Ed_S

The only recent 'problem' I've had with Bax was them sending me too much stuff - I got two of the same bass instead of just the one I paid for, which wasn't really a 'problem' as one was much lighter than the other and I got the choice. I rang them and asked for a label to post one back, and the RMA slip you print off and put in the box explained that it was "sent in error - do not refund". So of course then the refund arrived anyway, meaning I'd essentially no longer paid for the one I kept. I rang them again and asked for a payment link to return their money, and now we're all square. Both of the calls I made were answered quickly and the people I spoke to were friendly, so I'd still use and recommend them as there are some UK based shops where every time I've had occasion to contact them they've been abrasive at best. Regarding delivery, most things I've had from Bax have arrived on time or at most one day later than estimated. Those times have usually corresponded with bad weather, Black Friday, the run-up to Christmas etc.

Glad it's not just me with that. Weight of me, stones and pounds, but weight of basses very definitely kilograms. Then scale and board radius are in inches, but action and pickup height are in millimetres. And even though the rest of the neck measurements are in inches, the nut width is in millimetres. I measure all my basses in the same daft mixture of metric and imperial units irrespective of their value. (read: no idea 🙂)

Indeed! I don't know how I'd go on with being a drummer... aside from the minor strength, fitness and limb co-ordination issues, the idea of buying nice, shiny, expensive things intending to hit them repeatedly with a stick just doesn't sit right with me at all. GAS certainly has to be factored in. I keep having thoughts about a trip to Bass Direct so I can try an Alusonic, as they seem to be light and built to comfy neck measurements. I have to keep reminding myself that if I liked one so much that I left with it, that'd be unhelpful as it's well into 'expensive toy' territory... so it's better that I just don't bother.

The problem, for me, comes when I start to add it all together. My gear is decent but nothing rare or out of the ordinary, and still if I add up amps and cabs, pedals and power supplies, cables and straps, boards, cases and bags used for a standard gig, I'm at around £3500 before I even choose which two basses I want to take. Being primarily on the metal originals scene, the people I meet are some of the nicest and least likely to ever wilfully damage or steal anything, but my gigs are usually the £0 variety. Don't get me wrong, though, I fully support anyone enjoying using their rare and/or expensive basses and equipment exactly where, when and how they please.

Completely forgot I wrote all that back in '21, but to carry on the list where I left off with some basses that went soon after... Fender MIJ Classic Series 70s P (white) - Great bass; light and comfortable, and sounded just like a P should. Sold due to moving back to 5s - hope its new owner is enjoying it! Squier VM P (white) - Pretty decent for what it cost. Set up as a BEAD bass, but moving back to 5s meant it wasn't needed any more. Shuker double-P (white) - Too heavy, too many niggles, not what I hoped it would be, and a staggering loss on resale. An important experience, never to repeat. Fender-ish bitsa P (white) - MIM body, MightyMite neck, Wilkinson hardware and a quarter-pounder. Sturdy and sounded great - hope it found an appreciative home. Ibanez TMB30 Talman (black) - Bought by my mum as she used to play guitar and fancied a bass! Sadly arthritis meant it didn't work for her, so I used it for a while. Fun thing. Ibanez GSR180 (black) - A cheap gigging backup. Never needed to use it, but elected to do so a few times at rehearsals and it always sounded much better than its money. Ibanez GSR200b (walnut) - Bought on a whim because it was incredibly light and had great fretwork. Genuinely nice bass, and one I considered keeping but eventually moved on. Spector Rebop 5 dlx (tr. red) (tr. black) - Had a pair of these and liked the looks and sound, but they weren't the most comfortable basses and the Spector bridge is not my idea of fun. Maruszczyk Jake L4p+ (white) - Very light, very nicely made, sounded and felt great... maybe the perfect P-bass, but just not enough strings when it came to the crunch. Sandberg Cali 2 TT SL (black) - Very light, but very easy to damage. Fortunately I'd not added too many dings when the return to 5s meant it was time to move it on. Sandberg Cali 2 TM SL (red burst) - Similarly light and frangible. Never sounded as good as the TT, but wasn't around for long enough to work out which one of us was to blame. Ibanez SR506e (mahogany) - A fun return to owning a 6 for a while. Eventually it became apparent that I don't need a 6 so there wasn't much point it taking up space. Fender American Pro 1 Jazz 5 (black) - I made good on my earlier threat to get the MIA Jazz 5. It was alright, but the wrong nut width and board radius to be comfortable. Nice pickups. Ibanez SR305 (weathered black) - Intended to be the new gigging backup, but just never sounded that good and I didn't want to spend the money on trying to make it. Ibanez SR1305sb ('magic wave') - The bass that the 305 was meant to back up. Sounded great, but I learned that I don't like the feel of very open-grain wood on the back of a neck. Sandberg Cali 2 Central 5 (anthracite) - Having failed to learn my lesson about 35" scale basses, this was the one to hammer it home that I don't really find them that comfortable to play.

