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Couldn't agree more. The obvious example of this is the yearly cycle of mobile phone releases that millions sign up to. Never mind the fact there hasn't been any meaningful advance in what a phone can actually do in about 5-10 years. It's just a slightly better camera and more useless gimmicks. This extends to so many differing products in our daily lives.

IMO, the finest female voice ever to have graced the planet. Absolutely peerless and such a sad demise.

A big part of this is the convenience/use and replace culture as well. We're sold that idea that if something requires less effort it's a good thing, and that is something stops working, we should replace it. This is happening with music gear in so many areas from lightweight and non-repairable amplification, to studio hardware that goes loco when Apple or Microsoft change something (I sold an interface for £60 this morning that cost almost £2000 twenty years ago, which still works perfectly, which has decent preamps, functionality etc but which will not work with a computer or software made much after 2010), and don't get me started on the lunacy of data cable upgrades. I'm a cyclist as well, my Dad had the same Campagnolo groupset on his bike for over 30 years, he could always buy the right bolts, washers, springs, even quite esoteric parts if something started to wear. Bikes are crazy now, if something breaks, you buy a new one, which for a wheel can be £1,000!!!!! there's guys who are 3 stone overweight paying £10,000 for a bike because its 2lbs lighter than last year's model, for brakes that are actually less good in many conditions (disk breaks on high speed road bikes), because this is how the manufacturers get people to buy new gear - 'no-one's riding calliper brakes/26" wheels/manual gears any more". I forget who said it, but it was a reflection from one of the US Psychologists in the early 20th century who was involved in the systematic application of the psychology of the subconscious to sales and marketing (and politics); "We changed the way governments viewed their people, changing the expectation that they move from being good citizens to being good consumers". Yvon Choinard, the founder of Patagonia (a very switched-on company who repair their own and other manufacturer's mountain clothing free of charge) put it beautifully "In a world of limited resources, there's nothing clever about being a consumer". So this is why I love this thread, because to a degree whilst it celebrates gear that I love for doing what it does the way it does it, it's also about not simply accepting at face value the idea that everything has to be the way the marketing departments want it to be A very personal opinion, others are of course entitled to say "Beedster, you're talking stinky poo"

A picture of an installed bass bridge EVO5 ....

My amp back from Ashdown all serviced , thrilled with the results

No mate, you are exactly right. One of the more perceptive posts I have ever seen on BC. We have reached the point where technology exceeds need and requires to artificially create a demand that doesn't exist. For example, do we need driverless cars? But the technology is there and there is money to be made, so there will be a massive push for it to happen. Meanwhile we are accelerating a disposable culture to facilitate these unnecessary advances. I am obviously in favour of meaningful scientific / technological advances. But too often things are being pushed on us, not because they improve our life, but because it is a way of selling unnecessary products to us.

Ach...i pulled the trigger on the white Ian Hill it arrives Monday, s'posed to be headbanging @ their Glasgow gig tonight so thats my excuse 🙂

Welcome to the October voting thread we have a veritable cornucopia of marvellous magnitude for your auditory consideration. Have a listen to these offerings , all based on the picture chosen by @Dad3353 (Septembers winner) and choose your favourite 3 in order to crown the October Challenge victor These are well worth your time , another quality offering. 1.. @Dad3353 2 @binky_bass 3 @Leonard Smalls 4 @NickD 5 @fingers211 6 @xgsjx 7 @lurksalot 8 @upside downer 9 @adamg67 10 @Nicko 11 @Doctor J 12 @MoonBassAlpha 13 @skankdelvar Well there we have it , a tremendous selection, all worthy of at least one vote , but you have to limit your call to just 3. Good luck to and enjoy your listens. Poll closes at midnight on 31st October

There's too many! 😬 Mostly female. Ella, Etta, Aretha, Diana, Carla, Dusty, Shirly, Whitney, the list goes on... Not so many dudes do it for me... Freddie, Jagger, Bob Marley, Ray Charles, Otis (obviously), Stevie... Hairs stand up on the back of the neck performance! ^^^^^^^ ❤️

Ears, if they like I like. I don’t care about genre, era, band, artist, if the ears approve that’s it. My only filters are I won’t listen to anything extremely political (both sides) or religious. At that point I don’t care how good the music is, the lyrical content tells me no.

And from somewhere else on the amazing spectrum that is music, Steve Marriot:

A voice sadly last to Parkinson's Disease

Oh, and these of course:

Linder is as a god to me. I don't think any of my other heroes have quite such crisp, effortless, fast control of the fingerboard. And what's more he doesn't shred just for the sake of it, just where it's needed. Glad to have met him at the London Bass Show a couple of years ago. Oooh, this is my thousandth post. How exciting.

