BigRedX

Since the Fender P is all about that split pickup and it's position, how about this: Born To Rock F4B

Only if you are doing it the "difficult" way by using a guitar or bass as the controlling instrument. The synth plug-in that came free with your DAW would probably out perform it for both sound and ease of playability.

Just get a keyboard synth. The "fuzzy" part should be fairly simple to do on any decent keyboard synth. There's a cleaner bassy part tracking the synth sound underneath that you could do with the bass guitar, but unless you have supper-precise technique and a perfectly set-up noise gate on a side-chain you'll be unlikely to get close to the precision of the fuzzy sound using bass guitar and effects.

Yes and my fretless Gus G3 - both to BassChat members. I would have loved to keep them, but I don't play any fretless bass in either of the two bands I an currently in, and have no plans to join a band where they would get used, so it seemed pointless to keep two instruments of such quality sitting unplayed in their cases for even more years on the off-chance that I would find a need for them at some point in the future. I also sold a lot of other luthier/custom-made instruments including two Overwater Originals, a Pedulla Buzz, Yamaha BJ5B, Born To Rock F4B, Manne Mandobass, Atlansia Solitaire, Andreas Shark and Hallmark WingBat. I've kept just the instruments that get regular use.

It depends what you want to do with multiple bass guitars. Do you need a back up or are you going to be playing different styles of music that require different basses? I recently trimmed down my rather excessive "collection" of 50+ guitars and basses to just 6: Two Gus G3 5-string basses for one band I play in (one as the main bass and the other a spare). An Eastwood Hooky Pro 6, bass VI for the other band I play in with a Burns Barracuda as a back up (this will most likely be replaced by a second Eastwood or a Gus to the same spec depending on what I can afford). I also have two guitars for recording and if I ever decide to play guitar in a band again.

I tried 5 or 6 Shuker basses over the course of the afternoon. All of them looked great, but none of them were in the slightest inspiring for me to play. As I said they just felt dead in my hands. Also as I said in a previous post right up that moment I had been in conversation with Jon to make me a bass (in part influenced by the build diary for Dood's first Shuker bass), and so I was ready to like them. I felt disappointed, but also slightly relived that I hadn't nearly made an expensive mistake, afterwards. I'm sure it was just a mis-match between the basses and me (as I thought I had implied earlier), but I have never come across a situation where I have been unable to get on with every single one (that I have tried) of a luthier's instruments before. What I was hoping to convey to the OP is that not every luthier will suit every bassist, and from my experience I would want to try serval examples of the work of any luthier I was considering for a build before commissioning anything. I don't think it was guitar show fatigue as I nearly bought a Marleaux Consat Bass later on from one of the music retailers at the same show, but I'd not brought the right credit card to facilitate the purchase.

Also during the first lock-down last year DPD, obviously struggling under the increased number of parcels they were having to deal with, decided to cancel acceptance of any parcel with any dimension over 1m, which meant it was impossible to send a bass guitar with them. Nothing about this limit was immediately obvious on their website, and in fact it was possible to get stuck in a loop where the limit tried to get you to use a a different branch of DPD service that had also applied a limit, and you were passed between the two without actually being able to book a parcel collection. It was only after an exchange of emails with their customer services that it became apparent what had happened, and I was able to give up trying to use them and book a collection/delivery with UPS instead. As other have said a good delivery service depends on all parts of the chain being good. There is a certain bass company that I can't use because they insist on using APC as their carrier service and unfortunately here in Nottingham the APC depot appears to be staffed by the most useless collection of individuals known to mankind. They wouldn't even answer the phone when a member of APC head office tried to call them on my behalf to locate a delivery that had gone missing. That didn't go down very well with the person trying to help me. Unfortunately nothing has changed since then, I continue to avoid using them.

IME DPD can be just as bad as all the others. My last experience with them was for a delivery for my business (I work from home). Despite the fact that I was in and it was reasonably obvious that there was someone at the address, for some reason, instead of knocking on the door, they elected to hide the parcel in my front garden/yard on a day when it was also raining. I only knew that they had been because a couple of minutes later an email popped up saying they had "tried to deliver" my parcel accompanied with a low-resolution photograph of the "delivery". If it hadn't been for the photograph I doubt I would have found the parcel before it was irreparably damaged by the rain.

@bassmansam @Dood All the Shuker basses I have tried, felt dead and lifeless in my hands. It wasn't a question of of neck profiles or any single thing I could pin-point, just the overall feel of the instruments (to me) was completely uninspiring. Shuker instruments aren't the only ones that have elicited this reaction, but in all the other cases when I have felt this about an instrument it has been a single isolated case. It is only with Skuker basses that every single one I have tried felt "wrong". I'm sure there are some Shuker basses out there that won't give me that reaction, but I haven't played them yet. That's why I suggested to the OP that they try some examples of the basses by the luthier they are considering for their build. After my Shuker experience I would never commission another custom instrument based on some nice pictures on a web site and a specification alone. I would want to try lots of instruments to ensure I have picked the correct luthier for me.

I've recently made my first post-Brexit order from Thomann. Delivery times were exactly the same as before. Items arrived on the Wednesday the week after the order was placed.

