BigRedX

I've not owned a Kramer Duke, but I have owned other Kramer basses - 450B long scale and XKB-10 short scale - and a Hondo Alien, and IMO apart form the completely rubbish hardware (bridge and machine heads) on the Alien it compared very well. Once I'd swapped them for proper Schaller components it was a very usable compact bass with a perfectly good sound.

Who? Seriously though, they're not a massive company with a presence on the wall of almost every musical instrument retailer in the UK, Besides their Fender clones only appear to be part of what they offer, and my perception of them has been as more a custom maker than off-the-peg. Could they stay in business if all they offered were the Fender Clones with no customisation options?

TBH there are only 2 types of Fender style basses that are worth making if you are not actually Fender. 1. Standard P and J style basses of a reasonable quality that can be sold cheaper than the equivalent Squier branded model. 2. Specialised models that look on the face of it look like a typical P or J but have been customised to exactly match the requirements of the player ordering it and come with a correspondingly high price tag. Pretty much everything else is going to be doomed to failure.

No. Please no more pointless electronics being shoe-horned into the control cavities of our instruments. Especially when it almost always going to be duplicated somewhere else in the signal chain. IMO all I want on my bass is a master volume control that works smoothly, and for basses with more than one pickup that don't have an individual output for each pickup individual volume controls/balance controls for the pickups. If you are going to have on-board EQ then it needs to be individual EQ for each pickup, and not a master one which is going to be duplicated elsewhere in the signal path.

The Kramer Duke is generally a better bass, especially where the hardware and electrics are concerned. However if you can find a Hondo Alien cheap enough to be worth upgrading then it can come very close it in quality. There are two things to watch. 1. There are quite a few Hondo Aliens that are being passed off as Kramer Dukes. The earliest way to tell them apart is the neck joint. The Duke has the standard Kramer 2-bolt attachment with a lozenge-shaped plate which includes the serial number. The Alien has a 4-bolt neck plate attachment. Also the Duke has a single bolt string retainer whereas the Alien has two bolts. 2. Not all Hondo Aliens have an aluminium neck. All Kramer Dukes do. If you prefer the feel of the all-wooden neck the Alien might be a better choice if you can find a wooden-necked one.

How much string you need around the machine head winding post depends on what sort of headstock your bass has. For basses with angled headstocks you need somewhere between one and a half and two turns. This is enough the hold the string in place while not being so much that string tuning stability takes too long to achieve. (as you tune up the string would around the post takes longer to stretch to an equilibrium than the normal speaking length, therefore the more you have wrapped around the post the longer it will take the tuning to settle after restringing). Usually 7-8 cm of excess string is right depending on the diameter of the winding post. On basses with non-angled headstocks, for the strings that do not pass under string retainers, you need as much string as it takes to wind to the bottom of the post. This will depend in the thickness of the string, the diameter of the winding post and height of the post from the bottom of the string slot to the bottom of the post. If you are good with maths you could work it out, but it is generally easier to do it by trial and error making a note of how much excess string you have each time and adjusting it as appropriate the next time you restring. Strings that pass under string retainers can be treated the same as strings on angled headstocks.

The Hondo Alien/Kramer Duke is already short scale so no sawing needed.

Anything that is basically a knob joke.

Unless you have a particular amp/cab sound that you like and the Helix nails it convincingly, you don’t really need any of the amp and cab sims. In real life an amp and cab are just devices designed to make you bass loud, and any “sound” they have is generally unintentional. The vast majority of my bass patches don’t use and amp or cab sims - just a suitable EQ module - and those that do the amp was selected primarily for its drive sound and is used simply as an effect. However for guitar and Bass VI use the amp models are somewhat more important, although if I had to I am sure I could get away with careful EQ and overdrive/distortion module selection.

I've had a bass with a similar design bridge. This had an allen key screw on the side of the bridge that when loosened allowed the saddles to be moved by hand.

RCF745

Surely the Loadstone basses were also Fender copies but with an even more ugly headstock?

If you are set on 34" scale, then be aware not all the Rockbass versions of the Warwick Starbass are long scale.

