heard the necks were a bit fat, which I'm not a huge fan of.

I use North Face messenger bags for my general carting about of day to day crap... maybe not quite big enough for what you're after, but they're waterproof and tough, which is nice. I use them primarily for photography stuff like cameras, flashes, batteries etc. because I hate carrying anything that looks like a "camera bag". Very handy for my work (TV) where I'm often stuck out in wet, muddy fields with rolls of tape, batteries, headphones, leatherman, scripts, rig sheets etc. etc.

Hmm, reckon I might give them a shot once I've sold some other bits n bobs. Only problem is that both of the pickups in the bass I'm gonna install them on are neck-width (91mm), so will need to figure out how polarity will work if I'm sticking in two neck pickups...

Just out of interest, did you have any luck with the Super 55's? I'm looking at maybe grabbing one of them to stick in a project jazz bass. I've heard some pretty mixed reviews - largely that they sound decent but the connector is a pain.

Mine's not been pimped too hard so far. It was a bit of a recovery job, costing me a whole £20, coming from the back of another BC member's cupboard covered in assorted stickers and dirt. The first thing I did was get it cleaned up, and to give it that classy touch, fired some Poundland wood-effect vinyl wrap onto the scratchplate. The next, and possibly most major transformation was playing around with the tuning. I'd always had this daft idea about making a half-bass-half-baritone thing, and that's exactly what I've done here. It's tuned B-E-A-D using the middle 4 strings from a set of D'Addario Bass VI strings (EXL156: 34-44-56-72). My next plan is to stick some kind of rail pickup in it, but for now I'm actually reasonably pleased with how it's treating me :-)

I've had a mostly positive experience with Behringer stuff over the years. I used to gig a BX3000T 300W Ashdown ripoff head pretty frequently without any troubles. I really liked that amp actually. I have the Guitar DI (GDI-21?) for home recording stuff, but I've kinda given up on that and just use the amp simulations in Garageband instead. No problems though, still going. I used to have the BLE-100 (I think?) Boss Bass Limiter ripoff, both of them lasted about a year of pretty frequent use and eventually died on me. I replaced the last one with a GLX Bass Limiter, and it's been pretty great ever since. I bought a tremolo and an octave pedal just for experimenting with... the octave pedal was a bit crap, but the tremolo did the job just fine. Both are still working after a couple of years, but they've never really had a hard life. I think I also had the Boss Bass Overdrive ripoff one as well at some stage when my Big Muff started acting up and I needed a backup pedal for playing live. Overall though, I'd say to go with the GLX pedals, which are also known as Harley Benton pedals if you buy them from Thomann. Much the same deal (shameless Boss ripoffs), but in much more solid Boss-like metal boxes. I've got the Bass Limiter and a 7-band guitar EQ pedal (for tight control of mids) and they've both been pretty faultless for me.

Are the blue pointy ones reliable? I'm gigging next week and need to know whether or not I should take a backup with me.

Went in and had a look today, £200, 400W handling at 4 Ohms... might have a wee think about it. Anybody know if they're any good or not?

Could be right, yeah. For some reason, I had it in my head that the DBS cabs had a gold strip on them, kinda like the heads... but I guess I must've been wrong!

Big fuzzy distortion, with just a hint of chorus on top. Meaty. Listen to Om/Sleep, and you'll kinda get an idea of it. I'm on a black Russian Big Muff, and I loves it. Tried the Little Big Muff for a few months, but wasn't so keen. Turbo Rat is quite fun, and so so cheap.

Hi there, I was in the Glasgow branch of Guitar Guitar today and spotted a curious looking Marshall bass cab sitting there, obviously second hand. It looked like a 15" + 2x10", but my quick and shoddy research can't seem to place this to a particular model or generation to figure out what the hell it is or what it might be worth. I fired in at 5:20pm to pick up some strings, so I didn't want to piss the sales guys off just as they were getting ready to close up the shop. It had a pretty standard marshall cab covering (like a harder tolex), and all I could see was a fairly hefty circular port on the back of the cab - I couldn't see any labels, and I couldn't see enough of the back to read off any model numbers or anything like that. So, does anybody have any idea roughly what this might be, and whether or not it's likely to be any good? Cheers!

[quote name='BigRedX' timestamp='1329570130' post='1544355'] For me the main advantage to having 24 frets is that the heel is moved further up the neck. This is especially important on a bolt-on neck bass. On a typical Fender-style bolt-on neck playing anywhere above the 15th fret is a struggle for me because of the neck joint. [/quote] This is what I find - my 24 fret Yamaha basses are much more pleasant at the higher end, even if I'm going nowhere near that 24th fret. The extra room before the heel helps out a lot.

I wasn't a fan of the P/J setup - as someone further up mentioned, the J pickup is always gonna cause a bit of hum unless you put in a hum-cancelling pickup. I really love the sound of a single P pickup, or a pair of J pickups... they each have their own thing, but mixing them up didn't really do anything for me.

I've had three Squiers in recent years, and yeah, I'd say they're pretty great nowadays, although that definitely hasn't always been the case. My first bass was an affinity Precision, sometime around 1999-2000, and it wasn't really up to much. In 2008, I had a VM Jazz to keep me busy when I was living in New Zealand for a while, and it was an absolutely amazing instrument... I'd definitely have another one of those right now if I could justify having one. Again, I moved to the US for a couple of months, and bought a Squier Jaguar (the non-VM cheap one with the P/J pickups) - it felt pretty decent, although maybe not quite up to the standards of the VM/CV models. The fit and finish was pretty decent, I just didn't really care for the pickups or the active electronics - something you could very easily rectify later with some fairly simple modifications.

If you're after something cheap, Axes R Us is a handy resource: http://www.axesrus.com/AxeBassPup.html As for others... I'm trying to think of the name of the place where I got my Duncan QP's a few years back, but I can't remember now...

I remember Coloursound... particularly fond memories of a PA system just about going on fire once. As for the Line 6 thing, I'm sure there are some people out there that love them, but I don't count myself as one of them - I've always thought digital modelling stuff sounded a bit crap based on my own experiences. I'd just opt for something a bit more solid and good at one thing rather than a computer chip that tries to be 50 different amps in one (just my own personal opinion of course). Good to see the bass amps getting some kind of attention though, most rehearsal rooms I've used have seemed to treat them as a bit of an afterthought, giving the guitarists really nice Orange heads and cabs, but leaving the bassists with sh*tty combo amps that don't even register when turned to 10.