BigRedX

It's a Yamaha, so as long as you can get on with the shape, you know it's going to be an excellent instrument. And as has been said, they are no longer in production so the second-hand market sets the prices people are prepared to pay.

Since the vast majority of songs I've played since I started my first band almost 50 years ago have been ones that I have written, or at least had a hand in writing, I have never had this problem.

Last three gigs of the In Isolation Mini Tour this week: Thursday 30th March, London, at The Fidler's Elbow With: X-Superstar, Gothzilla and Feather Trade Friday 31st March, York, at The Fulford Arms With Gothzilla and Eyrx London Saturday 1st April, Bracknell at The Acoustic Couch With Greymere and Gothzilla

Last three gigs this weekend: Thursday 30th March, London, at The Fidler's Elbow With: X-Superstar, Gothzilla and Feather Trade Friday 31st March, York, at The Fulford Arms With Gothzilla and Eyrx London Saturday 1st April, Bracknell, The Acoustic Couch With Greymere and Gothzilla

It'll be a simple pickup selector. The Gibson version with the choke has 4 positions. The "Mudbucker" is probably single coil as well.

Have a look at the 3rd photo which is a close-up of the headstock. That looks like a 4-string conversion to me which means tight string spacing at the nut and dodgy string runs behind it. J-Basses aren't really my thing but if they were, even thought it's only £99 I'd want to see some more and better photos, in particular, the neck pocket, the routing around the bridge pickup and a flat on shot which would show how well the outer strings line up with the end of the neck.

It's a Jazz copy. That's what it is.

The Gus design makes a lot more sense when you are wearing it on a strap: And BTW the black Gus bass that a couple of you have posted earlier in the thread is also one of mine!

What's wrong with chancers?

I have an Ibanez Firebird from 1974 that has a set neck. TBH even with the pin router technology of the time there is little difference in the amount of work required for a set neck or a bolt-on neck joint, and with the right glue, a set neck can be slightly less precise without anyone noticing.

Strange that the manufacturer goes to all the trouble of replicating the much less common slot-head design, but still uses a bolt-on neck.

No, in the case of the song in the OP each note has very short release and a noticeable gap between notes which gives the bass line its distinctive feel, so not only do you need to mute the other strings to avoid tracking issues but you also need to be able to stop each note that your are playing in the appropriate place without producing another thump that will re-trigger any effects you are using.

Open back is only risky for bass use if you want lots of bass and/or lots of volume. For the first two years of playing bass I used my Carlsbro Wasp 10W guitar amp which had a 10" speaker and an open back design. My band was mostly a recording project so we didn't need to play very loud (and most of the time I was channeling my inner Peter Hook), and if we did need to use it live, it was mic'd up through the PA. In the days when I ran a bi-amped rig the top end was supplied by a 2x8" cab which I had made myself based on the dimensions a guitar combo I used to own. And if it's not real, open back can sound great with bass guitar. At the moment my favourite amp/cab combination on the Helix is their emulation of the Roland Jazz Chorus Combo, something that you would never use for bass in real life, but which sounds surprisingly good for the type of music I play.

Any effect that uses pitch or envelope tracking will probably require you to modify your technique to some degree if you want to to get consistent and usable results out of it. The problem with the example in the OP is that the performance (before we even consider the sound) is very much derived from the fact that the original bass line would have been played using either a keyboard or a sequencer

TBH I was never that keen on the SH09/SH101. When I bought my Wasp synth, the SH09 was the only affordable alternative. I had to weigh up if I'd rather have a proper (if somewhat clacky keyboard) and a Filter capable of going into self oscillation against two Oscillators and two Envelope Generators. In the end the additional sonic capabilities of two Oscillators and Envelope Generators won out. I later picked up a second hand SH09 which was used mostly for background sequencer parts and for really fattening up the bass sounds we were getting from out Korg MS20. One of the other band members had an SH101 complete with modulation grip as a primitive keytar.

So many colleges and universities had EMS synthesisers somewhere in their music departments. Nottingham University had a Synthi AKS, and IIRC someone I knew from another local band got a job as an audio-visual technician at one of the 6th Form Colleges here and discovered lurking in the back of a storage room a fully functional VCS3 that had been put away for over a decade.

Did you know Dean Poole who ran the "cassette label" Sexy Records from your time in Cardiff? I missed out on the joy Division gig either because I was still in Swansea (where I was at university) or because I had decided instead to go an see Vice-Versa (electronic fore-runners of ABC) play in Sheffield, but had moved to Nottingham in time to see Bauhaus play at the same venue later that year.