Is probably for a DI out (and if it is like the one on Overwater basses still needs a plug in the jack socket to power it on). Normally when these are disconnected it is because a previous owner has swapped out the pre-amp, and obviously the replacement has no DI circuitry. As has been suggested a nice big in focus photo of the control cavity would be useful.

Pub in Leeds in one of the arcades. Nowhere to park the van, so we just pulled up onto the pavement outside the arcade entrance and unloaded. Then all the gear had to be carried through the arcade to the pub, and up a flight of stairs to the room where the gig was. Repeat in reverse for the load out at the end of the evening. In the 90s there used to be a gig venue in Nottingham in a nightclub down an alleyway off a pedestrianised area where the bands played on the 3rd floor (and there was no lift). The Chameleon in Nottingham is pretty bad. There's only one space to (illegally) park while you unload and if it's occupied by a bus or taxi, you have the choice of either circling round the one way system to see if it's free when you come back or parking a long way away and carrying everything. The entrance to the venue is down a dark narrow alley way and the gig room is up two flights of stairs, one narrow with a door top and bottom and the other not so narrow with a door at the bottom only.

Anywhere that the band feels comfortable and the engineer understands what you want without it needing to be spelled out.

Any bass player making that kind of money will also be a songwriter.

It's all very much down to what you play. Most of the time 19 would be fine as if I'm playing tune and drone on a pair of strings it gets the tune string 2 octaves above the drone string. If I was going to use any more it would have to be 24 frets.

I think, than more than most basses it really does depend on the strings you put on these, so it's a pity that the version I had made it so hard to set up each time I changed strings. I liked the second set I tried (TI Flats) and stuck with them. However, I would have kept mine if it had been a 5-stringer. I may well have one again in the future if I find myself in a band playing music that requires fretless bass.

I used to have a second-generation Lightwave FL bass. When I played it it didn't sound much like the one in the review.

You say that but have you actually measured all your basses? I hadn't really paid much attention to string spacing (I play all sorts of stringed instruments with different types and numbers of strings, spacings and lengths so I suppose I find it easy to adapt - or more likely I'm equally useless on all of them), until I had my Sei Bass made and Martin needed to know these things. Not having considered it before I went home and measured up all the basses I had and discovered that the sting spacing at the bridge varied from just under 16mm to 19mm (and that was just on my 5-string basses). The spacing at the nut was just as varied and there was no correlation between spacing at the bridge and at the nut - wide spacing at the bridge did not automatically lead to wide spacing at the nut. In the face of all this conflicting information I just went with the same spacing as on my Gus Basses because they were the ones I was mostly playing at the time and it felt to me just as good as any of the other bases I would use from time to time. I have got a bit more concerned about string spacing since I started playing Bass VIs but that is more about finding an acceptable compromise between having enough space between the strings and at the same time not have a ridiculously wide neck. Here I've found that the string spacing at the nut is the more critical measurement. IME most Bass VIs have necks that are narrow even by guitar standards. My Squier Bass VI has a narrower neck than any of my 6 string guitars.

There were loads of bands in the early 80s doing this kind of minimal music with more conventional instruments mainly because they couldn't afford to buy synths. Musically it's very post-punk, and it reminded me quite a bit of Delta 5, but with a more "modern" production.

I've been using Schaller Straplocks since the mid 80s and have never had a problem with them. If anything because the score is more deeply recessed in the Schaller button it goes deeper into the wood and hold in place better than the original. I've owned one bass with the Dunlop style locks. One of the failed within 3 months (the bass was brand new) so off they came to be replaced by Schallers. I've never tried the rubber washer method, but if I wanted to have a strap permanently attached to a guitar or bass, I'd simply unscrew the existing strap button and re-attach it going through the ends of the strap at the same time.

Depends entirely on the construction of the neck joint. It's no use having frets that are uncomfortable to reach because the heel gets in the way.

Sorry to burst your bubble but from a musical PoV none of the bands you have specifically mentioned would have been out of place on John Peel's show in the early 80s. And Slowthai/Grime/UK Hip Hop is just Rap with a UK rather than an American accent. I'm not hearing anything radically new.