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I do love a sitting gig at my age. Lovely little jazz club in SW France near where we used to live. Went down great. Percussionist couldn't make tonights gig but still worked well. Well paid, but I would have done tonights and last nights shows for nothing as the sax/keys player is gravely ill and it was simply an honour to have been asked to provide the low end on what may well be one of his last gigs.

Just got this! I'm impressed! It's from 2010 I'm into metallic colours right now!

Last Friday’s gig took an unexpected turn when a drunk came on stage between sets—someone none of the band knew. I later found out that he had almost certainly stepped on my Peterson pedal tuner, cracking the plastic screen. Thankfully, the LCD beneath wasn’t damaged. I reached out to Peterson’s customer service, and they were excellent—sending me a replacement screen free of charge. It’s a reminder that for every bad experience, there’s often a good one right around the corner. Peterson gear may be pricier, but their quality and customer service make it worth every penny.

The P bass has landed. First impression are very good. Fit and finish seem to be spot on, out of the box it was setup better than a lot of the Fenders I have bought. Weight is ok. Tone and volume pots fully function. Everything seems good so far on this.

I went to see Alice Cooper last night. Never seen him before, not an enormous fan but always wanted to go. The Meffs were on first but we missed them due to traffic, can't say I'm bothered as I've seen them before and tbh I don't understand the attraction of them. Primal Scream were next... just garbage. The singer(dunno or care about his name) acted and sounded like he was off his head, kept introducing the wrong song next and messed up the words a few times. I was glad when they went off but a few others seemed to really enjoy them...I love this about music. Alice came on and owned the place. He was real good, strutting around and ordering people to sing. Hardly any recognition that the audience was there, sorry if reminded me of how The Ramones were, just song after song, no talky bits in between. I didn't know a few of the songs but the sound was so good that I could hear every word. Id go see him again.

I'm actually now in a reasonable state with the six string. Body is done. It's only 34mm thick. As it's so thin, this presents other problems, such as the wiring channels are very narrow as the Voronoi shapes are thin, well that's the way I designed it so I can only blame myself. I designed the parts of the body to split in the thinnest sections to reduce the join lines. There are dowels in these joins to ensure that the parts align. The switch abnd control panels are now printed in situ and it looks a lot cleaner. Aluminium backbone is done. Previously I had screwed two aluminium plates together to form a T shaped. This is the "chassis" of the guitar and the body attached to the wings of the T. That's the holes on the side. I've now bonded the aluminium together using an adhesive for ships. If it can stand salt water and last up to 10 years, it'll keep a guitar together (I hope). This has the advantage of making this piece a lot simpler as no tapping and dieing and no countersunk drilling, contrary to what the diagram below shows. It also keeps the back of the guitar super clean with only four holes for the neck. The aluminium now has a matt brushed look on the back, it still shows some finger prints but I'll do another polishing round when the guitar comes to pieces yet again.... The wiring is all done, I tried very hard to keep the strands of the Voronoi as thin as possible and as the channels are printed in with no access slots, this makes copper tape cladding impossible, so I use a copper braided tube to encompass the wires as the wiring goes from the switch through the body of the guitar to the control panel. Of course, did I allow enough space for the wires AND the copper braid? No. Another lesson learnt and as I had glued the whole guitar up, it had to be thrown away and another body printed. That's around 30 hours and a roll of filament down the drain. Bridge is in and is as low as I can get it. The guitar body is 34mm thick which is 8mm of aluminium backbone, 3mm of aluminium plate on top and 22mm on top of body which is about the height of the pickups. The neck is around 26mm. That's it, I can't make it much lower unless I get or make very thin pickups I managed to find a low level BBOT and that seems to be OK. Pickups are Tesla P90's which are great. They are wired into a pair of volume/tone pots a la Telecaster Deluxe. I only have on string on at the moment to test the height of everything. Plugged it into a Phil Jones Bighead Pro amp and it sounded great (with only one string). I seem to recall playing Smoke on the Water. Seasick Steve eat your heart out Pickguards are a challenge. I have designed them but none of the 10 or so versions I've printed look like anything but sh1t. Currently it's sporting a Prusament Orange pickguard as that's the last one I tried and it doesn't look good. However being orange will force me to think of a better solution. Work to be done: Take it all to pieces to fix a 1mm excess bit of aluminium around the neck joint. Purely for aesthetic reasons but got be done otherwise I won't sleep. Find the three way switch washer and nut which I appear to have lost and could be anywhere in the debacle that is my desk. Buy a chunk of pick-guard material, probably white pearl, and work out how to shape it into a pickguard. If anybody has any good suggestions on how to learn to do this, I'm all ears. I have this guitar to do, another copy of this guitar as I'm making two of them. The second version is a solid body version which I'm making as yet another experiment. I also will be remaking my Fender Jazz copy, I need decent pick-guard for my current headless (which is a really, really nice bass to play). I'm also planning (in my head) a headless Thunderbird bass. I have all the parts but am stressing over cutting the neck down. So that's five pick-guards to make. I'd be happy to buy one, but if its five, I should learn how to make them. If anybody has any pointers to how they have done it, I'd be grateful. Check if I can get rid of the ferrules on the back of the neck. I have some smaller domed screws which I'm hoping are short enough. That would clean the back of the guitar up a lot. Replace the silver screws on the back for the access panels. Black M2 countersunk screws on order.

