Chris2112

Glad to hear it. Even when the first came out, I had a look at one in Guitar Guitar and thought I would end up getting one at some point. I didn't think it would take ten years but here we are! Every time one came up on Basschat I'd always consider buying it, but I love being able to go to the Bass Bros website and doing it all with a couple of clicks in a minute or two.

I consider it a basic necessity but I wouldn't say I was thrilled to spend £2400 on it, even though the last boiler lasted nearly fifteen years. It's one of those things that you need to spend on, but the money always looks better in your account, a bit like the car insurance. I call them 'cost of living' expenses.

I've recently spent a load of money on things that were just no fun at all. A new combi-boiler yesterday, car insurance the same day, and today I was off to the dentist to have a molar removed after it was damaged whilst I was getting a wisdom tooth taken out last year. I decided to spend some money on myself other than just paying these 'cost of living' charges. Well, I have been saying for a long time that I wanted a fretted jazz bass and the Flea signature model always intrigued me. I'm not a RHCP fan but the spec always sounded like the sort of thing I would enjoy and have a lot of use for. Bass Bros to the rescue. Let's hope it's as good as it looks! I bought a fretless CIJ jazz from them in October 2024 which I play all the time, so it'll be nice to have a fretted model to sit next to it.

You think? I think they're only experiencing a hype because the order book has closed and the whole thing is winding down. It's a case of only wanting what you can't have. Add that to the fact that the typical Status customer is now a bloke in his 50's or 60's dreaming of watching Level 42 on 'the tube' and you can see why the sudden 'bubble' occurred. I say that as someone who is a lot younger, enjoys Level 42 and has owned a number of Status basses in the past.

It is certainly an interesting looking bass. Bass Direct seem to have had it since Jesus was a lad, so if you rang up and made a reasonable offer I suspect it could be yours. Looking at it, I had expected it to be quite heavy for the size of it, as composite basses often are! (Status and Basslab being the exceptions to that). Seeing this thread reminded me of the Spellbinder II bass, which I had thought would have been about 20 years old but was actually released in 2001! Much like the first Spellbinder bass, Stanley didn't use it much, if at all.

This is absolute peak Mark King tone IMO. Loads of grown and 'snap' on the notes. Perfectly compressed and with loads of punch. This is the live sound that I remember from him, it was absolutely massive.

Yes, that is an absolutely fantastic album!

I was really taken aback seeing Level 42 on the Retroglide tour years ago. Mark was playing a MK1 Kingbass through Ashdown amps and his tone was absolutely ferocious. Super crisp and clean but with a huge amount of punch. That setup really moved the air in the way that his other basses don't - I love the Jaydees but they don't have the 'fullness' of sound or body that the Status did.

That's a fairly normal timescale. In August 2019 I dealt with a case of S.20 assault that didn't go to trial until the summer of 2023, almost four years after the offence and three years after the charge was issued. Courts are absolutely rammed at the moment and they have been for years. Cases are often continually pushed back to make room for more complex or more serious cases.

I realise now that I haven't bought any musical gear at all this year, for the first time in a long while.

I love Joe Dart and Vulfpeck have some great tunes but I wouldn't go to see them at a massive venue like that where the sound is inevitably poor. I was lucky enough to see Joe with The Olllam earlier this year at The Boilershop in Newcastle, a small venue with excellent sound. It was absolutely incredible and had an intimate vibe that even the best bands just can't conjure when they're in a huge venue.

Jonas always said that the 36v premap was modelled on a Neve board - which he apparently favoured for studio use. The sheer voltage wasn't for outright volume but headroom, or clarity of signal at higher outputs. Why that mattered so much to Jonas at that particular moment, I'm not sure, but if you look over his career you'll see he was always very interested in tone and the sculpting of his sound through his gear. His signature gear like his Sound of Sweden basses or his Warwick amps were always unique in some regard, in accordance with what Jonas wanted at the time.

I don't know if anyone else here does it but the daily check-in on Bass Bros is a ritual for me now. I always want to see what new stuff they have! In this field, they have a clear edge over Bass Direct. After a large update a while ago, I found the Bass Direct site had become such a mess and such a faff to navigate that I had stopped looking at it unless I was going there for something I wanted. I like the fact that on Bass Bros, you just click the page and immediately see the new offering.

I'm guessing Maruszczyk?

The bass looks really poor, I have to say. It's not just one issue here but several, which is what tends to convince me that the overall workmanship is poor and the builder doesn't care. Letting a bass go with one flaw and hoping it wouldn't be noticed is lazy and unacceptable but to send something out with a number of flaws like this, all of which are quite obvious, just shows contempt for the customer and the £2300 spent. The binding is stained. The paint is flawed. The fret ends look ridiculous (is one of them casting a shadow in one of those photos?). The scratchplate looks like it's been hand cut with an old tin opener. The neck and bridge are out of alignment, and the OP didn't even notice that! I am guessing the OP is in the UK given that he stated what he'd paid in £. I do often wonder if UK customers now are given short shift at times because of their apparently meek nature and the additional issues and costs with shipping in and out of the country. In this case, we once again see an OP tip-toeing around the issue of naming this botch-jobber in the hope that this would give him some bargaining power to get the bass fixed, unaware that bending the knee at such an early stage just signals defeat. FWIW, I wouldn't want such a sloppy bass back; I wouldn't want an ornament of insult sat around my house reminding me of the episode. OP, you're the customer and you're supposed to get what you want when you're spending the thick end of two and half grand. Grovelling and hoping the builder will deign to fix his issues is just... not what I would do. It reminds me a bit of the Letts bass saga, or the handful of posters on Talkbass clutching at straws and hoping Joe Zon would finally build them the bass they had paid for a decade ago. We've had it here before with dodgy builders like Cristian Grosu and Grosmann basses, where builders were named for sending out subpar instruments and it saved the community plenty of headaches in the process. Not here, but on Bass Upfront and groups like that, I was able to warn a few people to read up on some of the horror stories about Grosmann including one on this very site. I'd like to think I saved a few people some cash and some disappointment. OP really should name the builder in this instance to prevent others going through what he has had to put up with.

It was probably Fender 😂 Very sad to hear this about G&L. I've always loved their instruments though the relative scarcity of them outside of America and Japan meant that I'd never ended up owning one. I do hope that Fender could buy them and keep them going as a sub-brand, out of respect for the company that Leo had built, but I don't think the shareholders will go for that. A lot of skilled workers will suffer in this.

Phwoar.

Unfortunately the prosecutor will probably see the file of evidence for the first time on the morning of the hearing and will have time to read the summary of evidence and skim the key witness statements along with whatever other cases they pick up that morning. I wish I was joking!

It's fair to say it's an absolute plodder of a song. Even if the bass tone were fantastic I doubt I'd listen to it twice.