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I believe this is now oookph in the metric era? 😃

Here’s mine - a 2013 MIJ Mustang. I swapped the dark tort plate for a plain white one. It’s the first and only short scale I’ve owned. Initially I got it due to a shoulder injury, but it’s got a sound and attitude all of its own which made it a keeper. With flats it has a smooth, almost acoustic bass sound. With rounds it’s got a midrange snarl and punch. I still love my long scale basses (especially for drop D tuning etc) but my Mustang adds a very usable, quite distinct flavour of its own which is well worth having.

It's a good point. I've advertised this on the forums you suggest and was given an ebay offer, so I chose to list it there. It's a low value item. What's worse, is the guy here lives fairly close (an hour away), and as several members here would attest, I'm happy to drive out and meet people. In this instance, the guy read the description, knew what was happening, and ignored it which wasted my time, cost me money, and annoyed me. Am I petty for getting annoyed? Yes. But if the internet isn't a place for privileged white men to get angry and moan about pointless things, then what is it for?

Do you look at it and every time think - I wish this looked smarter? if so get it refinished. If you look at it and think about all the good times you've together and the missing bits don't even enter your head unless it is the small hours - then don't. FWIW I woudln't, but it isn't my bass.

I have to disagree with this. I've sold lots of stuff through eBay as collection only. eBay has a filter that can sort by distance, it's a platform that has all types of sales on it, from delivery to collection. It's the sellers own prerogative. If you don't like collection only, then, as you have, find someone who does deliver. The platform caters for all. I also live in the relative sticks, and be it through eBay or Basschat (or god forbid, FB marketplace *shudders*) if it's an item I really want, then I absolutely don't mind going to collect it. In fact, I prefer it, as I get to see the item and there can be very little room for surprises. I know I'm likely in the minority, but the thought of buying, for example, a high value bass, from abroad, on eBay, is anathema. I want to see the bass first when that type of money is involved. And, especially so, given eBay is populated by, in my experience, a fair few melts and chancers, (although not to the degree Gumtree and FB marketplace are).

Santa has come early to Ez Towers. I’ve wanted a DB for absolutely ages, but none ever came up for sale that suited. Then I moved 500+ miles north and suddenly a good number of proper uprights and EUBs appeared back down south where I could’ve gone and tried/collected. Harrumph! 😤 I decided that an EUB would be the most sensible way forward, but didn’t want to spend a fortune. I saw a Stagg EUB 2nd hand at a well known bass purveyor, phoned up but sold. However, “We have KK Baby Bass,” they said. Hmm, 3 times more than the Stagg, thought required. Thought about it for a day or 2 and then phoned up to buy it; sold! Then, a few days later, they had a 2nd hand NS WAV advertised on FB, phoned the next morning; sold again! I could’ve gone down the Harley Benton route, but opinions varied and the strings would have to be replaced to get closer to that DB sound in my head. That was it, for the extra few quid (still way more than I started off wanting to spend) than 2nd hand or a lesser instrument, I decided to buy new from the distributor. Phoned up, “We’ve just had an NS delivery,” they say and I wait for the negative report about that delivery. But no, they have the very one I want (NS WAV 4 in honeyburst). Trigger pulled straight away (I didn’t want to be stung for a 4th time). UPS delivery info received, scheduled for tomorrow, but no, it arrived at 5:30 today! Happy days. Needs a bit adjustment action wise (for me anyway) but I’ll leave that for tomorrow once it’s warmed up properly (poor thing has been in vans and warehouses since it arrived down south only to go through it all again to get to me). However, had to test it just to make sure it was working and as I use Phil Jones gear, it should be just the ticket and it is. Sounds properly fine straight into the amp, but put it through my Sadowsky preamp pedal and it sounds even better (I understand the more expensive NS EUBs have active circuitry, but are really way above my budget, so the addition of a preamp makes sense). Now to learn to play the bugger! Ooh, I almost forgot. Thanks and blame must go to the folk who unknowingly influenced me in the final hurdle of this venture, namely, our own @NancyJohnson, David Swift and Tony Levin. And props to Barry at The Bass Centre for making it happen so quickly and easily.

... it'd be a "Wongo". I've always wanted a Wal, but I'm not prepared to wait three years for one, nor do I have a spare £6,000 knocking about. However, I have four MM Bongos. Yes, I know they look like bog seats, but I love them and they sound immense. So I came up with the idea of "Project Wongo" a little bit Wal, a little bit Bongo. I ordered a pair of Martin Herrick's fantastic multicoil pickups and a Lusithand filter preamp, and they're in the process of being fitted to one of my Bongos. The Herricks are a bit thicker in dimensions than the stock MM pickups, so a little bit of routing was required, but they're in, and the preamp is mounted but not yet wired up. Here's the progress so far: S The bass should hopefully be wired up and back together over the weekend - full report coming then. I might even make a video!

I still use the imperial units for heft, you know, 144 strains to a grunt, 12 grunts to a strain, 20 strains to a heft, 105 hefts to a prolapse.

