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Last night's gig (and the "open rehearsal" the night before) weren't too bad. We got a reasonable number of dancers in, and the rhythm section (bass, drums, tres, percussion) kept good time despite some soloists' attempts to shake the foundations on occasion. First time I've gigged with a fretted bass, which was strange. The venue was here. I've not been since before they revamped it to add a bar; it's a rather nice performance space now.

@Dave Evans Your "about me" runs to 9 pages. Your "philosophy" also runs to several paragraphs. You need a single paragraph on your Home page that says who you are, (where you live, what you play, what kind of music you play, (age?), how long you've been playing) And that's it. Even your 2 posts here are extremely long winded and difficult to follow. When people contact you, what kind of communication are you doing yourself, because I'm already disuaded due to what my first impressions are. And you could be seen to be spamming Basschat with you website. I'm trying to be candid while remaining helpful.

NAD. Upgraded the Abm 600 for the new 750. Perfect

I think @admiralchew recently won the thread

Ed Tudor-Pole would be spinning in his grave if he had perished.

Do you work for Bass Direct?

Is it Gwyneth Paltrow's head?

Despite being a serial purveyor of bass and long-time BC member, I’ve not posted a NBD before! However, due to the scarcity of reviews for these basses I felt I should add to our collective record here… This appeared for sale in a local music shop here in South Wales, I stopped by to have a look and left with it. The info received so far is that it’s a 1984 Wilkes Savoy Deluxe, alder body, bolt-on maple neck with ebony board. Schaller 232 bassbucker pickups and 2-band (unknown) active eq with passive switching and passive tone control that only works in passive mode. It feels like a high quality instrument, the neck is particularly playable, a slim profile and lovely feeling finish on the back of the neck. Sonically, it’s got a nice resonance to it and very full and fat tone from the dual humbuckers. Lots of tonal options with the 3-way selector switch and a polite eq that works well. I’m looking forward to seeing how it sounds with the band. I’m surprised we don’t see hear more about these lovely instruments! I’d love to hear any others views / experiences about Wilkes basses. And yes, it looks very similar to a Jaydee. Cheers!

@SamIAm Makes me think of a new book "Famous Five go mad with 3D printing". This is the version of one piece of the body, due to the shape it's full of support. Just no getting around it. The red is the stuff to keep, the blue is the stuff to discard. This took 12 hours to print at 0.3mm layers, the thickest I can get away with. Moving down to 0.15 will give better quality but take 24 hours. I have seven of these types to do for an open body and seven for a closed body So 14 x 12 hours or 14 x 24 hours of non stop printing. So no mater how rough the body is, printing and sanding is a lot quicker than printing high quality.

After having had many many basses, these are the keepers and the elixir of bass ! Bass 1 ACG custom 5 string, 2nd and 5 owner 🤣. This had really light strings on it the first time I had it and I didn't think of changing them, just didn't get the sound out of it I wanted. Second time round put new thicker gauge on it as soon as I had it back and it was a completely different beast. Blooming love it now. Bass 2 Fender Jazz bitza, 1968 original neck , body unknown if real been messed with a lot. 1976 / 1982 pickups / newish John east pre. Sounds awesome. BITBY those sandbergs are awesome - the fretless is one of the best I've ever played. Basses I would like to have back 1 ) Anaconda 4 string fretless ( owned by BITBY also) 2) mayones Jabba custom 4string ( same as profile pic but lefty) / sold this on Ebay and the guy still has it - he has refused every year since to sell it back to me probably 15 years ago! 🤣. If anyone knows where the Anaconda is please let me know

I was 4 when the Pistols were around, so can't pretend I am a dyed in the wool '77 punk but I have been a fan for 4 decades. I know it will really upset a lot of fans but personally I am okay with it. Lots of bands go out with one member. They are jobbing musicians who got ripped off at the time so if they want to make some money for themselves, it doesn't bother me. My take is that if you don't like it, don't go. Loads of people moaned in the 90s when they reformed and I don't think it tarnished their reputation longer term.

