BigRedX

Are you sure that’s the original bridge. IIRC Kays from the 70s had either a very primitive Gibson style bridge or a two piece that allowed you to adjust the string spacing but not the intonation.

I would agree. You need some space for the vocals to sit in if you want the bass and drums to be as loud as that. So EQ the bottom end out of the vocals and the top end out of the bass and kick drum so that they are not fighting for the same sonic space. See if you EQ out the vocal range from the melody synth parts as well. Not sure about the sound choices on the intro but that's just a matter of taste.

In theory anything goes if it works for you. In practice fretless basses have the strings much closer to the fingerboard (by about the height of the average fret), so before you go ahead and add frets try raising the action by about 1mm at the 12th fret and see how you get on with playing fretless on the upper part of the neck. That you give you some idea about how useful the fretless part is going to be once you have added frets to the lower end of the fingerboard.

I don't get this "feel" of the fingerboard. On fretted basses and guitars my fingers barely touch anything other than the strings, and even if they did the ends are so callused from years of bass playing they have very little sensation in them.

To answer the OP. No. Not in the slightest. I learnt to play mostly because I wanted to write songs/music. Seeing someone else regurgitate an existing piece of music holds pretty much zero interest for me. Also while they are probably all far better players than I am, from what I have seen, I am safe in the knowledge that my room is tidier than their's, and I look after my body better and have a far better dress sense than any of them (well the male ones at least). ;-)

That sounds like a lot of effort for a problem that shouldn't have existed in the first place. Surely the whole point of a "relic" is that it is just cosmetic, and doesn't actually affect the functioning of the instrument in any way. You don't get relic'd basses with massive fret wear or crackly electrics, so why is a non-functional bridge deemed to be OK? In the end it's just a BBOT bridge, so do what everyone else would have done before old Fender style instruments were deemed to be valuable, and replace it with a new functional part. There's a brand new BBOT bridge with threaded saddles on eBay right now for less than £7.00 including postage. Of course it's new and shiny, but that's how a proper old bass which has had failed parts replaced would look.

If it is, then the pickup has been changed.

Could well be that the backup battery has failed. The battery is a standard CR2032 and can be accessed by removing the base of the unit.

Given when this bass was made, the finish is almost guaranteed to be poly. If this bass was mine I'd be considering getting the bass refinished in it's original shade of white, so if your budget allows for this you could try carefully removing the finish in the area of the cracking to see what is underneath.

No that's not what they have done. They have take someone else's bass design and stuck a different headstock on it (which appears to be almost universally disliked) and then attempted to justify it for technical reasons which they are unable to back up with actual proof. That's what people have an issue with.

Fingerboards? Whatever suits the look of the bass. On the whole I prefer dark coloured fingerboards, but I wouldn't say no to a light coloured one if it looked right. I'm still to be convinced that the fingerboard wood itself makes any consistently noticeable contribution to the sound of the instrument.

It say it's at least 50-50. Without a very good helping of naked greed and opportunism you won't have the luck.

IME even trying to make a full-time living out of music is completely and utterly incompatible with having a traditional job. It's no wonder that pretty much the first step in The KLF's "The Manual" on how to have a hit record is to give up your day job. It might have been written slightly tongue-in-cheek but there's more than a grain of truth in what they say. It's not enough to be a good musician or songwriter, what sets those who are successful apart from those who are not, is the sheer amount of hard work they put in to the the business side of things. In order to do that you need both the time and energy (as well as the understanding why it is important) and generally speaking most day jobs will completely get in the way of this. And it may be that you need to be in the right place at the right time, but you do that by making sure you are able to take advantage of every opportunity that comes your way, when the right place and time come along your are there and not at your day job (or too knackered to be there because of it).

To be fair to @BITE Guitars their comments on the scarf joint were about "tone" not strength. However I have yet to see any real evidence to back this "tone" claim up. Bite Guitars seem to be good at ignoring the comments they have no response to.

