BigRedX

Yes. Born 2 Rock use a similar, but very different looking method, on their guitars and basses. Because theirs is done with an external "arm" it allows a much slimmer neck than normal since it doesn't have to accommodate a truss rod or withstand the tension of the strings. The only down side is because the arm is flexible tuning equilibrium works in a similar method to guitars fitted with vibrato mechanisms where the pull of the strings is counter-acted by the vibrato springs, and of course as soon as one of the strings breaks the whole instrument goes horribly out of tune.

I'm doing something like this at the moment. We're sharing files via dropbox as the project file has grown quite large. For us it's more working on proper recordings of already written songs, but depending on how long the lockdown situation last we might start writing new material too. The way our tracks work is the synth player has programmed up the drums and put down his parts along with a guide vocal. It's then passed around the rest of the band for us to add our parts one at a time. It will end up go back to the synth player for him to do the final mix that the rest of us will comment on.

Me personally? If I wanted something that looked like a Fender P or J for up to £1k, I'd probably buy a Fender P or J. There are plenty of examples to try and as has been said already they hold their resale value far better than the current flavour of the month copies. If I had more money to spend then I'd have someone like Martin Petersen make me a bass that looked liked a P or J but had all the things that I consider design problems fixed.

I saw them live on the Food Sex & Paranoia tour. Unless I am mistaken he played everything using brushes which gave them a very different drum sound. The guitar sound is also rather unique (I have a guitarist friend who says he would really like the band except he can't get past the guitar sound).

So to all of those defending Ashdown's choice of basses to copy. Would you buy one at the RRP and if so why would you buy one rather than a Fender at the same price point?

Furniture are a wonderful band. Both their full-length albums are exceptional, and IMO Brilliant Mind is one of the weaker tracks from "The Wrong People" which shows what a great album it is.

I used a bi-amp rig all the way through the 90s: Peavey Bassfex which split the signal using the crossover module into a stereo power amp feeding 1 x 15 and 2 x 8 cabs. It was done mostly so that I could have the effects that tended to suck all the bass power out of my sound on the higher frequencies only and get them much louder in the mix while still having plenty of thumpy low mids. Live it was a bit of a nightmare because it meant I had to have two bass DI's to get the full sound in the PA and many sound engineers couldn't get their head around the fact that the output from the low frequency send was much louder than that from the high frequency (as it should be). Once we got our own permanent sound engineer things were better. These days I do the same thing with my Line6 Helix and then recombine the signals to give the PA a single feed which makes everyone much happier.

It's not just that they are copies, but they are copies in a market that is arguably already oversaturated with very similar copies.

Thanks. Unfortunately that is narrower than my Squier Bass VI. I'm hoping that the forthcoming Eastwood version of the Shergold 6-string bass is going to be more suitable.

You've also got to wonder if the older and less healthy musicians will still be around come 2021...

And there's the UK's departure form the EU to take into account. I suspect many bands from outside the UK won't bother with the extra expense and hassle of getting permits to tour here after the end of 2020.

The Damned and Last Cry (amongst others) at WGW, and IAMX acoustic show in London.

It's a difficult decision. On one hand go with the designs that people already play, but how do you make your take on it an improvement when most people are more than happy with the choices that already exist? On the other hand if you go with something completely different how do you convince the majority of very conservative musicians to accept it? As I've said before here and other similar threads I really can't see the point of offering something that is essentially very similar to instruments that already exist in vast numbers with almost infinite slight variations and the standard designs. Yes it is perfectly possible to improve upon the basic design of the Precision and Jazz basses but unless you do it and still sell it for less than the price of a MIM Fender, your market is at best going to be niche, in which case why not do something completely new and different?