I'm one of those who doesn't like taking basses that cost too much out to gig with. I realise that 'they're tools to do a job' etc. but I get too preoccupied with their safety to enjoy the outing, so I play mid-value (£500-£1k) instruments out and have a couple of slightly more expensive toys to play at home, just for my enjoyment. I guess that makes my answer "both". Cheaper copies can also be subjectively better if they're built to more personally comfortable specs than the originals. The nut is too wide and the board radius too small for my liking on a 'proper' Fender 5 string P-bass, but much cheaper copies are out there with measurements that I find just right, so a couple of those (modded and fettled as required) are what I have.

I used to kick myself for more obvious (to me) mistakes, but then I saw a live festival set from a band I like, where the bassist butchered the key change at the end of the encore song. It was obvious and they literally only got it back on the held last note. As uncomfortable as I found it to listen to, and as much as I felt a bit bad for the guy, I'm glad they didn't just cut the encore off that video because it hammered home to me that not only can you still royally stuff up a song you've played at every gig for the last 12 years, it can be the fist-in-the-air moment, it can be recorded in HD and viewed over 650,000 times, and even then nobody will give a damn enough to say anything about it in the comments. I've found it quite freeing to know that I'll try to go easy on myself for any mistakes I make going forward. Last gig I played was a really solid one for me personally, but the band as a whole had a couple of blips. One where the keys were still on transpose, which made no difference to me as I play by ear, but all I could do was give the guitarist the 'watch out' look and play index-finger-only for a couple of bars to try and show him where we'd ended up before he had to come in ...and then hope the singers were still ok 4 semitones up. Went fine, but would have been an instant wreck (seemingly of my making) had I stuck doggedly to playing it where we'd rehearsed it. The other was an intro that for some reason one singer just couldn't pitch so she was perfectly out of tune for the first verse. Every fibre of me wanted to follow her and make it sound right, but the keys were sticking doggedly to playing it where we'd rehearsed it, so that one just had to be a bit clenchy until the other singer came in. Some you can cover.. some you can't.

A minor resurrection to pass comment on a rehearsal a couple of evenings ago that I'm still smiling about. An operatic metal band I recently helped out with a slightly out-of-character acoustic covers set asked whether I fancied doing a proper originals gig with them early in the new year while their bassist is still on holiday. They're genuinely nice people and a great band, so of course I said yes and duly received the 5 song / half hour set list - one of them is a 12 minute epic! I checked that I had some latitude to play them 'as myself' rather than trying to mimic their recorded material, which was fine with them, so I spent a few hours committing the songs to memory and then half my lunch hour for the next week just playing through the full set to really make sure I'd got them. Monday night was the first rehearsal and it went really pleasingly smoothly. Turned up to find that the borrowable cab in their space was a perfectly nice old Hartke VX215, plugged in my GK instead of the usual Markbass gear as I thought it'd be more fitting with their sound, and hit a near-perfect run-through of the set. They commented that it was a shame they'd not asked me to learn another particular song, but it just so happened that I'd seen they often used that one as a closer/encore so decided I'd learn it just in case (you know.. turn up to the gig and find out a band couldn't make it so everyone just gets a slightly longer set to cover) so I was able to play it there and then, which went down well. They all seemed really happy with how it had gone, the keyboardist complimented my tone for sitting perfectly in the band, and the drummer who I was meeting for the first time said he'd really enjoyed playing alongside me. All in all, one of those sessions you can walk away from feeling like you've done your job and the bit of extra effort in preparation really paid off. I'm not somebody who does dep gigs normally, but I actually wouldn't mind being their go-to. Anyway, even if it's just a one-off I'm looking forward to another quick run-through closer to the gig, and then showtime. For the gear-enthusiasts, simple but effective clean rig with a bit of edge... Ibanez SR1105B -> [G30 wireless -> TU3 tuner -> Thumpinator -> MXR M87 compressor -> SansAmp BDDI v2] -> GK MB500 -> Hartke VX215

