Mediocre Polymath

Here's the video I mentioned. It's a very rare case of Ted Woodford throwing in the towel and declaring and instrument to be unsalvageable.

The Canadian luthier Ted Woodford (him off YouTube) recently did a video on an attempt to rescue one of their new-era guitars. I'll see if I can find it. It's very long and technical though. The gist was that these instruments are all built with an oddly shaped steel extrusion instead of a truss rod. It has these sorts of ribs that extend into the wood of the neck. It's glued into the neck as the laminates are being put together and is completely impossible to remove or service. That on its own wouldn't be a huge problem (it's not like replacing a truss rod is a common maintenance job) but there seemed to be something fishy about it. Ted is very polite (Canadian) and understandably wary about getting sued, so he didn't come out and say anything directly, but I got the distinct impression he believed the design was fundamentally flawed, or just a steel reinforcement bar with an adjuster on the end that didn't really do anything.

That does seem like a daft amount of money to be charging, given how little of an impact the originals seem to have made on the music world. For all their reputed quality as instruments, I don't think I've ever seen one of the old US-made Cirruses (cirri?) in the hands of a player on TV or a big stage. Perhaps the odd session player here and there. I think they were mostly popular with gospel and CCM-type performers in the US – I vaguely recall someone telling me that Peavey always used to have generous financing and deals for churches.

As others have said, I think for a fretted bass the difference between fingerboard woods is mostly a cosmetic thing. My home-made fretless has a Pau Ferro board, I ended up lacquering it because I prefer the feel of a lacquered fingerboard on a fretless, but it was fine before. It's a very hard, very dense wood. Not to the same extent as Ebony, but I was able to sand it so smooth I could see my face in it.

If anyone's jonesing for a brick of bi-amped big iron a la mid-90's flea, I stumbled across this beast while insomniac browsing the other night. It's at Crack Converters in Milton Keynes. Looks to be in decent nick.

Why would someone selling a black bass take all the pictures with it sitting on a black gig bag? I'm intrigued, but I've looked through the whole listing and I'm still not entirely sure what the bass looks like.

Interesting that this thread has popped up on the front page today. I have had the last two days off, and in an absence of anything better to do (and a desire to get outside and touch grass after a long and stressful book project) I've been walking off in random directions across London, stopping when I reach a guitar shop. Today, I ended up in the shop not far from my parents house – it was the place I always went for strings and stuff when I was a teenager. I remembered it as a sort of dusty, neglected Tutenkahmun's tomb of beginner-to-mid-priced-instruments, a sad place with drop ceilings and heaps of cardboard boxes full of plastic recorders piled against the walls. So, it turns out it hasn't changed a bit. Amidst all the utterly unremarkable instruments, there was a Spector Legend – one of the four strings with the twin soapbars. It was covered in dust, but much to my suprise it played absolutely beautifully. I spent a while noodling away on it, but the guy in the shop couldn't tell me anything about it or how the electronics worked (it was in the stock of the store when he bought the place as a going concern in 2019). It seemed like it had active bass and treble controls, but they had no centre detent and behaved really oddly. So yeah. Not sure why I'm writing this other than to A) mention that I played a Spector for the first time and really liked it and B) to ask what's up with the electronics on the old Legend models (the Korean ones, from the early 2010s, I'd guess).

That's a beautifully weird looking thing. I love how it looks so completely of-its-time with that big engraved panel, like a Winchester repeater or a florid advert for some dubious patent medicine.

This bass looks very similar to my own, which also had an at-home neck reset. I'll post my own build/rebuild diary here at some point.

This is very much my relationship with Beck's music as well. What will usually happen is that I'll discover some album of his that I'd never much listened to before, become obsessed with some track or other, and then go off binging the rest of his stuff. My favourite album of his is Midnite Vultures. It's silly and over top, but I'd also argue his most consistent bit of work. There was an interesting interview I saw a while back with the guy who produced "Loser". He was talking about how they recorded it in either the very early 1990s or late 1980s, but agreed that no label or radio station would be interested. They passed it to a few contacts just to be sure and got told emphatically no, so they shelved it. Then one day the producer heard "Smells like teen spirit" on the radio and immediately phoned Beck to say they should try shopping "Loser" around – this time getting loads of airplay and a record deal.

There is a happy ending to this tale. The manky 45-year-old Ibanez responded very well to the surgery. It now has a new hand-carved rosewood bridge and saddle, new nut and nice new jumbo frets. It's comfortable to play and has a lovely sound. It still whiffs a little, but that will probably fade with time. The tuners are the right colour now as well. (The bridge is on straight by the way. There's a funny optical illusion created by the two dark lines in the grain, which don't quite run parallel to the centreline.)

