Alanko

Another vote for Brian Pilanz. Order a pickguard from him and leave a message on the order.

A new archival Who album to be released this year! https://shop.thewho.com/products/live-at-the-oval-1971-cd 1971 would be Thunderbirds and Hiwatts from John?

I think Pino modified it latterly with an additional sidewinder/mudbucker neck pickup. Trying to get Gibson tones from a bass built around Fender lines has been an on-and-off interest of mine over the years.

How Casady got that tone out of a shortscale Starfire strung with flats is beyond me. So much authoritative bark and grind. I know his Starfires were modded, but apparently they were still passive and just had a few extra tweaks here and there. I think Jack Casady is overlooked as a bassist, both for locking into grooves and for harmonic knowledge and creativity. John Entwistle did many things, but grooves weren't in his musical vocabulary at all, and he's never as harmonically inventive either. Jack's playing on the song Crown of Creation is amazing. Stomping along through the versus, adding chugging triplets here and there, through to the eerie outro with long held notes on the verge of feedback. Jack's playing sort of lopes along, through all the Airplane stuff. Interestingly as their drummer(s?) always seemed quite light-footed and skimpy, rather than pounding out a robust rhythmic grid for Jack to lock into.

I've interviewed people like that for jobs! "...and did you receive any positive feedback at the end of the assignment?" "...errr... I did, aye." Pete Townshend seems to be too far the other way, to be fair. Rabbiting away about how Happy Jack was based on an argument he had with his parents about transcendental meditation and the future of live rock music as a multimedia art form or some bollocks like that.

I'm guessing he lost all his high frequency hearing by then. The more terrifying thought is that was the tone he wanted back in 1964! The Alembic was strident and cut through everything like a piano. The Status, plus all the rack gear, just seemed to sound slushy and compressed and goes missing in the mix. Probably turned up to infinity to compensate for the lack of presence.

The Giltrap geezer keeps knocking John's instruments off the shelves in the storage room. I found the whole video slightly sad. John mumbling and grunting away noncommittally. Giltrap slightly too eager with his poodle mullet and 'I'm mates with John Entwistle, me!' The prospect of John alone in a vast country pile with his fake pub in a spare room and a stack of vintage basses hidden away. Talismanic icons of former glories, the lean and hungry years of The Who now decades past. All the time and money in the world, but nothing to do.

I don't think it is even a Telecaster headstock profile, but something even thinner and slinkier. The bassist also looks 15 here. I did way worse things to guitars when I was a teenager!

The same bass, prior to the reshape and with the decal intact? Looks like a black pickguard, but presumably it is dark tortoiseshell. colour photo. Post chop, looks like a boggo Sunburst P Bass.

A very 1970s Mustang Bass on EBay. Poo brown and insensitively modified with a Carvin pickup up at the neck. The inevitable clicky phase/coil split switch is there too. No need to worry about fakery here! https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/116563598473?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=kKGvwWPtR3C&sssrc=4429486&ssuid=74jSvcDiTL6&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY

On a 2013 Rick you should be able to turn the rods without having to manually flex the neck into your desired level of relief, then matching this by tightening the rods. The latter is a technique more associated with the hairpin rods seen on the 4001 basses. Still plenty of reasons the rods can be ineffective in a 4003, however.

I would trust a player-grade lightly modded bass like yours over a mint-grade 1971 with zero history to it, to be honest.

