Leaderboard

Fender jazz bass 1963

To keep the brass sealed I'll use a spray lacquer, this is the final result. These are a great functional bridge IMO, and I'm more than happy to keep this on the bass as I'm also replacing the nut with a chunkier brass version.

I'll finish off the radius of the nut with a final filing whilst the nut is fixed to the neck (I epoxy it in - it won't punch out again!) I'll then then cut the string slots once the bass is all put together for the final set up. Again I can use the old nut as a guide, but to give you an idea of the difference between new and old I put them side by side. I meant to say earlier in the thread, I bought my two black ribbed mats to work on from Lidl for 90p each! They are classed as doormats but I doubt they'd last very long underfoot. Under bass however, they are perfect! And I can just shake them outside when they are covered in bits.

I'd just let it go mate. You seem to have built up a resentment over nothing there, and its poisoning you. Why don't you share their social media advertising, saying that you played at the festival last year and you wish them luck for this year. You get promo, the festival gets promo, the charity gets more money and you get a nice warm feeling that you've done some good in the world. Everyone's a winner baby!!

I was away this weekend with my family for a trip to Chester Zoo. We stopped at a farm shop just outside for a cuppa and a nice slice of cake. There was an antiques place next door that had these slabs of wood - I'm told it is mahogany, and it certainly looks like it under the varnish. 45mm thick - a few screw holes but they can be avoided. Couldn't resist, had to fit a couple of pieces into the car boot as it was cheap (£25 for both bits) !!!

It's part of the same law in physics that determines you can only ever insert a USB product after flipping it over a minimum of three times.

After selling my board and 90% of my pedals last year I thought I might need to try again....

No actually it related to Mrs X at no.5 round the corner who wouldn't admit that her bell wasn't working... 😂

Here y'go...

This

Well, it's my first New NBD for a while and I have sold a lot of gear recently.... I've had one of these before and as much as I loved it, I couldn't gel with it for some reason. Still, I had a Ric-shaped itch that I knew I'd have to scratch again one day. I knew the 4003 wasn't right for me as I struggle with the top bezel edge digging in to my forearm. The 4003S is a totally different beast though and actually sits very comfortably for me. I heard recently that Rickenbacker was not going to make any more instruments in Midnight Blue, which to me was a real shame as it's a colour I love. Anyway, after a few fruitless Google searches I managed to find one: brand new at a ridiculously low price. Given the likelihood of finding another one any time soon, I decided I'd take a chance and order it online. Past experience has told me that online ordering is a bit like a reverse version of Russian Roulette, in that five chambers are loaded with not particularly well set up or well cared for instruments and I generally always try before I buy, especially with Rics and their, ummm, folibles. In this instance though I was lucky: perfect condition and finish (no QC issues here), low action, no tail lift, quiet electrics etc. As always, the treble pickup was a lot louder than the neck one so after a bit of adjustment I got that lovely warm "fizzy" Ric sound that I love and that nothing else comes close to replicating. I put on a set of TI Flats and it's a beaut. Haters gonna hate and all that, but to me this is the best Ric I've played and hopefully we'll have a good few years together. Maybe I should call her Taylor...

I'm in a desk job that, put frankly, I fecking detest, but if there is an upside I can just listen to music and switch off from the general crap that goes on around me. Never really been a fan of UFO's studio output, but would honestly cite Strangers In The Night as being my favourite ever live album. I threw together a playlist of their studio output from Obsession to Mechanix on the train today and just lost myself for seven hours. It's fantastic stuff. Honestly don't know why this band aren't higher on my musical radar.