In theory a really good idea. In practice they don't stock any of the strings I use or would consider as suitable alternatives to those I use.

To the OP, have you played any basses by the luthiers your are considering? While you can't really tell what YOUR bass is going to be like until it is finished and in your hands, playing other basses from the same luthier will give you feel for their strengths and weakness compare with what you yourself want. I loved the looks of nearly all the Shuker basses I have seen, and was in conversation with Jon to make me something until I actually had the opportunity to play some of his other instruments. Unfortunately I couldn't get on with any of the ones I tried as regards playing and feel, but I did save myself from making a very expensive mistake.

Which in itself is essentially a Les Paul Signature bass...

For that spec I'd be looking at either a GB Spitfire or a Sei.

I haven't actually owned basses by either luthier, but I have played lots of instruments by both, and unfortunately I have yet to play a Shuker that I liked in any way other than the looks. Having said that I wouldn't buy a J-style bass from ACG either, because IMO that's not where their USP lies (for me it's the filter pre-amp and the individual coil pickups). To the OP what exactly do you want? A "custom J type bass" cover a lot of variations from something that is essentially a Fender in all but the name on the headstock all the way to an instrument that only shares an approximate body and headstock design with a Fender Jazz.

Both my guitars and two of my basses were assembled in the UK. My other two basses (from UK and US based companies) were made in either China or Korea. But who knows were the materials and components used to make these instruments in the first place come from? And what about 3rd-party electronics and hardware? Some of my instruments have hardware from Schaller, Hipshot, and Gotoh, but are these actually made in Germany, USA and Japan? and even then where do the raw materials to make them come from? My Helix Floor is designed by a US company (Line6) who are owned by a Japanese company (Yamaha) and is probably made in China...

Visual idea completely stolen from the Bow Gamelan Ensemble, who IMO were a lot more interesting musically too.

Anyone looking for innovative ways to program a drum machine/drum tracks in a DAW should have a look at this video:

The tech might be better these days, but the skill still lies with the person doing the programming. Remember that the "drummer" on Marvin Gaye's Midnight Love album is the relatively primitive Roland TR808 - albeit backed up with some excellent programming and production.

I've always wanted to make an album where every track was to a slightly different tuning reference than the others, and none of them were A=440. However it would only be worth doing if you were an artist whose songs were regularly covered by other musicians, so it's not happening any time soon.

Series always sounds better when you play on your own, but as soon as you add the rest of the band the mid-scoop means the bass tends to get lost in the mix.

But with no drummer one of my bands can get all the gear we need to play live with all the band members and our roadie/merch seller in a single estate car.

Most tuning variations from A=440 on anything made before the mid-80s will almost certainly not be deliberate, but down to one (or a combination) of three things: 1. The tempo of the recording was altered by changing the playback speed of the tape machine at mix-down or mastering in order get the correct "feel". The change in pitch is a side-effect of that. 2. The only tuning reference in the studio was not set at precisely A=440. 3. The recording incorporated an instrument that could not (easily) be retuned and therefore that had to be used as the tuning reference for the rest of the musicians. If you are playing the song live, unless you are incorporating an untunable instrument ito the performance you should probably tune to A=440. If you are just playing along to the recording for your own enjoyment and in order to learn the song, either use software to retune the recording to A=440 (without changing the tempo), or retune your instrument to match that recording.

It really depends on the band, the type of music, the device being used to "play" the drums and skill of the person programming it. Most bands will play the songs the same way every time they perform (or at least try to), so if your band is properly rehearsed the fact that the drum parts are fixed shouldn't matter. Besides modern playback devices will allow you to loop and unloop sections manually. Have a look at the features offered by the performance section of the Studio One DAW. The drummer from one of my bands quite just before Covid last year. Having spent most of the past 18 months deciding whether or not to replace him, I used the studio recording to replicate what he played using the Drum Kit and Drum Machine plug-ins in Logic. I used Recyle! to extract a two bar timing template for each major section of each song from his performances and then spent a day or so on each song programming the drum parts. IME the most important thing to get right is the dynamics, rather than the timing nuances. I had to rein-in some of the micro-timing as it just sounded wrong on some songs. In fact once I'd got the dynamics right to drum parts sounded 90% right. The other advantage was that I could "correct" some of the mistakes from the original parts, where IMO the drums didn't quite gel with the rest of the arrangement. We've done one gig with this set up which went down very well and got us a couple of excellent reviews, although the genre (post-punk/goth) does lend itself more readily to programmed drum parts. Having said all that I have been working off and on with programmed drums since I first got hold of an original Boss Doctor Rhythm back in 1981, so I have plenty of experience of programming drums, know how to think like a drummer, and also know when thinking like a drummer isn't appropriate to get the rhythm part that I want.

Have you actually been able to make this strategy work for you? My experience is that people won't buy directly from a band's web site and in fact unless you give then no alternative they won't even visit it. They want to stick with the platforms they know and trust (as a consumer) even if they know that buying or listening this way means less money goes to the artist in question. For my last band, despite the fact that you could buy our CDs/records cheaper, direct from our band website we sold almost nothing that way. People were happier buying downloads or stream the songs from Apple/Amazon/Spotify, and if they did actually want to buy physical product they went to Bandcamp.