BTW not a good idea to let a buyer pay by PayPal and then collect, plenty of people have lost out doing that

my favourite vocal. Also Pino P on bass absolutely mind blowing.

The much-missed Sandy Denny ...

Technicians of Spaceship Hawkwind. Followers of Dr. Technical! (one of Brock's many aliases). Back in the early 80s the audience was split roughly into three, leather, labcoats and afghans 🙂 Sadly my afghan got attacked by rats and my labcoat is no more, so when I went to see Hawkwind for the first time in over 25 years last November I bought a NOS one from the 80s and used special fabric crayons to draw the cover of Warrior on the back. To my amazement I was the only person in a thousand or more wearing a labcoat!

All of my 6 instruments are 2nd hand and the most expensive was my Hofner HCT violin bass which was I think £232. The others were around the £150 mark. I have gigged with a £1000 borrowed Fender P special of my brothers but felt very nervous about knocking it or causing damage. So for me I feel comfortable with a cheaper instrument. My basses are still precious and I look after them but a very expensive instrument I find intimidating, I'm too worried about dings. I think I'm the same about cars.

Gear details (and lyrics because I mention Douglas) in spoiler box:

If you want "old school" then maybe one of the Barefaced Two 10 would be your thing. I have a pair of Barefaced One 10s and I think they must sound similar to a single two 10? Anyway, they are superb sounding cabs and LOUD, if that's what you need. No boxy sound at all. Full, deep, thumping and warm sounding and featherweight. Not cheap, but worth the money. Frank.

Here’s my ‘83

One of these came up near me at a good price and I just couldn't resist! I've heard all the positive feedback they get here, and on TB, so GAS curiosity got the better of me. Its a 2005 from the Peerless factory and is in pretty good shape apart from the odd ding here and there. I've been playing it for the past few hours and it produces quite the lovely mwamp with flats on it 😁

So I have only ever owned one bass guitar. I've read about neck profile, neck finish, radiused fret boards, read loads of manufacturer specifications. But having only really had my hand on one bass, it was hard for me to translate what this meant in the real world, so to speak. So this morning, I went to have my bass guitar lesson. Asked my tutor some questions. Afterward I thought to try some of the local music shops to get my hands on so that I could learn. So today I have tried Fender Precision ( Mexican ), Fender Jass ( Mexican ), Vintage Musicman copy, Musicman by Sterling StingRay Ray34, Music Man by Sterling StingRay Ray4 HH. To try all these basses out I had to travel to two shops. Out of the Fenders, I preferred the precision, because of the satin neck, and the pickups are definitely higher output than a Jazz bass. I nearly bought that in the first shop. I showed some restraint, and thought no I'll wait and contemplate over the potential purchase. So then I went to the second shop. Where I tried the Sterling's. So I spent some time comparing the Ray34 and Ray4 HH. I actually preferred the tones of the Ray4 HH because I could hear more tone choices from the Ray4 HH. I huess more tone of the Ray4 HH is probably down to having two humbuckers. What I really liked about the Ray4 HH and Fender Precision, was the satin necks. Wow they play a lot faster than a painted neck or high gloss neck. The Sterling Ray4 HH, sounded more powerful, and sounded like it had more variation in tone over the Fender to me. And you know when you get that "feeling", you know its the one, that real happy fuzzy feeling, yep thats what the Ray4 HH gave, so I knew I had to take it! I've already been playing my Ray4 HH. Very happy indeed. Photo, sorry for the poor quality the weather and lighting is rubbish hear today! The colour looks way cooler!

This is the sort of thread that makes me want to take all of my Badass and similar bridges off my basses in protest at the rubbish people talk about them All joking aside, I've high-mass bridges on three of my basses and I'm quite happy to say that they make little difference that matters to me. I suspect that on my two FLs there's a possible positive effect on sustain, but I'm not convinced, and even if it is the case, I doubt it makes any difference to my tone or my playing. As per the 'Bassists Obsessed with Sustain' thread, my old Wal FL didn't sustain at all, and it sounded glorious, snarlier than a Rottweiler in a cat farm

Such a shame she couldn't live on... 🤔

Here is my cheap Artist Guitars PB-2 Precision Bass copy ( with black hardware + DiMarzio upgrades). They are the Australian Harley Benton, except nicer name and nice script logo on headstock. £99 plus a free gig bag, free clip on tuner, free pack of strings, free delivery. They sell a 3/4 version also. These are so good for no money, and with a bit of set up play pretty damn well. They sell some very well priced quality guitar leads and cases also.