I wouldn't have called myself a composer, but I guess I fit 'improviser' to a certain extent in that even though I play written songs (originals and covers) rather than improvised jams, I never have a completely set idea of what I'm going to play when I get on stage. I don't use manuscript, tab or charts, I don't consciously employ any theory beyond 'what my ears know', and I don't even know what any of the notes I'm playing are unless my tuner tells me, so as long as the bass is tuned 'correctly' (conventional intervals between the strings - don't care what the actual notes are) I can use it to play what I hear in my head. The oversimplified way I've put it before is that I use the bass to be able to play any song I've committed to memory in a standard manner, where some appear to commit a selection of songs to memory in a specific manner so as to be able to play the bass. I wouldn't say I practise.. but I play every day. And the point? I'll use what I have available, so if you give me a 4 then I'll still be able to play something to anything I know - it just might not be what I would have preferred. If that 4 is tuned BEAD then that's fine - it'll just be a different something and again might not be what I would have preferred. If you give me a 5 then I have the amount of room to manoeuvre that I like, and it gives me scope to play exactly what I want to in the moment. 5 has always been 'home' for me, but I limited myself to 4 for some specific reasons (covered in my earlier post) until it made sense to return. When I have a 6, I generally have to force myself to use the highest string; it rarely figures naturally in what I want to hear, so that's the musical basis on which I classify it as broadly unnecessary for me. What I have no concept of is choosing a bass with a certain number of strings to play a set of songs, knowing exactly what the correct lines are and that I won't need any note below an E to play them. I'll play what I play, and if I have a 5 then it'll be what I wanted to play. If I have a 4 in either direction it might be partly what I had to play ...and if I have a 6 it'll be what I had to stretch a bit further over to play. On balance, I don't think it makes sense to limit yourself to a lower number of strings than you personally find optimal if you're a 'make it up as you go along' type like me, unless/until you're doing it for non-musical reasons. Of course this all works for me and might not work for anybody else, and that's fine.

Wouldn't say it's cheating at all - I thought the Digi Drop was great for up to 3 semitones down when I was gigging 4s. Admittedly anything lower and it started to sound just a bit chorussy, but in a live mix it was close enough for many genres and, indeed, good for metal.

I've mentioned before on here that I spent my first 10 years predominantly playing 5s, then switched back to 4s for 10 years, and now I'm a few years back into exclusively playing 5s. When I switched back to 4s, my reasons were... - I had back problems and lightweight 5s within my budget were happy accidents. To be honest so were lightweight 4s, but there were many more 4s out there to dig through and find a light one. - Sound techs at the kinds of gigs we played seemed to be at home with a 4 string P-bass. Playing a 5 string Warlock would reliably get your FoH sound butchered; the low notes weren't worth the aggro. - I could work around the missing low notes easily enough anyway, and started using a BEAD tuned bass or a Digitech Drop pedal to get round the very few songs that really sounded wrong without them. - The feel of playing a 4 was more 'energetic'. People rightly point out the economy of motion you can enjoy with 5s, but I actually enjoy playing up and down the neck. Yeah, you can still do it on a 5, and I do, but it's a decision rather than a necessity and the extra width of the neck means it feels different. - I like to have fresh strings, and sets of 4 are generally cheaper! I've tried 6s a couple of times, and whilst I like them - mostly for the novelty - I don't really need the extra width, weight, expense etc. enough to justify playing them all the time. Beyond the novelty, the one thing I do like is that there's another string between what I'll lazily call the G and the edge of the fretboard. I've just never liked the feel of playing on the thinnest string at the edge of the board, so to have another one that I really don't need, just as a spacer, was kinda nice. Not nice enough, though.

Just measured a few of mine, all of which get set up by look and feel rather than measurements. It seems that what I consider normal is 3.5mm at the 12th for all strings, and what I think of as low is 2.5mm. The 'measurements' are oddly precise, too.

I think I have a tendency to only consider low-to-mid priced basses that impress me by not needing any work at all to be 'magic', as more expensive ones should be magic to justify their price tag. To that end, mine would have to be an Ibanez SR655 from 2018 which is just great despite not being a premium model and only having 'designed by' pickups etc. I changed the tuners as a prefer the shape of the keys on GB707s - there was nothing wrong with the stock ones, I just had a set of nicer-looking ones spare.

I think I'm now at the point where I could pretty much spec a bass to be built for me. I did it 10ish years ago and now realise that I didn't have a clue what I actually wanted other than a unique and perfect thing made just for me by somebody that everyone heaps praise onto for the flawless nature of their work. It didn't turn out that way, and I take part of the blame as I gave far too many answers that sounded like "I don't really know.. whatever is 'normal'.. I'll trust your experience". The rest of the blame was in the workmanship, but though that's mostly irrelevant here, I do wonder whether they cared less about the build since it was almost certainly not going to be what I wanted - given that I clearly didn't know. Anyway... P-shaped 5 string 3.8kg absolute maximum (lighter the better) Passive V/T 34" scale 12" board radius 45mm nut (65.5mm at the 12th) 18mm string spacing I'm still no good at describing back-of-neck profiles but I could hand one to a builder and say exactly "like this" - it's a P neck that's neither the thinnest nor thickest you've ever handled. So, I found a cheapy with most of the specs and modded it the rest of the way!

Passive, for most of the reasons others have said; less temptation to twiddle, the tone I want is 'just there', cheap and easy to service/repair/replace. I also like the 'cleaner' look of an instrument with just a couple of controls much more than clusters of knobs and switches all over. That said, most of my basses are actually active as that's the only way they come and I don't have a big enough problem with it to start ripping the preamps out. One I did rip out by necessity was a Rockbass where the preamp died. The active MEC pickups still need powering but sound great into passive VVT controls, and there was even a spare hole for a toggle switch to select one/other/both parts of the twin-jazz pickup in the bridge position, which gives a substantial difference in overall tone.