My band were recently (Saturday) honored to play at the LGGF 25th anniversary ball in Birmingham. For 25 years the LGGF has been fundraising for Marie Curie and Cancer Research and this night was a very special milestone for them and they celebrated in serious style. Such a great night for us and everyone in attendance!

She's Right I'm Left, our acoustic offering is back at The Harley Motor Restaurant tomorrow Saturday 5:30-8:30. Daryl

The Australian Pink Floyd tonight

Wow! Got my z3 today in black sparkle! Its an absolute stunner! Came well set up and ready for action. Sounds great, eq very strong and you can get huge tonal differences. Active and passive works great. Lovely neck and feels quite light (I'd estimate 9lbs). Photos online don't do these justice.

I also had a go at a mk3 clone, but I was more interested in the shape than mimicking the true Wal sound. But saying that, I did use Walbuckers and Lusithand preamp just out of curiosity. It’s a truly powerful bass for sure with lots of tonal variation on tap

That’s fantastic. Stays in the country.

i see his main strat went for $910,000 dollars and was donated to the national museum of Ireland

Whenever I am not gigging, I watch an "act" every Saturday at the Wheeltappers, and invariably the "Solo Singers" use the miniature line array plus sub arrangement. Again, invariably,the bass thumps out in an unpleasant way. IT reminds me of when my mum got her first Colour TV. The Colour ( Saturation) was turn up as high as it goes. I worked in the broadcast industry at the time and tried to explain that it did not look natural, her reply was, " I paid for colour and I will have as much as I can".

Don’t be daft. They might be known by gear nerds, and maybe ‘known of’ by bass players who hang about on internet forums… but I couldn’t tell you why they were good like funkle’s video… but general bass players? Nah last month a bass player asked if I had heard of that obscure make ‘Cort’ that he had just found a bass he was interested in.

And has anyone ever actually bought one?

The carved vs ply discussion really depends what you're doing. If you're playing rootsy pizz or slap styles, there might not be a meaningful upgrade from a well setup, quality laminated bass. The situation is complicated by there being a lot of carved student basses that aren't all that wonderful either. And the laminated bass can be a useful working instrument in situations that would be rough on a carved bass even where it might not be the ultimate instrument for the style you're playing. It's in classical styles and the more articulate end of jazz pizz where great carved basses can bring something that laminated basses rarely have - otherwise, a nicely set up laminate is probably going to be fine.

Musical snobbery (and instrument snobbery) is utterly pointless and entirely against what should be the spirit of music making. I’ve played carved basses badly, ply basses badly and even aluminium basses badly - but I’ve had fun with other people while doing so, which is what music is about. For the vast majority of people and playing situations a ply bass is more than adequate. (The 100% ply David Gage Czech Ease bass I sold is going to be used on a global arena tour playing to more people in one day than many classical orchestras will reach in a year.) Get bass. Play bass. Love bass. If you can afford a fully carved bass then buy one. But many of us started on (and remain fans of) basic beaten up ply basses.

I had an MIJ 66 Jazz in candy apple red with matching headstock and dot and bound neck back in the day, around the time I bought that silver P off you. I don't know if you'd remember it but here's a photo from manic 16 years ago. It had clovers rather than lollipops and the guy I bought it off told me it was a non export model. I Shouldn't have sold it, but I didn't know what I had 😭.

Sorry had to be done ...

Next Thursday, I'll be interviewing the amazing Gail Ann Dorsey for my bass player's podcast. Of course I have some stuff I want to ask her about, but maybe you guys also have some questions for this giant And while you're at it, feel free to check out other episodes of the podcast. Many are in Dutch, but the English episodes are: Henrik Linder, Brady Watt, Renaud Garcia Fons, Adam Ben Ezra, Martin Méndez, Joe Dart, James Genus, Kinga Glyk, Tal Wilkenfeld, Pino Palladino, Damian Erskine, Dale Davis, Tim Lefebvre, Stu Brooks, Michael League, John Stirratt, Jeff Berlin and Jeroen Paul Thesseling.

