tauzero

My Squier Vintage Modified Modified is partway there - passive but with a MM pickup (and a tarty control plate).

I had one. I never really noticed the sound, I was too busy recovering from carrying the bastard thing into the venue.

Tempted by a 6-string fretless on the Gardiner Holgate, I put in a low bid (below the lowest estimate) and won it. Went down to their auction house today to pick it up, and also picked up a guitar that one of my guitarists had bought - saved him a 5 hour round trip which would have been difficult as he works in the week, so it was just me with a 5 hour round trip (a different 5 hour round trip to his). Anyroadup, it came in a rather nice Gator case (£150 quid). Description for the auction: 2018 Greg Barcus Custom six string fretless bass guitar, made in USA; Body: chambered mahogany body with figured maple top and figured myrtle back; Neck: seven-ply maple and bubinga neck through; Fingerboard: ebony; Electric: working, Bartolini quad-coil pickups, John East five knob preamp; Hardware: good; Case: Gator hard case; Overall condition: very good. As some may have noticed from the photos, it's a single cut. I never thought I'd buy one but my tolerance to the looks has increased gradually. It's also got a headstock. Well, there's no such thing as the perfect bass. On taking it out of the case, at first I thought the neck was a bit thick, then I realised it's an asymmetric cut which works really well for me - more perceptibly asymmetric than my Sei Original 5-string. It's lined with faint lines (if it's got to be lined, I far prefer these) and also, admirably, with the dot markers on the fret positions. Action was a bit high for my liking but a small tweak to the twin truss rods and adjustment of the bridge saddles has it nice and low. Strings are roundwounds with colour-coded ball ends - I guess D'Addarios. As I like rounds on fretlesses, they're staying. I'm pretty sure the strap buttons are Schaller, I'll check that with a strap or two tomorrow. I haven't yet plugged it in - the five knob (two of them stacked, two of them push-pull) preamp will provide hours of amusement, and I have to find out the functions of the three switches. This will be tomorrow's fun. The logic behind getting it is that with the originals band, I'm using a fretless as it's the most flexible for me. Currently a 5-string but I'm wondering whether I can push myself into more exploration with a 6-string.

Mine got used at a few gigs, notably at a Christmas one - it's a bit heavy to lug around though.

To be pedantic, PAT stands for Portable Appliance Testing, so PAT test isn't the same RAS syndrome as PIN number (or ATM machine).

Nothing ventured, nothing gained, unless you think he's going to mug you and steal your bass if you go to a rehearsal.

When I joined the current band there were a few songs I'd done before, and I went back to some of them to check I was playing things right. Discovered I hadn't been playing "Run to you" exactly right, so I corrected that. I'm house bassist at a couple of open mic nights and the host plays certain songs regularly, so I have checked most of them out to see that I was reasonably consistent with the original. Something that annoys me at another open mic, where there's no house bassist but the host's assistant is a guitarist who owns a bass, is that said guitarist who owns a bass (who is, in fairness, f*cking awful as a bassist) is the favoured one to accompany a couple of the regulars, and one of the songs that one of those regulars does regularly is "Folsom Prison Blues". Possibly triggered by the word "blues", the guitarist who owns a bass always plays a walking bass line (extraordinarily badly) to this rather than the proper root-5th country line.

I bought a 2000 Warwick Thumb in 2006, surprisingly cheaply, and had the baseball-bat neck reprofiled to the same dimensions as my JD Thumb and defretted. Some years later, I had the unfretboard replaced with a slab of ebony by Jon Shuker. This is it with the initial defret:

A brace of Warwick Thumbs:

If the active speaker can take both mic level and line level inputs then any preamp pedal should drive it.

Friday night's open mic featured an appearance by the 14-y-o guitarist's mother to sing November Rain. She got a bit panicked and it all got somewhat rearranged on the fly but Phoebe managed to get her soloes in. And it was the last night that the 12-y-o singer was a 12-y-o singer as her birthday was the day after. Another guy put in an appearance - the first time Mrs Zero and I had seen him since well before lockdown. He used to run an open mic night in Coventry which is where I first met the keyboardist-singer that I'm now playing bass for. He had a series of mini-strokes but has recovered and is trying to get out more.

Fretless ex-demo 6-string, 15% off, just under £7k, presumably plus VAT and duty.

But for me to play it the right way, I'd also have to train the guitarist to play it the right way. And I think it sounds fine as it is.

I'm considering one of these - what's the neck profile like? I like a slim shallow neck, would I be disappointed?

I feel remarkably relaxed about that.

I've always played the intro along with the guitarist (multiple bands), same notes going up as going down.

It wasn't the guitarist who cut the solo off at seven bars, it was the singer crashing in at a random point. Verses and choruses would be added, deleted, or reordered completely randomly, the three of us got very adept at switching.

In fairness, one former band had a singer who regularly rearranged songs at random in real time. The delights of a 7-bar guitar solo in Johnny B Goode...

I just had some ICs sent over from the US by a guy from Talkbass. This is what he did about shipping: " I use a shipping broker called Pirate Ship (pirateship.com). For international orders I send the package to them, and they re-ship it to you. Saves lots of money. Anyway, in a few days the package will reach Los Angeles and will be trans-shipped to you."

Just ordered one of these from AliDistress: to give it a whirl with Fender Studio and anything else that takes my fancy. £14 (prices may go up as well as down).

Most of our gigs are play now, pay later - the drummer and I both act as "treasurers" in that some of the gigs he does the online thing and others I do invoices for and collect the money, then we just redistribute it as a straight 4-way split. Generally works OK although occasionally we have to chase up payments.