I've done an awful lot of printing these week to see how I can get a good finish. I've also redesigned things so that body is chamfered on both sides. This involves printing the body on the side so its upright, There are two strands of work. Designing and printing a solid body as opposed to the open body previously used. Designing and printing a very open body with large spaces. Both have pro's and con's. A solid body is far, far easier to sand and finish. as there's really only two surfaces, front and back. The open body looks far better but all surfaces need to be finished and thats hard work. printing in 0.2mm or even lower resolution reduces the layer lines but does not eradicate them. I'm going to get some printing resin (not filament), mix it with baby powder and brush it on the parts. This acts as a slurry and *should* make sanding easier. I'll need a UV torch to cure the resin as nobody makes a cheap extra large UV curing system (600mmx600mm) and whilst I can make one (another rabbit hole to pop down), I want to test the idea out first. Other people have shown that it works OK and simplifies sanding, which is good in my book. Here's the solid body design and the (very) open body design Ignore the lines in the model, they are the join lines. Printing time is much the same as I need to print supports and thats time consuming. And here they are being printed. I'm going to move to gray filament as it's so difficult to see the black This should be sprayable so perhaps some new bright colours can be used.

"Ever feel like you've been cheated?"

Both my last two bands were from JoinMyBand, and in my last side band we got the guitarist from an ad in JMB. So for all its problems it has been invaluable for me. its not an issue with the site, but any free resource that is open to anyone is going to have a large percentage of people who are no use, that is just the public, so it should be no surprise, but it is easy enough to filter. Franky I would find someone replying 'Im not interested' to be a near perfect reply, ie, they replied, they were polite, and saved you from any other effort on that route.

Need??? I use 2 112 cabs because I can.

What will Mr Lydon's take on this be? https://www.vulture.com/article/sex-pistols-reunite-without-johnny-rotten.html

Does it count as NBD if a single change to a bass you've had for 25 years transforms the sound and makes you fall in love with it again?! I just swapped the pickups in my MIM fretless Jazz bass from stock to CS60s, and... Holy moly! Picture doesn't do justice to the colour. It's a lot "creamier" than the off-white it looks here.

Here’s my latest build…….👍🏻

Been after a reasonably priced 5 string for a week or so, after trawling through the super information highway I came across this in the sale at Andertons. Now I love a white bass so I couldn’t resist. The specs are almost up there with some higher end instruments (3-D bridge, just-a-nut, wenge fretboard, straplocks!), the only things I thought about upgrading were the pickups or the preamp or both at a later date. This model (RB Streamer LX 5) is listed as having passive MEC Dynamic Correction J pups, with an active 2 band EQ (not listed as an MEC unit, so guessing it’s some generic cheaper preamp). So, when I opened the gig bag (included) the first thing I noticed was the pickups. They don’t have the same branding as the DC pups, and are noticeably different in that respect (see pics). A quick look at the MEC pickups website https://www.mec-pickups.de/en/bass-pickups/j-style tells me that the pups on my bass are active, with metal covers. It’s actually quite difficult to tell if these are metal or plastic, but there are no passive variants on the website that look like these. Anyway, I’m wondering if I’ve got more of a bargain than I first thought (price was reduced by £150 anyway). Have a look at the pictures, see what you all think. 😊

Whilst good advice often given for this kind of thing, its no excuse to just ignore emails. If a shop chooses to trade online but don't actively respond to emails, they're doing it wrong. As a working full time 9-5 fella, I don't really want to spend my lunch hour on the phone and shops are closed either side of my working day, so I will almost always choose to email.

Here's the relative position of the pickups on a Mustang, Jake, P bass, and Lionel, resized to be the same scale length. The Jake is more in the Mustang position.

I'm out as soon as anyone uses the P word

And bassists who do backing vocals who tick "bass vocals" and have an Irish traditional vocal harmony group hounding them for weeks before the penny drops. Oh, I mean, a guy I know once did that. Not me. Honest.

Well you did not ask me, but I had Elixirs before on both my Ibanez and Sterling short scales, can be cut down with no issues. E string's winding can get bulky and tricky but nothing crazy.

Seems more like the Ex Pistols 😛 John

"Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" C'mon, get it right, us Pistols anoraks will notice 😁

Maybe he's waiting for someone to butter him up?

There is one less in their incoming stock now.