I think most folk are happy to go and hear songs they love, played well, it doesn't really matter how many original members there are

Online retailer forgets the internet exists 🤷🏻‍♂️😂

Interesting story... back in 1997 I was working for a video games company, and we had a motion capture studio that we would rent out to clients when we weren't using it for game stuff. One of the clients we got was Sony, who were making a Minidisc ad that was going to feature a little CG character made of Minidiscs that would morph into Jay Kay doing his funny dancing. So we had to motion-capture him doing the dance. The place was in a warehouse on a sleepy industrial estate in Croydon, and, even when we had big name people there (we did a football game where we got several Premier League players down) it was always quiet. Not on that day - the place was full of Sony people from Japan, they brought a Winnebago down for Jay Kay to use as a changing room (the Premier League footballers were perfectly happy to use the toilets) and then he shows up in a souped-up Mercedes. Stuart and Derrick were with him, and they hung out with us and were very cool, but Jay would only speak to my boss, and very much had that "I'm too important to talk to you" vibe going on. Everyone just thought, "d*ck". Still, we did the job. They made the ad, and I got a Jay Kay anecdote out of it. For what it's worth, this was the ad (or one of them, anyway - apparently they made several, but this was the only one I could find, and it doesn’t have the morphing thing):

I too though the same as above when I saw the image of no scratchplate bass. Mark

Acid Skiffle!

@Quatschmacher - soz, only just seen this. I’ve got a mercury, can try tomorrow…

That sucks. Nice to hear the positive outcome though - Peterson seem like great people as well as making superb tuners.

I would like that. I know 9v batteries last for ages and aren't much trouble to change, but it's annoying to have a big gig coming up and to be wondering about the state of the battery. I'd like to have either an external charging port, so I can just plug it in while it's sat on a stand in the corner; a battery charge indicator; or phantom power, so I can just use a preamp with phantom power and be done with it. Ideally the system that I gather Chapman Sticks have, or some of them anyway, where they run active if they have phantom power, and passive if not.

When I owned a db many people were impressed by the volume and projection of my hybrid (solid top, laminate back, sides,1950s Czech). Outclassed imo by a laminated bass that was in the school music room where I taught. There seems to be such variability with most instruments it is a matter of finding what works for you and your situation.

Yep, it's easy to assume a lot more knowledge than is the case Reminds me of when I used to gig my old 4003, the bass player from one of the other bands on the bill, probably in his mid-40s, came up in the break and said "What an amazing looking bass, I've never seen one like that before". "Mate, are you seriously telling me you've never seen Paul McCartney, Lemmy, Bruce Foxton, Chris Squire, Geddy Lee, any of those guys, playing one of these?' "No, sorry, and who were those last three......?" I kinda wish I was in that 'Just play my own bass in a band whose music I like blissfully unaware of all the other stuff' space, it would be so much cheaper

Obviously, we all have several don’t we?

Is there a manufacturer that hasn’t made a Frank Bello signature bass?

Hello you, it’s me again! This time with a little repair/upgrade on a Ricky 4003s/5. This is a great bass, but I wanted to make it an amazing bass for me. I play with a low/very low action. Because of that, to setup the intonation the bridge saddles must be closer to the neck. But the “calculation” of the Rickenbacker factory was not very good this time, the screws for the intonation becoming too short. For a medium and high intonation I’m sure the screws are long enough. So, I moved the bridge 10 mm to the neck because I didn’t found longer screws on stores, even Schaller factory has only 24 and 28 mm M 3,5 screws. Yep, unfortunately I made 3 new holes, but the bass will remain forever mine, so it must be not very “marketable”. The second modification that I made was to put a new pickguard with a new shape, to have a pseudo-thumbrest. Even the design was made in such a way to have a parallelism with that oblique pickup edge 🤓. I need to play there (and to rest my thumb for the B string) to have the tone that I want. So, this problem was solved too. In the case the bass looks better with a white pickguard, but on stage it’s too much contrast for me. Yeah, I know, I’m too fastidious (it’s the proper word? ). Now pictures...

I must admit that having a HXFX which was way more powerful than the ME90B, I explore the 90b more, it is much more immediate, like separate effects without all the faff, but also much more restrictive, which concentrates the mind on what you actually want. I mean I would still like to use my Mod Dwarf if bass direct ever return it (to be fair they have only had it since march), but I think when I get that back I will probably stick with the 90b.

I rejigged my secondary/‘fly-board’ after receiving my Schutone replacements for overdrive and chorus: All on a PT Nano and powered by a Cioks Sol. Just need to get a couple of tall pedal toppers for the Schutone pedals now, ones that fit momentary switches (the Mooer toppers don’t). Si

An update if someone is interested: Lessons are once a week for about 20 minutes. I worked through a first year's beginner book in about a month, which was great for learning the basics (posture, first and half position, ...) and relearning the bass clef. I've been working on how high the moon for the last week or so (melody, arpeggios in different inversions etc). I'm well aware I'm just scratching the surface, but so far I'm very pleased. There's something about the physicality of playing an actual acoustic instrument. So far so good!

ok I really might try and leave it alone for a week

Thanks for posting this. Might be helpful to others to edit the title to include the words Pino or Palladino so people don't skim past it 😉