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I was just reading (on Facebook) the cheery story of one of our bass playing brothers, John VanZanten of Seattle, who about 14 years ago had his dream bass built by Mike Lull Guitar Works. Two weeks ago the bass was stolen, then the thief contacted Lulls in an attempt to sell it to them; Paul Schuster at Lull got photos, verification of the serial numbers etc and convinced the person who had it to bring it in as they had an interest in buying guitars for cash. The guy took it in and Mike Lull seized the instrument advising the thief that the bass was stolen and the guy fled empty handed. Bass has been reunited with the original owner. Brilliant, eh? I doubt you're going to get that sort or after service from Fender.

Thanks UPS, that's the way to do it, custom build ordered 20-05-2019, hand made, delivered today, less than 20 hours from Italy to my door. Status Date Location Activity Current Event Delivered 05/23/2019 3:52 P.M. BEXHILL-ON-SEA, GB DELIVERED 05/23/2019 7:20 A.M. Crawley, United Kingdom Arrival Scan 05/23/2019 6:35 A.M. Crawley, United Kingdom Destination Scan 05/23/2019 5:30 A.M. Stansted, United Kingdom Departure Scan 05/23/2019 3:39 A.M. Stansted, United Kingdom Arrival Scan 05/23/2019 4:30 A.M. Koeln, Germany Departure Scan 05/23/2019 1:53 A.M. Koeln, Germany Origin Scan 05/23/2019 12:39 A.M. Koeln, Germany Arrival Scan 05/22/2019 11:16 P.M. Tessera, Italy Departure Scan Past Event Shipped 05/22/2019 7:54 P.M. Tessera, Italy Export Scan Past Event Label Created 05/22/2019 11:09 A.M. Italy Order Processed: Ready for UPS

Posted about this in elsewhere but I think it warrants its own thread. Posted this over on TB too, figured I should start posting here more as well. Picked up a Sire Marcus Miller M7 2nd generation on a whim on Monday, and I'm extremely impressed. I compared it to my other bass at home, my 2016 Marleaux Consat Custom. Not exactly a fair fight, but life is unfair. The attention to detail on the M7 is extremely impressive - super smooth neck and rolled fretboard edges, ebony fingerboard with absolutely perfect fretwork (I daresay it's better than on the Marleaux), bone nut, wood electronic covers, and other features that you wouldn't see on a Cort/Samick or anything similar of this price. The out-the-box setup is all right, but not perfect. Standard tuning was perfectly adequate, action is not super-low but there is definitely an allowance for it. Besides I do like to really dig in when I play, so it works for me. If you're handy at that sort of thing you can adjust it easily enough, or if you want to be 100% sure take it to a tech. For a 35" scale it was a bit less tight than I would've wanted, but then again I should emphasise that I do play one step down, so a setup is in order. Still perfectly playable, though. Tone is really powerful, and very versatile. The preamp doesn't quite have the clear sparkling brilliance that the preamp in my Marleaux has, but that preamp alone probably costs more than half of this entire bass does, so I'm not complaining. This one is super versatile, can deliver pretty much whatever sound you need it to, just don't expect it to emulate a P-bass too closely. Close enough, I guess. J-tones can be had fairly easily by switching to passive mode and putting the pickups in single mode (separate tone control available - something my Marleaux DOESN'T have...). You can make some pretty radical adjustments with the preamp, each control has a very wide range. Most other sounds are doable too, the sweepable mids are really helpful. There's a very noticable drop off in volume between passive and active mode, but that's to be expected. The only chinks in the armour so far aside from the less-than-perfect setup are the kinda plasticky-feeling knobs, they just don't fit with the premium vibe of the rest of the instrument - I'll probably swap them out for some generic metallic domed ones soon. Also, with the stacked knobs, if you move one the other would move too - I managed a temporary fix for that by pulling off the top knob and then putting it back but not pushing it all the way down, it's merely the bottom of the knob dragging the lower one along with it. With a set of metallic knobs costing around 6-7 quid on eBay, it does make me wonder why they chose this particular corner to cut, I'd have gladly paid that much more for good ones already installed but I guess it's the whole economies of scale thing. The pots themselves however are smooth and solid. The coil tap/passive active switches too are a little cheap feeling as well (less so than the knobs though), but again that's a relatively easy thing to modify should the need arise. Overall though, the value, quality, sound and features are outstanding and come together to bring a very, very impressive bass. An extremely impressive and creditable instrument that a beginner or intermediate player would be overjoyed to own, and that a seasoned pro would be happy to play with a few very minor adjustments - it holds its own very well against some of the best out there. Full band practice with it next week, so I'll add some more thoughts then!