Clearly he's a Sith Lord, Darth Funkious

A picture now before I start the cull.... Back Row: 1982 Fullerton-made Fender Precision (one of the good ones it seems), Ric 4003, Gretsch Junior Jet, , Fender USA FSR Jazz (#51 of 100 apparently and signed by the Production Manager. Whoop-de-doo), Sandberg VM4 Laid Down: Sterling Musicman (raffle prize won at the Herts Bass Bash, signed by the Jools Holland Band), Yamaha RBX370A fretless Front Row: Dingwall Super P/J 5, SGC Nanyo Bass Collection SB310 (now with passive electrics, Entwistle Pickups and a Roland MIDI pickup), SGC Nanyo Bass Collection SB310 (active with new pre-amp and pots), Dingwall ABZ 5/3 (now back in my hands after a brief holiday) I want to cut this down to five but I'm not betting that I'll be able to......

Humble, compared to some of the Apollo flight desks here

Many changes over the years but nice and settled now. Fu Fighters gig board.

Remind me never to get Bazzer the Bodger to never do any work on a bass of mine. Not to say that the butcher job is down to Baz. Maybe Macca owned it in the 60`s? Could be worth a fortune....

Unfortunately the Columbus SG Chop is the only one of my victims to survive! That experiece sort of taught me to look after my gear...

When I get to shaping the heel, it's useful to already have the screw recesses in place: The carve along the heel line will be radiused to cut into the recesses - if I get it right, they should follow the angle of the machine screw ferrules. I probably will get the neck to a stage of being temporarily fitted before I sort out the carve of the end blip - this one will be more about feel than aesthetics, and you can't really do that until you are in a position to be able to play 'air-bass' with it. Next job is carving the chamber for the pickup cover to fit into (which, incidentally is at this very moment winging its way to Kent for Aaron Armstrong to do his stuff) and carving the controls chamber. While that goes on, I'll carry on reviewing and tweaking the body carve until it's 'right'

All they need is some white paint for at least two sales... 🤔

Errr, interesting one on Saturday night... Private Party, supposed to be us headlining, one other band and a few people having a bit of a busk/jam earlier in the evening. That's what was arranged. Week before the gig our trumpet player realises she is double booked, luckily just round the corner so as long as we go on at our allotted 11:00pm start all is good. Everyone is there for the soundcheck, no sign of the geezer that booked us, sound guy already very stressed, venue owner is at least as stressed and already talking about shutting the evening down - he has been waiting for about 3 hours for some comms with the booker. Meanwhile every ten minutes another couple of chaps turn up with guitars or drum kits or what have you. All the signs are there, the wheels have well and truly come off this one! We get on stage to do our soundcheck and lo and behold the PA has a desk with 9 functioning channels!! We are a 7 piece band FFS, we run 18 channels into our mixer for a pub gig (IEMs require this kind of thing for everyone to be happy, but its worth it in our experience). There will need to be compromises, sure, but really! I choose to forego the PA - with a Big Twin II and a Quilter, I am very confident that I have got enough grunt for the quite large venue. This is absolutely the only thing I am confident about at this point. At this point a couple more full bands turn up with a ton of gear each - the sound guy looks about ready to quit... An hour after this our man turns up, with a full entourage of party goers. He is in no fit state to really organise taking a leak, and can't cope with the immediate barrage of questions. I hang back, two groups leave with their kit. I pin him for the fee, and he pays half up front. He then explains that he is charging £5 on the door - for his own party (?!?!?!?!) - to recoupe, we will be paid the rest of our fee when its been made. Hmmmmmmm.... Really? I explain we will be going on at 11:00, because that's what we agreed with him, and that none of our gear is to be used by anyone else (because we haven't agreed to that at all and this is well out of hand and there is no way I am going to let a bunch of unknowns have a crack on my gear - the amp is borrowed anyway, its not mine to lend). He then proceeds to play a set of terribly performed covers of Beatles songs with some of the aforementioned busker types. Dear God. I am not keen on the Beatles' efforts on their own songs, but this is some new and truly awful Hell. The single worst effort at Hey Jude I have ever heard. No amount of money is worth this! Whilst this is going on two more groups of buskers and another band walk. Thinning the heard is a very good thing, so ta-taaa! So there is a lot of people milling around with assorted gear, this makes me nervous, we ensure we have a watcher over the kit in the green room and another over the kit on the stage for the entire evening, how tedious, and rotate going for food. But at least things are moving now. And we can see the people turning up and turning away when they find out they aren't coming to a party, but instead coming to a gig played by a bunch of buskers having a dodgy jam. Another band storms out, the herd is fully thinned down now Finally a band proper goes on, they are a glam rock covers band, and have all the gear on to make that very obvious, lots of Sweet, T-Rex, Bowie, good singers, great rhythm section, its not my all time favourite set, but they are very good at what they do, and people start actually coming in to the venue, handing over cash, even having a boogie for a bit of the set. Things may be looking up. When they come off its clear they have had a great time too, really nice bunch too. Birthday boy has another crack after them, couple of bluesy tracks, way better than the earlier effort, then it our turn. He hands over the remainder of our fee just as I am setting up my pedal board. Result! After all this utter chaos and uncertainty (we would have walked too to be honest, but to be fair it was a long drive to not end up playing), we ended up starting our set at 11:02pm! Good God! Our set is completely redesigned and re-organised for this gig, we only have an hour and half rather than the usual 2 and a quarter hours to fill, so anything that isn't a funk monster track has been binned, the transitions are great fun and a nice change. We don't know quite how this is going to work but we have a decent idea it should really work. And, it really really does, we get a bunch of people dancing from the get go really enjoy the entire set, couple of squeaky moments mainly because the onstage sound is pretty much garbage (two monitors, and nothing for the drummer so he can't hear a damn thing properly). Come the end of the set we sell a few CDs have a chat to the revellers, and for the first time I can remember 3 people come over and talk to me specifically about the bass sound, which they reckon was immense, and superb. Kinda make up for a lot of the grief! Like I say, a really weird one, and we have decided we aren't going to do another party again without some very specific conditions, and if that means we never do another party again, I will be fine with that!!!!

