BigRedX

Do you already have a drum machine? If not what's you budget? I assume that you already have a drummer (since you talk about percussion rather than drums) have you considered how you are going to keep the drums and programmed percussion in time? Can your drummer play to a click track? Edit: And if you have all of that sorted out why not program your own percussion parts? If you are copying existing parts off recordings it's hardly difficult (and free).

How about a Bass VI? If you're going to play solos then get a bass aimed at guitarists.

Guitar type humbuckers without coil taps in the typical guitar bridge and neck positions. All the "popular" Bass VIs tend to follow the Fender model of having 3 single coils and although they include a "bridge" and "neck" pickup they tend to be set in slightly from where they would be on a guitar. Also all the best "bass" sounds use the centre pickup either on its own or in conjunction with one of the others. You can get a decent bass sound out of pickups in the typical guitar bridge and neck positions but they need to be single coil (or with coil taps) and be capable of being wired in series when both are on. This instrument appears to offer none of those options. It is simply a standard parts bin guitar with a long neck.

Fenders have never been on my radar, and TBH until I start frequenting internet bass forums I never knew that there was supposed to be something extra magical/special about the Fender compared with basses from other manufacturers. I think for me the problem is that they are pretty anonymous as instruments. When I was first getting into music the bass players of the bands I liked seemed to be playing Rickenbackers, Thunderbirds, EB3s or something custom (probably made by John Birch). To give an example of how anonymous I found Fender basses, one of the bands I really liked in the early 70s was The Sweet; my memory of Steve Priest has him playing either a hollow-bodied Long Horn copy or a Rickenbacker, but looking through all the videos of them on TotP that are available on YouTube, AFAICS he only played those basses once each and the rest of the time he appears to be playing a Jazz bass. When I bought my first bass I ended up with a second-hand Burns Sonic, which I played all through the 80s. This was replaced by an Overwater Original 5-string in the early 90s and that by the first of my Gus Basses 10 years later. Having spent all my bass-playing "career" using instruments that had little in common with either the Fender P or J, when I bought a Squier VMJ because I wanted to play fretless and I'd heard good things about them, I found it very alien and uncomfortable to play and it was quickly replaced by a Pedulla Buzz. In some ways my experience with Fender-derived designs must be similar to those Fender players who try a Rickenbacker bass for the first time and discover that everything about it is "wrong" compared with what they are used to. I couldn't get on with the Squier Bass VI either. I liked the concept enough to switch over to using one exclusively for one of the bands I play in, but the neck was just far too narrow for me, and it was been replaced first by a Burns Barracuda and more recently by the Eastwood copy of the Shergold Marathon 6-string Bass. I've never had any problems with my less than conventional choices of bass guitars mostly due to the types of music I have chosen to play over the past almost 50 years, because I always pick something that is visually appropriate for the image of the band and finally because no matter what the bass I have chosen to wield looks like I have always been to deliver the sympathetic bass sounds for the music being played. So to the OP, if you have managed so far without a Fender bass then you really don't need one. There are plenty of alternatives that will supply the correct sound(s) and image for whatever you want to do that don't have to have the magic "F" word on the headstock and these days the over-inflated price (for what is essentially little more than a pre-assembled Ikea flat-pack instrument) that goes with it.

Rehearsals are for learning how to play the songs as band as opposed to a number of musicians who are all playing the same song at the same time. Also for those bands who care about such things (and you should) for sorting out the correct sounds for all the instruments and deciding what to do between songs.

I suggested this because my Helix and FRFR has replaced both my bass and guitar rigs for practice and live use, and after selling the equipment that they replaced I came away with an overall profit!

Helix and the smallest FRFR you can get away with. Seriously. For headphone only practice you just need the Helix, and you can even use it as your gigging rig. The only thing it won't do is the wireless streaming, but what's wrong with connecting your practice source with a cable?

Pickup position and type will probably make it more suitable as an A-A baritone guitar than an E-E Bass VI. And looking at the specs if you want to use it as a Bass VI you'll need to swap the supplied strings for LaBella's or Newtone Axions.

Thanks for posting the additional photos. There may still be some reinforcement in the neck but it's just not adjustable. Quite a few other budget brands in the 60s had necks built this way. If it's straight I wouldn't worry about it, but when you put it all back together again you might want to string this with strings from the lighter end of the gauge selection to keep it that way. These photos confirm that it most probably had an Audition logo on the headstock when it was new (there appears to be a hole for fixing the logo badge between the E and A tuner posts), so the photo I posted previously shows how it should look like (apart from the missing vibrato arm, which yours still has). They were sold through Woolworths in the 70s and AFAIK they were the cheapest new electric guitars you could buy in the UK at the time - this particular model would have been under £20 in the shop. None of the examples I came across back then were up to much especially when you consider that at the time you could have bought a much better instrument with Columbus, Grant or Kimbara on the headstock for about the same price second hand. Good luck with the restoration, but I wouldn't spent too much money on it.