Sounds fun. Good luck! PS: I just checked 4 versions of P I P on YT and they're all about 2-3 cents sharp of D (They probably recorded in D and vari-speeded it up a bit to reduce 'plod'. Or recorded in Eb and slowed it down because they were all speeding off their faces. Who can say?)

OK. This is a mass produced Squier Vintage Modified Jaguar Bass in its original form. It has however been breathed upon by our own @Andyjr1515 and is quite unique in appearance. Some of you may recognise part of it from Andy's previous avatar. Although stock in essence, it got a refinish, a modified scratch plate and a full set-up. It's a great sounding bass anyway but now it looks fascinating too. Whilst nowhere near as unique as his complete builds, it is with pride that we (Jack and I) can say that we've got something nice by that nice man at AJR Guitar Mods from the time before he got famous and started to live as a recluse in his own private lumber yard where he started rolling out wilder and weirder basses such as the Spruce Goose bass with its massive wing span.

I'd agree that the very worst communications I've had are from the lowest value items, the absolute nadir being when I offered two pretty good sofas for free, the only condition being they were picked up. The number of 'Will you deliver?' messages was in equal parts annoying and depressing. Other than one protracted conversation, the gist of which went: "I'll have those two sofas" "Fine, when do you want to pick them up?" "I haven't got any transport, you'll have to deliver them" "I'm sorry, they're pickup only. Like it says in the ad." "But I haven't got any transport" "Sorry" "But I really want them, i just haven't got any transport." "Well, you haven't got two free sofas then, either." That one was alllll annoying...

Plays like: Butter, Margarine, Other spread. Djents: Y/N Mwah: Y/N

If i'm using all 'normal' pedals then the ZGP goes between the wall power supply and the daisy chain. If i'm using it for pedals and Zoom B3n then it goes on the daisy chain plug that goes to the Zoom. It usually takes a bit of jiggling plugs around to find which bit of the chain doesn't interfere with other bits..!

Mmmm... Something like this?

😂😂

Get yourself a 6x10 cab, Aguilar db751 and be prepared to have your neighbors calling the police. 😂 sorry. I’ll get my coat.

Reminds me of the Karl Pilkington sitcom where he gave a sofa away. Guy came round and didnt have transport so Karl had to help him carry it to another address, on the day he was going to a funeral. When they got to the other address it turned out the sofa guy was selling it to this other bloke. The second bloke changed his mind and didnt want it so Karl had to try and get it back too his house. The first bloke wanted £20 to help carry it back lol.

Conversely your job as a bass player isn’t to f up to he mix by fiddling with your feed to the FOH - that would be amateur

Binding take 2........... The little mark at the start of the lower horn has be rectified now............... 😀

Um Bongo 😋

Me too 🙂 There's quite a lot of eighties stuff on our list, with a few slightly earlier and later. Our first set is: Don't Get Me Wrong Hanging On The Telephone Union City Blue Pretty In Pink Teenage Kicks You've Got My Number (Why Don't You Use It) Bad Reputation Best Of Friends Psycho Killer I Feel You Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) Stupid Girl (the Garbage one, not the Stones) Panic Gimme Danger We had to whittle that down from a list of 60+. We're going to be busy! And we also have to find a drummist and someone who plays one of those screechy things with too many strings.