For a first short scale I would go for a Harley Benton PB Shorty all day long. I believe they were £65 when I got mine, currently £85. When they first came out I bought one as a modding platform but, when it arrived, found I didn't need to and gigged it straight out of the box. Stock pickup was a great vintage P bass tone. I have since put a Tonerider pickup in it because I wanted a bit more oomph and bite; I also changed the pickguard to a black one 'cos I don't like black basses with white pickguards. These were both a matter of personal choice rather than any fault. If I were being uber-picky I'd say the tuners are a little scratchy but they work just fine - replacing them would cost more than the bass! The fret ends could do with a file but I have had worse on basses costing 6x as much. The biggest disadvantage about these I would say is the credibility issues around how cheap they are - it is almost impossible to believe you get a decent bass for such a small amount of cash.

I'm in one of my bands as the result of a JMB ad. I was very specific about the kind of music I wanted play and what kind of commitment I was expecting from any band I wanted to join. It took almost a year before someone answered my ad, but the band were exactly what I was looking for.

Short scale, light and in a nice red.... tempted to get one myself actually. PS just listened to the sound samples on the Thomann site.... has a really good tone. Even more tempted now!

I had two Silverstones and never needed to use them both together, one would easily keep pace with a drummer and after a year of never using the second one I sold it on. If anything the Monaco is even more capable. It will handle any pub I've ever played in.

Delayed NBD - Maruszczyk Jake 4P 30" (Apologies for post length. tl;dr - After 35 years of playing bass I finally bought my first P bass, highly recommended) I actually got this about a month ago, only just getting around to posting about it! Never having owned anything vaguely resembling a P Bass since I started playing in the late 80's, I found myself increasingly feeling that it was a sound missing from my collection and started looking for something that would get me in the ballpark of the distinctive P sound. Getting a standard P bass was out of the question, I have osteoarthritis (in multiple places) and the Fender P body is too large and too heavy for me, complete non starter. I preferably wanted short scale, passive, and under my magic weight of 7.5lbs, so I started by looking a Mustangs, firstly because the Player series has a P pickup, but then down a rabbit hole with all the other models reasoning that split pickups are split pickups, but as it happened I couldn't find any Mustangs much below 8lbs so gave up on that idea, plus I really can't deal with humming pickups and I've read a fair few reports of noisy Mustangs so I pulled myself back to being set on something with a single P pickup. I was playing with the Sandberg configurator, toying with the idea of pushing the boat out a bit for a Lionel, and this is the look I came up with. Colours were exactly what I wanted, but these don't tend to come in much under £1800 once they get to the UK, and tbh I'm not entirely sold on the look of the Sandberg finishes. But then completely by chance, I found this rather attractive short scale Maruszczyk Jake on Bass Direct... Aha! Now that's more like it! Exactly the same colour scheme but with a nice bit of flamed maple!😍 30" scale, Haussel PB4 pickup, scaled down P shape alder body with flame maple top, 40mm nut, 19mm spacing at the bridge, gorgeous satin neck finish, 7lbs 7oz, and at £1250 probably a good £500 cheaper than a Lionel (also somehow cheaper than precisely the same config on Maruszczyk's own website), plus Bass Direct gave me a decent part ex price for a bass I was looking to move on to bring it down further - BD were excellent to deal with, as always. It's a fantastic little bass, very comfortable, lightweight and easy to play, hangs perfectly with no neck dive, satin neck finish is wonderful and the 40mm nut gives it a touch of P bass heft while remaining appropriate to the overall short scale dimensions. The colour in person glows, more turquoise/peacock blue than it looks on my laptop. And most importantly, to my ears it sounds like a P bass. Interesting to note the difference in pickup placement between the Lionel and the Jake... Obviously it looks like the Jake's pickup is closer to the neck than on a classic Fender P bass, however as far as I can make out, Maruszczyk have actually placed the pickup the same distance from the bridge that it would be on a standard 34" scale - about 5.5 inches from the bridge to the pickup centre line. Consensus from what I've read, is that Fender P pickups are located about 28.5 inches from the nut. So, 34 - 28.5 = 5.5. I don't know much about string physics but given the obvious differences that occur the closer the pickup gets to the bridge on any scale length, I'm guessing that possibly Sandberg went for the more traditional aesthetics of the look of the pickup location, whereas Maruszczyk sacrificed the traditional look to chase the classic P sound in what would be this bass' comparable sweet spot? Whatever, it's a pretty convincing take on it, short scale warmth notwithstanding. If you're looking for a short scale P style bass, can't recommend these enough. One slight word of warning though, I've never bought a bass that's required quite so much setup to get it to what I'm used to. I tried 5 sets of strings on it wondering why they all sounded awful before I realised quite how low the action was and quite how high the pickup was. It was only when multiple sets of strings sounded chorusy that I worked out what was going on, increased the action up to 6/64 and reduced the pickup height by a full 3mm. I read other people received Maruszczyk's with pickups set crazy-high but even so, it was nuts. Anyway, all sounds great now. Oh, and the tuners function well, but they do feel a step below the quality of the rest of the instrument. Stiffest tuners I've ever experienced on a new bass, had to smother the gears in lip salve (best thing I could think of) to lubricate them and get them working smoothly. Luckily they hold tune incredibly well so I don't need to use them much! Currently got short scale D'Addario 45-100's on it, which just happened to be the set No.5 on it at the time I adjusted the pickup height, and they've stayed on. I've been meaning to go back again and try some flats and Elixirs etc to see how it responds to different sets now it's adjusted correctly, but it just sounds so damn good with the D'Addarios on it I haven't been able to stop playing it for long enough to think about changing the strings. I don't think the Jake would replace my No.1 - my short scale USA Stingray (modded to be active with a John East preamp) which I bought from scrumpymike just over a year ago, but it does something completely different and complements the Stingray beautifully. If for some reason I had to get rid of most of my basses, it would be this and the Stingray that I'd keep (...and my Vox Starstream A1H, couldn't let that one go.) People like to say that P basses "sit in the mix" well. Actually I think my Stingray sits "in" the mix, in that it's tone naturally draws attention and sits smack bang in the centre of the mix for songs/genres where the bass needs a strong presence as a featured main instrument. In comparison I hear the Jake more as sitting "under" the mix, ever present and inconspicuously holding down the low end, doing it's very necessary job without hogging the attention. Maybe just a difference of terminology, but both fantastic basses in their own right with very distinct personalities.