Interesting thing, the regular Digbeth says "Designed and engineered in the UK by Laney" on the back ("engineered by" being a fun turn of phrase that I think Uli Behringer thought up as a way to vaguely imply that something is not made in China). The Nathan East model, however, says "Designed and made by Laney in the UK" (italics for emphasis). Possibly accounts for the difference in price. Edit: just noticed it says made in the UK right there in the description. In my defence, I just got home from the pub.

With the tuners it all just scrubbed off, and I think I've gotten the gunk off the finish. I'm going to have to level and oil the fingerboard so that will probably be fine when I'm done. The only issue really is the inside of the guitar, where I think the stink has seeped into the pores of the unfinished wood. I'll think of a better plan at some point, possibly doing what you've suggested, but for now I've tossed a fabric bag full of lavender in there and taped a bit of cardboard over the soundhole.

This is perhaps a little off topic, but I had to share this somewhere. I'm currently working on an 1980 Ibanez acoustic for someone – replacing a lifted and damaged bridge, refretting the neck and generally giving it some TLC. It's a nice guitar, and in remarkable condition given its age and how much it has been played (frets 1–7 have string grooves that go almost down to the tang). The downside is that it came from the house of my friend's late brother, and both he and his wife were heavy smokers. It smells. Today I was looking at the tuners, which I knew I'd have to take off anyway. They're a sort of faded, brass/gold finish with a funny adjustable tension system (Ibanez called it "Velvetune"). A few were a little sticky to the touch, so I decided to get some vinegar and clean them up. ... Turns out they're not gold or brass, they're nickel covered with a thick coating of nicotine residue. Here's a before and after picture. Bleurgh

Apologies, what I meant was when Andertons made their push to get into the online business in a big way. Not sure when that was exactly, but I remember them starting to show up in sponsored search results and the like in the early to mid 2010s, I think around the time that Lee Anderton took over the business and started making changes.

GAK was a "shop of dreams" for me when I was a teenager. Their website was where I'd go to ogle basses and wish I had more money. When I actually had money though, their way of doing business put me off pretty fast. I tried to order most of my first grown-up gear from them back in the late 2000s, but they used a godawful courier who nicked or broke most of the stuff they shipped. The store also had an annoying habit of selling you stuff they didn't actually have, then stringing you along for months before giving you a refund. I remember that when Andertons first popped up in the 2010s their website made GAK's look like a Geocities page.

Huh. I was in Brighton on Monday and walked past the shop in the North Laines, but didn't try to go in. It did occur to me as I was passing that it was starting to look a bit shabby and neglected.

Thanks. I'll drop you a pm

I've been tinkering with some 5-string headless designs lately and this could be just the thing. What's the string spacing?

Just a follow up thought on this. I don't think there's likely to be another generation after the baby boomers for whom the electric guitar – and to a lesser extent the electric bass – is such a potent cultural symbol.

I suspect we'll soon be reaching a sort of saturation point with solid-body instruments. They've been in mass production now for more than 65 years, and unlike acoustic guitars and other things, they don't tend to naturally degrade past the point of unplayability --at least not on a time scale that has made itself known yet. Each year's production adds to the stockpile of instruments that are already out there on the market, and I don't think the number of people willing to spend money on a non-beginner instrument goes up by that amount every year. The reason prices have held steady or gone up, even for non-"vintage" stuff is that the average number of instruments owned by players keeps rising. As a few people have mentioned, the generation now settling into retirement include a lot of people who collect guitars, and during the 1990s and 2000s big chains like Guitar Centre in the US actively encouraged that with marketing and finance deals. I know a few older folks in the US who own many more more instruments than me, despite never having learned to play. They bought them because they thought they were cool things (they are, in all fairness) and because they'd heard they'd increase in value. The actuarial tables are starting to look threatening for a lot of those folks, and they're probably not going to ask to be buried with their 17 identical sunburst precision basses.

A local guitar shop had one of these for sale on commission for a while. Such an awkward, misbegotten thing. The guy who ran the place tried to sell me on it, and the only thing he could think of as a pitch was "it's really rare, probably collectible". To get back to the topic at hand, I would say that something that's worth remembering is that you can use much lighter woods than maple and still have a pretty stable neck. Probably the combo of, say a multi laminated sapele neck and a super-small Bass Collection-style headstock would help with the centre of gravity issues.