We've been training more competent fakers courtesy of twenty years of detailed documentation online. If you are that invested in faking Fenders, you can get high res shots of every pencil mark, scrunched up piece of masking tape, tooling mark and router deviation in an old Fender. Plus, it is tricky to state Fender always did X or never did Y. Some grainy black and white photo surfaces periodically of some bizarre factory special in the hands of a local country artist. Fender never put binding on Strat necks, apart from when they did! I saw a '50s Strat on Facebook yesterday in an unusual metallic green colour. Apparently it was all original as the 'worm' routing, pin holes etc were all intact. The owner traced the colour back to one car manufacturer's catalog and it was a dead-on match. Funny that! How many solid-colour, immaculate custom finish Fenders are going to keep crawling out from under beds and out of closets? And they all have the right pin holes, router chew marks, stamps, 'paint stick' in the neck pocket. Amazingly. Does it make them real? I saw a guitar builder on Instagram rejoice because they had uncovered a stash of unused 1950s car paint. Loosen it off with fresh nitro and you have ready to spray period correct finishes. Why is that such a big deal? Conversely, look at the nonsense passed of as vintage in the 1970s. Dick Knight used re-top Les Pauls and pass them off as bursts. Famous guitarists bought these, probably while slightly under the influence in dark dressing rooms. John Entwistle also bought a pile of weird fake Gibson basses, supposedly from Gibson's skunkworks division.

It could be magnetic pull from the pickups interfering with how the string naturally wants to vibrate. A bit like Strat-itus.

Gibson built approximately 1,700 sunburst Les Pauls between 1958 and 1960, of which only 2,500 are accounted for.

Maybe a way of styling out headstock damage. Notice there is no visible headstock decal. That or he played with a pushy guitarist with a Telecaster who insisted on the matching showband look. Another mystery bass is a P Bass played briefly by Chris Hillman of the Byrds: I wager there is the remains of a split Fender headstock under a new veneer, plus extra wood to make up a 2 x 2 headstock. The bass has never surfaced, so pure guesswork on my part.

The pickguard looks like modern Fender tort. Dark, with small cream or yellow blobs. The edge might have been dyed to look older, but it isn't vintage tortoiseshell of any marque.

Allparts have them at the higher price: https://allparts.uk.com/products/bartolini-split-pickup-for-p-bass-8s?srsltid=AfmBOoqwAaaFZhkCgdLlnnht9EEJv411mRxHcxLX8PYT5sQBaiQuy1sa Maybe wait and see if they sell out at Bass Direct and then come back at a higher price!

I saw some Barts listed (their 8S P-Bass set) for over £200 yesterday. Maybe a blip, or symptomatic of tariff-geddon.

Headstock seems a slightly unusual shape? Looks a bit thin to my eyes.

I think it also helped that John Weathers would stick to a 4/4 rhythm, even if the others started playing syncopated polyrhythmic stuff. You can keep a foot tapping through some of the densest Gentle Giant moments. Fantastic band, usually with a really good grunting P Bass tone pinning down the low end! My minor gripe is that their live setlists were fairly conservative versus the spread of stuff they put across their studio albums. There are lots of grey market Gentle Giant live albums with almost identical track lists but wildly varying sound quality. Great if you want to listen to fifty versions of Knots!

Unless the strings are damaged, or they are La Bella low tension flats, then any other string will buzz if you are using regular high tension La Bellas. I owned a 2008 4003 for a while. I am convinced it was slowly folding around the neck pickup route. Rickenbacker removed out a lot of wood for the relatively small footprint of the neck pickup in quite a critical structural location for many years of production. I gather they revised the routing at some point, so this might not be the case in a 2013 instrument. Final thought is the trussrods. I didn't find I could use them independently and get more relief on one side of the neck by running one rod looser. I dialled out the relief with one rod but had to tighten the other just enough to stop it rattling. I think the rods themselves were tone thieves to some degree depending on how they were adjusted due to sympathetic vibrations, etc. Again, Rickenbacker take a lot of wood out the core of the neck to fit two rods to do a barely adequate job that is usually accomplished better with one rod. Good that RIC have recently seen sense and dropped down to a single rod. My 4003 always buzzed, but part of the charm of a Rick is that husky semi musical fret buzz, so I lived with it.

Cozy Powell, eat your heart out!

Nail polish can come in glitter finish, or you can get glittery clear/gel coats. I would find a UV-cure glitter white nail polish and use a small UV pen to cure it hard, then wet sand level and polish out. White is horribly unforgiving to match as every white guitar finish has a bit of yellow, blue, grey, pink or even green in it.

If the bass sounds brighter without the covers then perhaps the covers were introducing eddy currents. This would be the case if they were made from plated brass or copper.