The shape is based on the Mosrite as surf music was massively popular in Japan in the 60s. Apart form the black finish and the metal pick guard it looks mostly original. Here's what it probably should have looked like: Edit: One of my classmates at school in the late 70s had the bass version of this. It was a nasty, almost unplayable piece of crap. 2nd Edit: IIRC these were £19.99 new in Woolworths in the mid 70s. The 2 pickup version was an extra fiver.

Once again paging @Bassassin Seriously... Looks to me a bit like a modified "Woolies Special" so may have been branded Zenta or Audition. IIRC most of these were sunburst so it's probably been painted black at some point. Also the pick guard is unlikely to be original. Some more photos would help - close-ups of both sides of the headstock and the neck plate. You may find that there is a truss rod at the body end of the neck.

You do know that this is bass forum... 😉

A group of my friends actually did this a few years ago. Having had a look only one of my choices has changed since then: Songs in order of their release date: "Seven Seas Of Rye" Queen "Being Boiled" (Travelogue version) The Human League "Stepin' Out" Joe Jackson "Doot-Doot" Freur "New Wave Jacket (Reform)" Polysics "World's End Supernova" Kuruli "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight" The Postal Service "Kill The Lights" The Birthday Massacre Book would either be "Jitterbug Perfume" by Tom Robbins or "Fool On The Hill" by Matt Ruff, most likely the latter. And my luxury item would be a Mac loaded with a copy of Logic (and of course some means of powering it) so I could compose some new music to go with my listening choices.

Did that J-pickup need to be so close to the bridge that it necessitated cutting into the base plate for the screw holes? Is it in the correct position relative to the short scale length for a Jazz?

No, because of the colour. Both are insipid pastels for people too scared to make a bold colour statement with their choice of musical instrument. Remember I'm the person who in the 80s painted his brand new and very expensive keytar bright yellow and later gold, because the original colour scheme was too boring.

I've got Sgt Pepper (which I bought when I was 14) and the Blue Compilation (in order to learn a couple of covers when I used to be in covers bands). I find the Beatles musically and as people interesting, but they have never been one of my most favourite bands. They had already split by the time I got into pop/rock music, and therefore weren't really on my musical radar in the same way that T.Rex, Slade, The Sweet or Bowie were. I did have quite a bit of time for Wings up to Venus and Mars. The same with the Stones, never really my thing. On the other hand I found The Pretty Things who were initially similar (their guitarist Richard Taylor was briefly a Rolling Stone), far more interesting and they have remained one of my favourite bands, even if they did release a couple of duff albums in the early 2000s.

Which one stays? Thumb rest or tugbar?

Both are equally horrible.

Remember that in the days before Trace Elliot the difference between most guitar and bass amps from the same manufacturer was the name on the front panel and maybe a few component changes to re-voice the tone controls.

Although IME the possibility of instant mobile communication actually allows flakey band members to be even more flakey with last minute practice cancellations, late arrivals at gigs etc. They think that just because they can send a text or make a quick call it's alright. It's not.

As I often say regarding modelling devices, is that there is no need to stick to bass-orientated modules for processing the bass guitar. Unlike their real-life counterparts there is absolutely no chance of damaging them by putting a bass guitar signal through them. The worst that can happen is that you won't like how it sounds. And use a bit of lateral thinking for you distortion/drive sounds. Remember that just about every amp sim will produce some degree of distortion - I use one on a couple of my bass patches simply because the drive sound it produces works better for the songs than any of the dedicated distortion pedal sims. The trick is to spend some time experimenting, and be flexible in your thinking.

That's useful. What does it say on the neck plate? It's just a bit too small for me to make out.

Paging @Bassassin In the mean time some more photos would be useful. Close-ups of the back of the neck/body join showing the neck plate and also the back of the headstock showing the machine heads for starters. And if you are feeling brave, any serial numbers on the undersides of the pickups. As Bassassin will tell you without the original headstock logo, tracking down the manufacturer and/or importer of this bass will be difficult unless it sports a unique combination of characteristics that help identify it. These instruments would have been sold under a variety of different "brand names" depending on the importer, rather than who made them.

Just took a quick look. The two things I would have been vaguely interested in if they didn't have an over-inflated price based on who owned them both appear to be incomplete. In particular the Hagstrom Patch 2000 bass appears to be missing the custom multi-way lead and foot-pedal interface unit, without which it is just another medium scale Les Paul-style bass guitar.

That sounds like a limitation of the Stomp. I'm pretty sure you can do what you want with the full Helix Floor (or Rack). I think the other thing you need to consider is the trade-off (if there is one) between the convenience of having a suitable sound for each part of every song in a single unit and just a single footswitch press away versus having exactly the sound you want but with a more complex pedal board, and also if you can tell the difference between the two in the context of the overall band sound anyway. Before I switched to programmable multi-effects units, I found I was compromising my live sound anyway, because it was more convenient to simply have one distortion/chorus/flanger setting for the whole set even if it wasn't necessarily the best one for each individual song (or even section of the song).