IIRC Simon of Gus Guitars fame is a graduate of one of these courses. I think he originally went to learn how to make furniture but became more interested in applying the techniques to guitar making.

I have every single Z-Block release apart from the one you were on :-(( (although I do recognise the band name from John Peel). I was a massive fan of both Reptile Ranch and YMG (I saw them play at the Boat Club here in Nottingham where they were persuaded to do 5 encores by a very enthusiastic audience and only allowed to leave the stage because they had no more songs left to play). I was introduced to Z-Block by John (IIRC) from Puritan Guitars who "bought" (they were available for free to anyone who sent us a blank C-60 and an SAE) a copy of our first cassette album and then wrote back berating us for having released it on a free cassette rather than putting some of the tracks out as a single or EP as in his opinion the music was certainly good enough. I had to politely explain to him that firstly even at Desperate Bicycles production prices producing actual vinyl was way beyond what we could afford, and that secondly since we didn't gig I didn't see how we would ever shift any copies. We did distribute over 100 copies of the cassette in less than 6 months though.

As the great man himself said after playing this track: "Well mine are real and really rather lovely", which we then sampled lo-tech style on cassette and spun in as part of the intro to the "dub" version which was on our next album. Johan Kugelberg was quite enamoured too... You probably couldn't get away with either song from a lyrical PoV nowadays. At the time we justified it by claiming to be ironic.

My second band recorded both our demos (including the one that had CBS records interested in signing us) in the music and drama studios at Trent Poly where both myself and our singer were studying. The "music studio" was a tiny room with a 4-track reel-to-reel machine, 4-channel mixer and a Mini-Moog synth. We failed to get any decent sounds out of the Mini-Moog either because it was broken due to years of abuse at the hands of uninterested students, or because I simply didn't know how to work it compared to the Wasp. In the end I think we managed to coax some white noise percussive sounds out of it that were used on one track. The studio was only available during normal teaching hours which meant that people kept knocking on the door and telling us to keep the noise down. We managed to record and mix two songs in the course of an afternoon session. By contrast the Drama Studio was a massive hall with the recording equipment (1" 8-track reel-to-reel and 16 channel desk) in a raised booth at one end. This time we were able to record over a weekend so there were no problems with noise complaints. However we did have problems getting a suitably hot signal from the drum machine and synthesisers onto tape, and ended up having to put them through amps and mic them up. Unfortunately this meant we didn't have enough amps to play and record live so everything had to be built up one or two instruments at a time. We did the drum machine and bass first, with me standing as far from the amp as my leads would allow and the singer singing at me very quietly so I knew where in the song we were but she wouldn't be picked up by the mics! It took us the whole weekend to record and mix 4 songs that way.

Did that originally have a cover over the bridge?

In fact the whole history of my DIY cassette band could be viewed as an exercise in making do with what you have. For the first 3 years of the band's existence at the end of the 70s our instrumentation was: two acoustic guitars fitted with magnetic pickups, a solid electric balalaika that I had made in woodwork classes at school, two reed organs that were not in tune with each other so only one could be used at a time. Our "drum kit" was a home-made affair composed of anything that made a suitable noise when hit, fitted to stands made out of broomsticks using retort clamps "acquired" from the school chemistry lab. Our singer also played a plastic toy trumpet and sometimes managed to almost get tune from it. The only amplification we owned was a Carlsbro Wasp 10W guitar amp. For recording purposes we were able to borrow a bass guitar, but because none of us had spent much time thinking about bass parts, it was only used on the occasional song. We would also hire a mixer amp, microphone and speaker from our local musical instrument store each time we did any recording. This was the set-up we used to make the first album and most of the second one. By the time we came to record our contribution to "Angst In My Pants" we also had two "proper" electric guitars - a no-name Stratocaster copy and one I had made in the woodwork shop at school whilst I should have been studying for my A Levels. After that we added a Boss Dr Rhythm drum machine, Casio VL-Tone and I bought my first bass guitar and later a Wasp synth out of my student grant money.

Which band were you in? There's a good chance that I have your record!

Yes right at the end of the year. We were the last of the 8 bands to submit our recordings which were done late June/early July when we were all back from university and then sent straight off to Deleted Records for the cutting session (done by Porky). I got my copies of the EP just before Christmas, and about a week after John Peel had played it for the first time. That was the kind of lead time you were looking at for vinyl back then, and since it was our first proper release it seemed to take forever. My next release on vinyl in 2013 took less than 8 weeks from sending off the master recordings to receiving our records and that included over a week's break while we approved the test pressings.