As a long-time user of Newtone strings, and having had several conversations with them on this subject, I can tell you that the information on the Newtone website and their string packaging is incomplete and only designed for use with instruments fitted with guitar-style machine heads with holes rather than slots for the string. 1. So if you have an instrument with machine heads where the string passes through a hole in the post, it's not a problem. You pull through as much string as you require, tune to pitch and once the string tuning has settled you can safely cut off the excess where it pokes out of the hole. This is the best way to deal with strings with this design of machine head. 2. Even so, for machine heads with slotted posts (most bass guitar designs and some "vintage" guitar machine heads) the windings slippage problem should only happen on strings with round cores that extend the full length of the string. Therefore if you are using strings with a hex core or square profile ends to the core (so long as you don't cut the strings so short that you are cutting through the round portion of the core) then cutting to length first will be fine. This is the advice that Newtone will give you if you specifically ask them about cutting their hex-core strings first before fitting. 3. With round core strings and slotted posts, the way around this problem is to bend the string at 90° first and them cut off the excess. If you are really paranoid about the windings unravelling you could do this on all your strings, but IME even if you cut first and bend afterwards the time between cutting a bending is only a few seconds and it's unlikely that the windings will de-tension all the way down to the speaking length of the string in that time, unless there is something fundamentally wrong with the construction. 4. Ideally the fewer turns of string you have around the machine head post the better tuning stability will be. The ideal amount is 2 complete turns which is enough to prevent the string slipping when tensioned to tune. I've found that 80 or 90mm past the centre of the post (depending on its diameter) is exactly right. The more string you wind around the post the longer it will take for the string to achieve tuning stability. 5. Unfortunately if you have a bass with a non-angled headstock, for those strings that don't pass under string retainers/trees, you will need more string length to get the correct break angle over the nut. This why I don't like non-angled headstocks, not only do some of the strings take longer to settle into tune, but every string that doesn't pass under a retainer requires a different amount moving to get the correct break angle. If you cut a different amount when you fit your next set of strings then you change the compliance and therefore the feel of the string. Of course string retainers add their own tuning problems.

Is it cold? You all appear to be wearing wool hats.

To stay on the OT. It's easy for people like @Al Krow and @DoubleOhStephan to be optimistic about the situation when in all likelihood this proposal will have zero impact on their musical income and ambitions. Maybe if there is a massive hike in price for tickets for UK gigs for some European-based artist that they like they'll have a bit of moan on the internet, but that will be it. The reality is that no-one will really know what the real impact is until it actual happens and has been in place a year or so, but the chance are it won't be good for musicians or the UK music scene, especially since selling recordings is no longer a viable income stream for any but the most popular artists, and for everyone else playing live is the main source of income. The only goof thing is that this is still only a proposal and there is a chance that it will be negotiated away. We can only hope.

Or you'll need a separate visa for each individual European country with all the additional expense and bureaucracy that incurs. Makes me thankful that due to my parents I should be eligible for either German or Scottish nationality.

For all of the 90s and much of the following decade I was using a bi-amped system running a 1x15" and 2 x 8" cabs. This allowed me to run different effects on the low and high frequency components of my bass sound, mostly to stop any chorus, flange, or distortion effects sucking all the bottomed end out of the sound. These days I do much the same thing in the Helix, only I merge the channels before the final output that is presented to the PA and my FRFR cab for on-stage monitoring.

The "FRFR" option makes most sense for those of us whose bass sound is covered FoH by the PA rather than the bass rig. Think about it. When was the last time you saw a bass cab mic'd up? And if you did would you know 100% that it was the mic'd cab you were hearing or if it was just for show. Then if the bassist was using multiple cabs of different designs, in order to reproduce the sound FoH each different cab would require a mic on it. And using a DI, anything taken from the amp will be before the power amp section, and usually the sound engineer will request a pre-EQ feed, so at best only the pre-amp section of the amp is going to affect the FoH sound, and most of the time it's probably only the input circuitry. So all those impressive looking all-valve heads are contributing almost nothing to the FoH bass sound. So why waste time an money agonising over bass amps and cabs when most of the time only you are going to get the benefit, and on anything other than the smallest stages only if you are stood directly in front of them? If most of what you are hearing is coming from the monitors or in-ears which are fed from the same source as the FoH what is the point of a big and heavy bass rig?

The production version of the Fly Bass is probably the most uncomfortable instrument I've ever had the misfortune to play. Which is a pity as the original guitar version is a fantastic instrument.

Who I considered for "L" but I just can't stand that "headstock".

I couldn't find any I, Q, U or X manufacturers whose bases I liked. So I cheated with the (Switch) Innovo, (Riverhead) Unicorn. I could have also had the (Vaccaro) X-Ray but I didn't think it was different enough in looks - it's essentially a pointy P-J bass with a semi-aluminium neck. And the (Knuckle) Quake but again it's very ordinary looking apart from the 39" scale length.

Z is for: Zon

Y is for: Yamaha