The look of resigned weariness that says "How the hell am I going to get that out the other end?!?"

Case closed!

A snippet from a set we did a couple of years back covering music by Ernest Ranglin, Monty Alexander and Bob Marley.

Well, thats what you get for not listening to the instructions. Was it, "go and listen to some guy isolated on youtube"? No, it was "go and listen to spotify". If you had done that you wouldn't have been able to hear the bass properly and you could convince yourself you were doing the right thing The only time I have had to relearn is when I have either hashed a version together as I had to learn 20 songs in a week for a gig, and it got ingrained (like moondance), or if I join another group who are doing the same song, and it has turned out that over the years of doing it in another band you have drifted so far from the original it doesn't fit, which is the situations I find myself in. I think both are a bit tricky really, once you have learned a song, changing it is really really hard. After all, I have no idea how I play those songs, I just tell my brain we are playing that song, it tells my fingers and then we get on with it

Just got home from the first proper all Hellborg amp/cab gig. I love this amp and the cabs. The sound was full, tight, clear and warm but if I wanted more note articulation I could just dig in a little and the notes popped out. Versus Class D amps I feel more comfortable with playing into the older technology of solid state amps. I feel like they can deliver a more solid sound and manage with a range of dynamic playing from soft to heavy fingerstyle playing and heavy slapping. It just seems to respond better and deliver, and I used to use a posh miura M2 compressor to but I find that unnecessary now. I have been using iem for the last year and tonight I decide to give the Hellborg a go, minus the iem and I did not miss them at all. In fact it felt a lot more natural to me! Yeah it's heavy... But I loaded all my gear in to the house in under 5 minutes at 2:30am with little hassle. Definitely worth it... Also definitely enjoying not using pedals any longer as well.

I think Abba were in a golden age of great bass lines to be fair. Never played them myself but I've heard them many times... An ex made me watch Mamma Mia 6 times when it first came out. I could sing it better than Pierce Brosnan too 😂

Gotta agree with the consensus here. You did a great thing by playing at last years festy, and animals, like children, always need our help, so big back pat for that. Forget the poster. Its just getting you in a frazzle over not much at all. You can do better and more important things with your time

Yup, just buy buy buy, wrap in plastic, stick it in the loft. Take it down when you fancy a look and wonder why you bought it

It's no secret, but in the early 80s I accidentally murdered my very first guitar, a Columbus SG copy. Undeterred, I murdered it some more until it looked like this: And it still looks like that now.

To be honest, yes! Using a photo of an artist from a previous years event to promote this years is perfectly normal. Reading between the lines - You sound like your nose has been put a little out of joint by not being invited to perform this year. You can't expect a promoter to have the same bill as last year. That's not how they work. Imagine Glastonbury 2019 having the same line up as 2018.

Hi! New member from Stockholm Sweden.

Don’t worry, the Basschat Podcast will be back soon!! Couple of weeks

Don't laugh, but sitting chillin today, the missus got Alexa to play some Abba stuff. My ears (as per usual) automatically hooked onto the bass and I was amazed how inventive and just dead right it is to every song. Some of the little riffs and fills are exactly what any aspiring player should give an ear hole to. Instead of young'uns slapping the shite out of their basses, it would give them invaluable tips on chord structures and the 'right' notes to compliment a song by listening to other genres and give people like Carol Kaye, Mo Foster and James Jameson half hour an evening before bed.

Yuch!! Rick inspired body, Mock Marcus Miller scratchplate and Sire/MM headstock. Not what i would call " a looker"

I find the discombobulater set like that gives it a bit of 70s squelch. Not too much. I don’t use it live but might if we have no keyboard player at a gig. The bottom feeder was my first ever pedal and is never used live. Just for annoying the missus on a Sunday. 😂

They need to stop fann*y-ing around with esoteric £4k designs and make stuff that we would all buy e.g. how about offering their BB735A: - in white and / or - as a neck through? That would sell, believe me! Yamaha are you listening?!

I think you could be my Brother from a different Mother! 😉 😂

Very nice Nick, nicest colour on a Rick by far.....I am a bit biased though.