If you ask me it's based more off this

I see no problem with people not wanting to post, when they clearly state so. EBay gives you more exposure, even locally, than Gumtree etc, purely because more people use eBay. Regardless, it's the seller's choice. People have different priorities/preferences, there's little to understand.

Looks fine IMO, leave it as is.

I have recently given it away now to a local council run music service for young people. So it will be well used and i feel good. 👍🏾🎵🎶🔉🔊

I get all of this ^^^^^ It’s the “releases them” bit that I have to work on personally!!

Hasn't it been out of production since Trace Elliot moved to The States?

I`m sure we can manage a 2023 relay - I`m J8 on M1 (20 miles north of London) I could get it up to the start of the M6 as part of it.

Yes, the point I have already made a few times in this very thread.

from her to eternity - nick cave

Your mate needs to get out more. 😄

My story is a little similar but with different outcome. I've tried 5-string basses on and off over the years. Didn't gel with any. The MB-5 was cheap enough and I like the Stingray type of sound... but I never like 5-string basses, do I? I hesitated and my girlfriend bought it for me. I loved it. It was well balanced, reasonably light, and I loved that neck. Of course, it had to sound good, and it did. I considered putting a preamp in there to make it more like a 5-string version of my main bass... but I enjoyed the passive controls. So much, that I just kept playing it and I finally 'clicked' with the 5-string and now I am "ambidextrous" 😝 The MB-5 led to a couple more Harley Benton 5-stringers, a JJ and a PJ (JJ55OP and JP55OP), and more recently a Ray35, so I get the versatility of the preamp for when I want that stuff, and the MB-5 for others. Aaanyway, I sound like grandpa and his stories... To answer the OP, I've kept mine stock. I'm not shy when it comes to mod instruments, most of my guitars aren't stock. But sometimes an instrument just fills a niche as it is and I don't want to change a thing. The MB-5 is one of them. The one thing I'm tempted to change is the bridge. Not that there's anything too wrong with the existing one, I just would like a slightly wider spacing and the fingerboard is wide enough to allow that... but I'm not in a hurry. Oh, I lied! It's not stock... I didn't like he tortoise-shell effect type pickguard and had a matt black one made:

Recently set up by Basschat member Stevie, LFSys is a new name in a market that’s already pretty much saturated. So what can Stevie bring to the already crowded party? The first part of the answer is ‘loads of experience’, given that he’s been the driver (excuse the pun) behind the long-running and successful Basschat self-build cab project. But there’s more to Stevie than being handy at DIY, as you can read for yourselves in the ‘ABOUT ME’ section of his https://www.lfsys.co.uk website. The second part of the answer to ‘what’s new?’ is the bit that really motivated Stevie. As a bass player, he was unhappy with the sound quality of what he was hearing while standing in front of his rig at gigs. He wanted to improve not only the audience’s listening experience but also his own. Having already done so much cab design and build, following some additional development work that took the self-build design to a higher level, Stevie found himself just one step away from becoming a manufacturer. A big step maybe but – spurred on by the number of people who had seen the self-build cabs and said they’d pay him to build them one – he decided to take the next step into small-batch production. The LFSys bass-cab was defined a couple of key decisions. Uncompromising sound quality was top of the list with other considerations such as lightweight construction following on behind. Stevie opted for the ‘FRFR’ approach and set about creating a couple of cabs capable of delivering full range and flat response. The reasoning was that, if you make cabs that faithfully reproduce what’s being put into them, you’re giving bass players a kind of sonic ‘backdrop’. This lets us overlay the ‘sounds in our heads’ without first having to overcome any cab-induced ‘colouration’ that gets in the way of what our imagination, fingers, picks, pedals, modellers and amps generate. The next key aspect is mastery of the cross-over technology that is all-important in the performance of multi-speaker cabinets and a pre-requisite of achieving the ‘flat response’ half of FRFR. There aren’t many who really know what they’re doing in this highly-specialised field but Stevie is one of them. That’s all very well, but what does it mean to us? To be honest, it didn’t mean that much to me at first. I believed my existing cabs were doing the business and wasn’t considering replacing them. Until I heard Stevie and Phil Starr’s ‘blind’ cab shoot-out at the S-W Bass Bash, where one of Stevie’s Silverstone cabs was pitted against some of the best of the rest. When asked which sounded best, nearly all of us (me included) opted for Stevie’s cab. However, Phil finished the session by stressing the limitation of the shoot-out: the musical test piece was an electronically-generated, bass-heavy demo recording chosen only because finding a skilled bass-player capable of doing a professional, multi-genre demo had proved to be a step too far in the time available. Being a bit of an ‘old school’ rock-‘n’-roll luddite myself, I drew some comfort from Phil’s warning. My hunch was that Stevie’s bass-cab recipe wouldn’t translate into my preferred ‘classic’ tones but rather into something a bit too bright, clinical and soul-less. Plus, I’d never got on with the HF-enabled cabs I’d tried in the past. Nevertheless, as a fully-GASsed-up member of the Basschat fraternity, I resolved to try both the already available Silverstone cab and the soon-to-be-released Monaco for myself at the earliest opportunity. Fast-forward to our living-room a couple of months later. I’ve got a Silverstone and a Monaco side by side on the floor with my Mesa TT-800 straddling across the top of both. First I try the Silverstone that came top in the bash shoot-out. I haven’t changed the amp controls from my normal gig setting and I’m instantly preferring it to my existing brand of cab! A few minutes later, I find out that the more expensive Monaco sounds even better, a result that is later replicated in Silverstone owner Phil’s much larger sitting-room. But STILL I cling on to my scepticism: how will it perform under real live gig conditions?! To cut a long story short, it’s the end of our next gig and my band-mates are coming over to slap me on the back. They don’t know (or care) what the new box is or what it does, just that it works. So I tell them. It makes the bass sound much more clearly defined and articulate than before so it cuts through the mix and enhances the whole sound of the band – even on stage. Before I’m even half-way through my short explanation, they’ve turned their backs on me and are packing their kit up. It’s worth adding that, courtesy of my wireless system, I nipped into the front of the audience at the beginning of the first set for a quick check that all was well – which it was. The only tweaks I made to my amp were to back-off the bass and treble a touch (to 1 o’clock and 12 o’clock respectively) on both channels, use the DEEP boost a bit more often and the BRIGHT hardly at all. With the LFSys Monaco, I now have killer-sounding, 600W (AES)-rated, 8ohm cab that handles the reduced power from my 800W (into 4ohms) amp with headroom to spare while still being PLENTY loud enough to cope with any of our indoor gig venues AND compete with my decibel-junky band-mates. More importantly, it feels like the music we make has kind of more room to breathe. Last but not least, this single-cab solution to my needs comes in at only fifty quid more (and a couple of kilos heavier) than ONE of the matched pair of 12” single-driver cabs I’ve been gigging with. What’s not to like? 😊 PIC'S TO FOLLOW