A box.

Love it! Just the thing for pumping out Mustang Sally at the Dog & Duck

To be fair, they are billing it as Frank Carter and Sex Pistols and it is a benefit. Any chance Johnny would be gracious and show up for a tune or two? Lol.

Yeah JR has recently seemed a bit less tolerant of the others (probably due to the Pistol series), strange though as for me SP were successful due to what all 4 of them brought and I would have thought he would have recognised that. I`m sure Frank will be better than Billy Idol, I watched Generation Sex at Glastonbury and thought they were awful, though the guy who produced our album was at one of their indoor gigs and said it was very good.

Yeah I saw this and as much as I’m a fan of the band it’s not for me. No disrespect to Frank, he’s my best mates nephew (tho I’ve never met him) but for me without JR it’s not the Pistols.

Manual for a Trace Elliot Elf

I have painted some of my pickguards before with acrylic paint, and with great results. For best results you should finish with a couple a sprayed clear coats.

First port of call would be those Harley Benton Mustang clones I would think. I just like the colours really.

For a casual OM turn on a bass, HB Shorty P all the way. I've had mine for over a decade and I've done nothing to it. At all. It's still got the strings on it came with. Didn't even need to touch the trussrod or intonation. Still going strong and sounds Brill. This coming from a serial bass fettler/buyer/seller is high praise indeed! Cheapest new bass I've ever bought too (apart from a HB deko) which really does make me question my otherwise very expensive habit 😂 It's short but sounds like a grown up P 👍

Many years ago I actually printed a '76 bicentennial Thunderbird style one out of regular sticky paper for my Goth Epiphone Thunderbird. Might be worth it to try before you commit to anything more expensive

Great advice from @itu and @Dad3353. One further aspect to consider is whether you loosen the strings before making adjustments. I always adjusted truss rods with the strings in tune, never had a problem with 20? 30? basses. I then encountered my G&L L1505, got stuck in and terminally cracked the fretboard off the neck. Fixed by Jon Shuker (new board, better than new). The advice I was advised to slacken the strings,adjust and bring back into tune. @itu suggests wait an hour which is good advice. Most basses in my experience respond pretty quickly, the hour is a good figure. Some do not, my Warwick Corvette (baseball bat neck) takes several hours to respond. There are many good videos on YouTube on action and truss rod adjustment. Remember also that there are no absolute measurements /settings. Strings, condition of frets, your playing technique all play a part. I have a heavy right hand technique, 2.7mm to 3mm at the 12th fret is the result.

A single Rotosound string?