So having owned over 80 different basses over the years trading & selling etc, I have a few I can think of: Ibanez BTB 1606 - Recently acquired in a part ex trade off here, needed the cash. The bass was just saddening. Weird body shape, neck heavy, ugly finish to the Mahogany back and the thing was just cheap feeling. Sold to Martin at the Bass Gallery for £400 on Gumtree, it’s now on The Gallery website for £975! Cheeky. https://thebassgallery.com/collections/all/products/ibanez-btb1606-premium Dingwall AB1 - Flame Maple top, maple neck and Wenge fretboard - I’ve discovered over the years I have a love hate thing with Dingwall. I owned a £7500 Z3 model with X grade bubinga top, was a lovely bass build quality and playability wise and active too, Glockenklang pre was alright but the pickups let it down. Anyway the AB1 I had was the worst of the 4 I owned, it played meh. Adjustment required me to go out and buy a set of imperial Allen keys because the guy who traded it me refused to give me the Dingwall adjustment ones, THANKS BTW! Finally got it adjusted and playing to my liking but plugged in it sounded WEAK. This was a passive version, that some idiot had Modded a Nordstrand preamp into - had a tech look at it and sort the soldering etc, got it back and it still sounded weak and like c**p. I honestly have an avid hate for the FD3 pickups. Dingwall seem to model all their basses to sound good when put through certain pedals (Darkglass hype train, Choo choo) but yet they never seem to sound fantastic without. Just well, weak. So I moved that bass on about a week after. Last but not least, my most hated brand of all..... WARWICK. I could rant for hours about Warwick, from stealing Spector designs to Status lawsuits etc etc, but I’ve only ever owned one Warwick and swore to myself I’d never own another. So the bass I speak of was a German made Warwick Corvette Standard 5, Ovangkol Neck, Solid Bubinga body, Wenge Fingerboard. We’ll start from the top, purchased it for £575 from a bloke in Derby. I inspected it when I met him and thought: “The action is abit high but I can sort that and adjust the bridge and truss rod” (Boy was I wrong) Got it home, neck was warped, on further inspection, twisted. Went to adjust the truss rod, truss rod was broken. Brilliant. I was 16 at the time, went to contact the bloke and call him with the number provided but it seemed immediately after our meeting his advert had disappeared and he had changed his mobile number. Again, BRILLIANT. So I was stuck with a bass I had paid £575 for, with a broken truss rod and twisted neck. In the months to come, I removed the fingerboard with a heat gun and sharpened scraper trick, I removed the broken truss rod, I got an apprentice luthier to plane the twist out of the neck, which he screwed up and planed too much, he also refused to cough up any money to compensate for his mistake. BRILLIANT #3. So then I was stuck with a Warwick bass I now didn’t even want, with no truss rod and an overly planed neck that didn’t even fit a fingerboard. SO. I emailed Warwick customer service about the situation, they were rude, unhelpful and downright disinterested. I even offered to purchase a brand new neck and they said, and I quote “we don’t make them for broken basses, check eBay or Dana B Goods” Needless to say I did, even had a long conversation with the people at Dana B Goods who were very helpful but unfortunately had no necks and couldn’t get me one at the time either. I had a few more run ins with Warwick customer service expressing my disappointment with them and how little they cared for customers struggling with issues, I’ve heard plenty more horror stories from other BC’ers since about how truly awful Warwick customer service actually is. ANYWAY, even after all that, I ordered a replacement Warwick branded bass truss rod off their online shop, fit that into my bass neck and started to get to work, I tried evening out the neck to get the fingerboard to fit as best it could, at 16 I had not much clue of what to do, so doing the best I could with my amateur woodworking skills I glued the fretboard back onto the bass, with Titebond, then I managed to get some ovangkol wood dust from lightly sanding the neck. Which I mixed in with mahogany dust and titebond, which made a filler concoction that filled the gap where the neck was overplaned, it looked ugly, but it was stable and made the neck even enough for the fretboard to sit flat. Finally the neck and fretboard were stable, it was fixed - to an extent. I could get a medium low action and the neck was no longer twisted, however still slightly warped with a slight hump on the bass side, but I was happy it was somewhat better and now adjustable. So what I truly hated besides the whole ordeal above: Brass frets - Really soft and awful fret material IMHO Adjust a nut - BUSTANUT utter plastic c**p, any Warwick you buy preowned is 100% guaranteed to have the sides broke off revealing sharp feeling corners. Crazy heavy body - weighed around 12lbs. Ridiculous. Ovangkol neck - unstable choice of wood, it’s an overall cheap wood and looks horrible, not to mention the neck on the bass I’ve spoken about was 3 piece which also was starting to delaminate and create “ledges” between each piece when I bought it. MEC Pickups & preamp - Worst electronics I’ve experienced to date, most Warwicks have them, besides custom shop stuff I think, never heard of any other company using them, for good reason, sounded overall plain and cheap. Two piece bridge - saddles and adjustment was an absolute pain, Allen screws everywhere and all seemed to do jack s**t. Truss Rod cover - That little flap thing you pull out that gets lost so easily???!! What?! Sold it to a Scottish chap who I’m still friends with for £120. The W stands for Won’t buy again. Or if we’re talking about my opinion, W****rs.

I'm not here to help, I'm here to enable and encourage.

Although, Rutger Gunnarsson played on most tracks, there were a couple of other Bassists involved, one being an English player called 'Mike Watson'. A decent little read below, about ABBA and the Bassists, the Basslines, along with what Basses were used etc... https://philwbass.com/2014/01/02/the-bassists-of-abba/

I'm a lefty who plays right-handed. That always felt the natural way, however in recent years I have realised that my right hand is a real weak link in my playing.

https://www.mcintyreguitars.com/

Here's my Status Series II through neck - a beauty! :)