I think the issue is that the sound guy (in the venues I've been to where we have had one) will set everything at sound check time and may tweak once the audience is there during the first couple of tracks. If you are turning yourself up mid set so you can hear yourself better on stage, you could risk being very loud for a while before the sound guy realises what's going on and has time to react. Not going to go down well with him or your band mates.

Hop on a plane, get over there and tw@t him. Then retrieve your pedal and have a bit of a holiday.

Wait for the new Source Audio C4 if you can. It may well have all the octave/dirt/filter/synth capabilities you can dream of! https://www.talkbass.com/threads/source-audio-spectrum-inteligent-filter.1385756/

The Aguilar is really sensitive to how you play. I remember having similar tracking issues starting out with it and thought maybe it was defective. I contacted Aguilar support and they explained that technique is everything for that pedal to track properly. So on the plus side, it definitely can force you to start correcting bad habits in your technique. The advice to place it after a compressor is really good as well since it will keep the signal to the octamizer more consistent.

We used to do this in a band waaaay back, and IIRC we just picked a key the singist was happy with (again IIRC, it may have been D) and went from there. I play at home with headphones using an iPad app which can adjust pitch (helpful for things like ACDC, which seem to be in some odd Antipodean key, possibly something to do with the way water goes down their sinks...) so you don't have to tune your bass to the track...

Got any photos of the Tele neck with the hair still on it?

I'm loving how @scrumpymike's mate's walnut is finding its way into some stunning instruments. Talk about your mojo. That's truly spiritual.

@mcnach back to T-Bird - I popped a telebird together. Epi Nikki Sixx body needed repair, and had no neck, so I repaired it and added a tele neck which needed a shave and voila. its not bad!

I've long looked at Sandbergs and thought I should try one and see for myself if all the love for them is justified....and I concur. Just given a new home to a 20th Anniversary Edition Ken Taylor Basic 4 and it's fab. Lovely neck, great slabs of tone from the pick ups with very usable EQ. It will be my only bass for the foreseeable future, I couldn't be happier and I'm pleased to be in the 'berg Club.😎 Here's a pic.