There's nothing wrong with only having a album or two that's really any good. That's an album or two more than most of us on here can manage. Both Kraftwerk and Bowie managed to produce a vast amount of consistently good work all through the 70s so I can forgive them for making music that doesn't captivate me as much since then. They made plenty of music early on in their careers that I like and I'll stick with that. What they do afterwards doesn't bother me if I don't like it. TBH I can't think of any band who have produced more that a handful of albums that have managed to keep me entertained with all of their musical output. At some point they will either start repeating themselves (while generally being less interesting) or go off in some different creative direction that I don't like. Even one of my all-time favourite (and IMO very under-rated) bands: The Pretty Things who were constantly re-inventing themselves during their 50+ years of making music have produced a couple of albums that I have zero interest in.

Depends on what I'm doing with them. The ones I play on a regular basis are on stands. The others are in their cases stored where ever there is room for them (usually horizontally). IME electric guitars and basses are robust things and you have to seriously abuse them before anything bad occurs. I wouldn't worry how you keep them.

It's got nothing to do with the current situation. Nottingham APC depot and delivery have been consistently rubbish over the last 10 years when I have had the misfortune to have anything delivered to me by them. As a consequence I will no longer order stuff from companies I know use then for deliveries unless they are able to offer an alternative.

All delivery services are only as good as the weakest link in the chain. Unless Bas Direct have changed their courier service recently it is still APC and unfortunately their Nottingham depot is completely useless. The two times I've ordered something big from Bass Direct I had problems with the delivery which has completely been down to how crap the local depot and drivers are. Until an alternative service is available I won't risk ordering anything from Bass Direct again.

Whatever you do make sure it's stable with the rig in place on it. I stopped using my Gramma Pad after watching a video of the band playing at the venue where it was most needed and being horrified to see that my rig was swaying all over the place in response to any other movement on stage. When we next played and I didn't use it there was a slight extra roominess to the bass sound, but I could live with that in exchange for not having to worry that my rig could topple over at any minute.

If you are getting noise with your Helix when it's attached to your laptop and goes away with the laptop PSU is disconnected, then there is something wrong with the earthing on your set up.

Could be a digital clocking problem. You need one device to be the master clock (normally your computer) and all the other devices sync'd to that. Have a look at your Audio MIDI setup Utility on the Mac and see what it says there.

If I understand the OP correctly they are not interested in a Fender style bass no matter what it says on the headstock, so most of the suggestions on here aren't going to cut it. There are two contenders among Hellzero's selection but both are currently out of stock. I can sympathise, when I was started playing fretless bass there was very little choice at the cheaper end of the market if you didn't want something derived from the Jazz bass design. I briefly owned a Squier VMJ Fretless and hated pretty much everything about it. Luckily for me a second hand Pedulla Buzz turned up at a very attractive price (although still well over the OP's £500 limit) and that sorted out my fretless problems until I could afford to have something custom made. My advice to the OP is that if you really don't want a Fender-style fretless bass even just to get you started, then you need to keep an eye on the ads on here and eBay and eventually something interesting will show up at a suitable price.

From what I have seen both sending and receiving, if you pick a tracked, signed for or guaranteed time delivery your letter or parcel will get there pretty much on time (guaranteed deliveries are still guaranteed for the correct day but may not arrive before the normally specified time). Everything else is hit or miss if it will arrive within the usual time frame.

But bass amps and cabs are just devices with a pre-set EQ curve (based on the design) and some adjustment of this at the amp. In an ideal world all an amp and speaker set up would do would be to take the input signal and make it louder without changing it in any other way. Amps and cabs only have "a sound" because originally it was close to impossible to build a system that provided the required volume levels without additional colouration of the sound. We've only become used to these sounds and seek them out after the fact. Using a just good EQ module on my Helix I can get a far better and more versatile sound (to my ears) than any amp and speaker modules can achieve.

Really don't get the obsession with having to have an amp and speaker sim. I use hardly any amp or speaker sims in my patches and mostly when I do it is used as an effect - one of the amp sims has a distortion sound that suits my basses and playing style better than most of the distortion pedal sims. The rest of the time I just use one of the EQ modules instead. Far more versatile IME.

The other thing to remember is that on a lot of the records the "bass" part is being provided by the left hand of the keyboard player, while Wyman noodles away in a higher register.