tauzero

Status are there - the Streamline that Bass Bros are selling is £200 more than the new price when they were last made. I do wish I'd kept that Series 2...

As an increasing number of people own boutique basses, that could have the effect of pushing second-hand prices up, as the names become more widely recognised.

With several different basses, almost all 5-strings but with pickups in different positions (including a couple with piezo pickups only), I find the best approach is to use the B string as a very long thumb rest when I'm picking other strings. For picking the B, I have to do a little set up work when I first get the bass. I work out what is the best position for my thumb on this particular bass, and then I stick a small picture of Noam Chomsky in that position so I can easily return to it.

Isn't this one of these nuclear fusion things - the new website is always a year away.

You can't do that, it falls foul of the rules on both no politics and no religion.

Ah, I was quoting from the AxesRUs website: "The following are the weights (in grams) for the Hipshot ULTRALITE Tuners. These weights include the tuner, barrel nut, mounting washer and mounting screw: Licensed Ultralite Y Key with 9mm String post: 95 grams". So either they're using Bass Direct's primitive to metric converter or they included the bit of headstock that the tuner mounts in.

Arrived today - a Batmanking bass uke, which looks very similar to the Ebay picture: Also included: a soft case (as seen), adequate for avoiding little dents, and a hex key. I was a little puzzled by that, as Mrs Whelsh Ukulele Lady said in her Youtube review that it didn't have a truss rod, but they've obviously listened to her and put one in - or at least put a truss rod cover on, maybe there isn't a truss rod under it. On top is a preamp section featuring a tuner (appears accurate), volume control, and 3-band EQ. Around the bottom is a socket plate with a 9V battery tray (battery not included), 1/4" jack socket, and XLR output. The strings are a different feel to the silicone strings on my Ashbories - not grabby like those are. I've had an initial plunk around and tune up. It all seems nicely put together. If you shake vigorously, the cable between preamp and socket plate does bang around, but I don't think that's a particularly real world test. In these post-Harley Benton days, I suspect that expectations of budget/economy/cheap instruments have risen far beyond what they once were, and I'd say that this lives up to those heightened expectations. A tiny niggle is that there's slightly too much A string wound onto the tuner, so it's starting to overflow. I could do with taking about a turn and a half off. Also it could do with a strap button on the neck end of the body - putting one on the treble string side of the heel, as Mrs Whelsh Ukulele Lady recommends, would avoid having to tie the strap to the headstock. Which reminds me, I should do that to my bouzouki too. I have yet to plug it in and check out the electric sound, which will also give a chance to compare these strings with the old silicone rubber Ashbory ones. For under a hundred quid (with a couple of voucher codes), it's very impressive.

The Stingray 5 with graphite neck. Or maybe the decapitated Bongo, as long as I wasn't paying for it. There's a couple of 6-string fretlessessses I could be tempted by but I think five strings without frets is sufficient for me.

And licenced Ultralites are £16 apiece but weight 95g, so double the weight of the USA ones. So 250g excess weight in total, or half a groat for the Neanderthals among us.

Cort use Hipshot Ultralites on the GB4/5/94/95 as they're light and cheaper than the Gotohs - https://www.btnmusic.co.uk/product/hipshot-hb6-ultralite-bass-machine-heads/ is a 4-string set but £34.40 for 3/8" Y-key in chrome - around half the price of the Gotoh. I may have made a mistake - for some reason I thought it was for a set of 4, looks like it's for individual ones.

Lado does look like a possibility, although the headstock is wrong, and the horns on Lados generally match - the one @AndyTravis has unearthed has top and bottom horns which both look like flaccid penises, and there are others which have sharp upper and lower horns, but there don't seem to be any with a flaccid penis top horn (well, maybe a semi) and a sharp bottom horn.

EVEN CORRECTER

But then I'd have to cut the headstock off.

It's not a wage price spiral, it's a profit price spiral. Wages wouldn't fall behind prices if there was a wage price spiral, the relationship would stay the same. A major contributor is corporate greed and the unpleasant truth of capitalism.

With that code and some other code that was automatically applied, £96.84. And I'll still be OK for the 2023 gear challenge!

In real terms, my most expensive new bass is the JD Thumb, which cost me £900 in early 1988. It just felt so good, I had to have it. I think nowadays my limit for a mass-produced bass would be around £1000 - I wanted an Ibanez EHB but waited until I could get one secondhand for a tad under rather than buy new. I'd pay more for a one-off luthier-built instrument.

Just got my Kala SUB 5-string off the wall - haven't used it for ages, not since the original tune-up session, as many circumstances changed. All tuned up again. That Batking does look tempting - I prefer fretless for rubber-string basses. Used to have fun with the ceilidh band, taking an EUB (NS WAV-4), Warwick Thumb fretless, and an Ashbory along to gigs, and swapping between them as the fancy took me.

I decide which one I want to sell, then leave it a week, and the feeling passes.

Better leave the decapitation until after the 30 days are up.

The TRS ought to help - one other factor is where the cables run, in moving computers you may have put the cables somewhere where there is a large electromagnetic field. My own experience with a 2i2is that it's connected up to a Behringer mixer using straight TS jack-jack cables and I don't get any crackles. Although this has started me thinking, and as the inputs on the mixer are TRS, I'm going to upgrade.

And, of course, the enlightened ones who play headless basses.

MOD Devices have re-emerged as MOD Audio, and they've just released v1.12 of their software across the three devices (Duo, Duo X, Dwarf). That should be of interest to at least two other people on here.

I've got two Ibanezezez, an SRF705 which uses a barrel jack and an EHB which uses a locking socket (which I plan to de-lock). The barrel jack on the SRF705 is playing up. I had a look at the guts of it, and it looks like the wood is sufficiently thin and there's enough area around the socket to be able to put a skeleton socket in instead. So that's one project for the near future.