I think it has to do with the changing perception of short scale basses. To elaborate further, if you look back to the 70s a lot of budget basses were short scale, there was Kay, Jedson, Columbus and a couple of others, pretty much all of the output from Kay, Jedson and Columbus was poorly made junk, microphonic pickups, cheaper than cheap machine heads, dreadful bridges, terrible electrics. Even Fender during that period in time seemed to treat the short scale with a degree of contempt with the (IMO) dreadful Musicmaster bass that was usually put together from the leftover parts from other models like for example the strat pickup that was under the black pickup cover. Then there was the false perception that short scale automatically meant mud, this was largely a result of the kind of basses that were short scale that were available , the above mentioned basses were tonally limited due to their cheap electronics combined with the flatwound strings and the poor amplification of the time, this perception was not helped by the Gibson EB0 and EB3 that had massively overwound pickups and the trend of those times for short scale basses to be hollow or semi hollow. Fast forward to nowadays and the sands of time have helped for those perceptions to be largely forgotten, a lot of the people now playing bass don't have memories of learning on those dreadful cheap basses of the 70's and the short scale basses that are around nowadays are far superior because to put it simply people expect better nowadays and it is now possible to make better instruments nowadays and so people are trying these basses and finding that they are actually more comfortable to play than long scale basses (for most people ymmv etc) and actually sound pretty damn good which of course drives demand for more short scale basses. Controversial perhaps but I would be willing to bet that the Squier Jaguar ss bass has played a large part in the resurgance of the short scale

Hmmm...another can of paint? Veneering a headstock like this is pretty straightforward, but matching, as you say, would look pretty good...

I've not listened to all yet but the standard is higher than ever. Kudos to the one that sounds like return to forever on a cosmic trip! The picture certainly fired up people's creative juices!

This is the thing, 99% of the time it'll be fine because most people aren't scammers. But it's when you get caught out that it hurts. I'm far to trusting and generally believe that people are good, but I've been stung for a large amount of money in the past and won't let it happen again. It horrible to have to doubt everyone though.

I would buy 10 of the Sound City heads I had in the late 60s plus.............

You are quite right but for me the preference for a lightweight Class D head comes from necessity, I can no longer hump two large lumps of iron around at close to 69. So yes that puts valve amps out of the question. I love my old HH amps but they were designed to sit on top of a 4x12 and my cabinets are smaller than that. Even the best Class A/B amps (ABM) overhang my current cabs. I think of it like this. If I were a mechanic, I would use Facom or Snap-On tools, but for me my Lidl spanner set works, has never let me down. The same goes for my amps, The Bugera Veyron has never let me down and is manageable and does not look silly on top of my cabinet. Another point, modern cabinets are smaller. It made sense for big wide amps when sat atop a cabinet 2ft6 wide (750mm approx). Newer cabinets tend to be designed single or vertically aligned speakers as speaker design and drivers have evolved.

Paul Rodgers, awesome vocals and still has it nowadays.

All qualities united. What a career..!

Haha - hardly likely. Besides, you already know what you're getting into after spending some quality time with its Stella sibling, which you were very positive about. This is just going to give all of that and a fair bit more besides in the shape of dual band rather than single band compression.

(I know that'll be the never-seen-before box of rotted matchtsicks which once was a bass.)

You should own a P bass at least once in your life! I’m pretty Sure that’s in the bible too

Listened to Space Ritual almost all day long at live volume. Terrific and amazing record even almost 50 years later...

As it was raining today I've chucked something together. Probably should have given myself more time to learn how to play in 23/8... still, that will probably be a first for the composition challenge, if nothing else. Will check the mix after Strictly 😓 It's not very good

I can't tell if you're serious or not.. on the off chance you are and I haven't fallen for a leg pull, it seems to be a fairly straightforward heads up to the community of a potential bargain.

In 1977, a recording of Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode" was included on a golden disc sent to space with the Voyager mission. Many life forms in the universe were lucky enough to hear Chuck's finest moment. However, someone must've lobbed a CD of Motorhead up into the big black sometime in the 80s because it certainly inspired Illegal Alien. Led by frontbeing Lem-Mi, Illegal Alien are The Hardest Working Band in the Cosmos. And, one of the hardest to listen to. Enjoy or endure, the decision is yours!