I'm not sure whether anyone is interested, but I've just finished a guitar with a brushed nitrocellulose lacquer finish. I always swore that I'd never use nitro - too poisenous both for me and the planet. However, a friend asked me to make them a Tele using a beautiful piece of flamed spalted maple, and nitro was the only finish that worked. Polyurethane, oil and CA glue turned the test pieces into a dull splodgy brown mess, not exactly the look I was going for. Nitro though brought out all the beautiful colours and let the flame really sing. Here's the piece of wood before I started.... Although I do spray waterbased polyurethane, there's no way I can spray nitro so I thought I'd try brushing it on. The internet though had almost no information about whether it was possible to brush it on, how to do it, or what the results would look like. So, hopefully this thread will help you decide if you want to do it. It is definitely not an easy option, but.....let me get up some finished pics, and you could decide whether it was worth it. This is what I used: This is Rothko & Frost's standard gloss nitro that they sell neat, ie not in aerosol. This was a 250ml bottle and I used the whole thing plus a bit more on the body. I brushed it on with an artist's brush, a trick I stole from @Andyjr1515. You need to make sure that it's a brush for oil paints, with natural bristles, otherwise the solvents can melt them. I used a Daler Rowney Bristlewhite hog hair fan brush, size 4 (though a size 6 might have made life a bit easier). They are comically long so I cut mine to a more manageable length. Schedule was something like this: 1. Sand to 220 2. Grain fill with Aqua Coat 3. Ignore the fact that the grain fill was pretty poor and crack on with finishing (john, john, john, will you never learn?🙄) 4. Brush on R&K Nitro, thinned with 30% R&K cellulose thinners, probaly about 10 coats. 5. Curse myself repeatedly for failing to grain fill properly. I've made enough guitars to know that preparation is everything, and if you want a smooth finish grain fill is critical. Impatience though sometimes clouds my already pretty poor judgement 5. Wet sand with Wet/Dry paper (water with a drop of Murphy's oil soap) with 600 grit. 6. Another unknown number of coats. It felt like hundreds, but was probably another 5 or so. 7. Wet sand 1000 grit 8. 'wet' sand with Gerlitz Carnauba wax on a piece of Mirka Abralon 1000 grit. This left exactly the satin sheen I was after. I found the key was to brush the nitro on in one stroke, never go back over somewhere you've just painted. Because the nitro dissolves the layer before, I found the brush would start 'sticking' as it got caught in the previous layer. My approach was to do lots and lots of layers, knowing that I would have to go back and wet sand quite a lot of it off to get it completely flat. In reality, because my grain fill was....well, shite.....I had to do many many more layers than I otherwise would have had to have done. If I ever do this again, I'm hoping that 10 layers in total would be enough, assuming a flat surface to begin with. I lay the guitar flat on a 'lazy susan' turntable, did the top and the sides at the start of the day then turned it over and did the back and sides. Would I do it again? Ummm....yes, and no. Yes, if the wood was crying out for nitro, as this piece was. I'd be a bit reluctant to do it again on an entire guitar body though. Even though it was brushed rather than sprayed, the fumes were still pretty bad, and I wore a proper mask with organic filters at all times. On a guitar with a binding like this one, next time I'd probably brush the top with nitro, as above, but do the rest of the body with something else, tru oil probably. The binding would provide a natural break between the two finishes, so the two finishes wouldn't ever touch. And on a flat surface like a guitar top (rather than the fiddly curved inner horns) you could whizz through the process in no time. It's worth mentioning that the Rothko & Frost nitro specifically says it is not suitable for brushing, though I'm not quite sure why, as far as I could tell it went on perfectly nicely. The process also used much less nitro than you would get through if spraying (I think). With a proper grain fill I'm pretty sure I could do a whole body with one 250ml bottle. An aerosol contains about 150ml of nitro, so I used probably the equivalent of two aerosols worth. I've never finished a guitar with rattlecans, but I'm pretty sure it would be many more than that. So all in all I'm pleased with the result (but the next one is going to be Danish Oil, which I can do on the kitchen table😂😁). And some photos.....

Just like that mate! 😃😃👍🏻

I went from a TC RH750 to an Aguilar TH500. I loved it so much I bought a 2nd as a backup. A couple of years later, one of the TH500's was replaced by an AG700 which is now my main gigging amp. ATM I'm very happy with Aguilar, but for the future I'm watching out for Berg Forte HP and Mesa Subway WD-800 reviews.

Anyone who's watched BassTheWorld videos on youtube will at some point have drooled over their selection of very cool instruments. I stumbled upon this video where Gregor Fris talks about 15 of his favourite basses, with some lovely playing from René Flächsenhaar and Lars Lehmann as always! It's a long one but worth a watch. Enjoy. For those of you who don't have the time to spare, here's a heavily stripped down version with no chit-chat:

Wouldn’t be Surprised if the president made him disappear.

You forgot Battery Y/N (deviant) 🙂

Love it...and positively upper-fret friendly in comparison to mine 🙂

It's really very simple. Eurovision is not about the music. Basically it's the epicentre of over-the-top, glitzy campness and we just haven't been building our entries to spec. Want to win Eurovision? Here's how: * The performer is more important than the song so choose someone with an intriguing back story, a willingness to wear heavily perforated bondage gear and the ability to weep like Niagara Falls without the aid of a freshly peeled onion * Come up with a dance routine that would scare your mum, possibly involving near-naked people juggling blazing chainsaws * Select 'basic EDM 4/4' on your drum software. Turn down the snare, turn up the kick. Switch off cymbals. * Choose two chords. Any two chords will do. * Write lyrics which detail the performer's urgent desire to 'be themselves' and not 'anyone else'. Ker-ching!

Hi, the EVO-FX5 prototype is almost finished; Audere Audio Classic preamp installed ; first rough setup & test drive done ! I’m very satisfied with the results & the first serial FX5 is on it’s way....