This guide to how a whole range of effects work from the now, sad.y defunct “Monkey FX” is brilliant and hilarious - well worth a read… http://www.monkeyfx.co.uk/fxguide.html How a compressor works explained through the medium of tiny monkeys.. Compression Picture the scene. Sicily, 1947. A monkey. With a volume pedal. He has tinnitus, so he doesn't like loud noises, but needs things to be a certain volume level in order to hear them, poor little mite. He is wearing headphones. When you play, if it's too loud, he turns the volume down a little. If it's too quiet, he turns it up. He can do this quite quickly if he wants, but there's a big dial in front of him, telling him how fast he's allowed to turn the volume control. There's another control that determines how loud his headphones are compared to your guitar. Pop the little chap in a box and paint it (traditionally) blue and off you go. Oh, it might be a good idea to replace him with some sort of electronics gubbins, to save his poor hearing. Some compressors allow you to have a little effect loop in between your guitar and his headphones, so that you could (for instance) have him only listen to the bass part of your guitar sound, but work the volume control according to that.

Who the Cap Fit - Bob Marley too slow, again!

Small update. Fretboard glued in place (remembered the truss rod, just in time), fretted, tidied up the body shape (and routed for the pickup). Lots and lots of sanding to go, as well as hardware to fit and electronics to sort, but getting there!

I feel like the bass equivalent of a someone that saves wounded animals from death, heals them and releases them back into the wild.

Hello, Dolly - Louis Armstrong

Greet The Sacred Cow Primus

Barrel jacks are the Bar Steward spawn of Beelzebub.

My old 72 Pbass with the thumb mark. It’s pretty deep.

Looks like you’re going for a refin instead then @Stub Mandrel 🤣 But seriously as per @Reggaebass as the mojo is mostly/all yours I’d keep it as it is.

Heft... i think its like Torque... and i think Peak with the SI unit of ooomph. So 'x' amount of 'Heft Ooomphs Peak'... (HOP) I seem to remember reading it in a Trace Elliot Brochure back in the 80's...

Must admit Bargain Hunt is a real favourite of mine, Christina Trevanion makes me come over all unnecessary !! 😛 John 😎

It looks brilliant as it is, good honest wear and clearly you've a long history with it, I wouldn't dream of changing it... IMHO of course

If you refinished, it would be like a NBD. LPB would look nice with the maple. Or Olly white with a minty guard.

Forever more - dub syndicate

A large chunk of the saturation and dirt, to my ear comes from driving some kind of outboard gear, possibly even the channel on a high end Neve desk, but I have read a few articles that state he recorded the whole album using his GK rig. Sad thing is, I doubt even Flea will remember, it was a fairly wild time on the Chilli's career...

The MOSFET preaamp version appears to be based around Ampeg products, I'll let you guys determine the basis of the tube preamp model...

Again, I have no issue with people asking before bidding, it's the people who ask after they've won the auction that irk me.

Stingray 5 Special seems to have cured my love late relationship with Stingrays. The new pickup/preamp combination is a great upgrade. I feel like it is going to complement my Precision really nicely…

Slappa de baysszS

It's what scratchplates were invented for... to cover scratches made during routing...

To compound my sickness, I absolutely mourn for every single bass I've ever sold as well.

It seems likea lot of effort when a simple no would suffice :shrug: