BigRedX

At that price point you really need to get down to your local musical instrument retailer and try everything your friend can afford. The usual suspects will be a good starting point but there's always a chance that there will something in stock that you've never heard of before that turns out to be a bit of a hidden gem. Also you'll get a much better guitar at that price if you don't buy one with a built-in pickup/electronics.

The dangers of the missing comma...

Then I've already beaten the lot of you. I made the one in the photo I posted earlier 40 years ago...

Electric balalaika? Nothing new at all. I'll just put this out here...

IIRC there used to be a Basschat list of "problem" eBayers along with their eBay IDs so that they could be blocked form bidding on your items. Maybe it would be a good idea to resurrect that list and add this person to it?

I would like to stick with Warwick Red Label. According to the tag on my StarBass when I got it, those were the strings fitted at the factory. Unfortunately it seems to be near impossible to get a set with a taper-wound low B so I've had to change to Black Label in order to guarantee this.

What's the scale lengths of the 5-string Dingwalls? And are there EADGC sets available for them? I think that the Dingwall Combustion Basses are designed to get the best out of "conventional" BEADG stringing and you may find that even if there is a suitable E-C set made the high C will be too high tension and consequently rather brittle sounding. Certainly my experiences with a 34" scale 5-string bass strung E-C, a 30" Squier Bass VI tuned EADGCE, and a 28" Baritone guitar tuned B-B is that 30" scale is for me the optimum to get a nice feeling and sounding high C string. That doesn't mean that the fan-fret design is a non-starter for E-C stringing, just that you might need to look at alternative scale lengths to what is normally available.

Although my natural inclination was to pick up the guitar left handed, I found that I was equally rubbish no matter which way round I tried to play it. I must have wanted to be able to play the guitar so desperately, back then when I was 13, that I stuck with it for 9 months of barely being able to do anything even vaguely musical on it, and then suddenly almost overnight I found that I could competently strum my way through the chords to all my favourite songs.

IMO that puts a whole different perspective on the feasibility and attractiveness of the Basschat Podcast. Someone with your abilities at the helm makes the finished product far more likely to be of a quality that will appeal. IME of listening to podcasts, poor audio quality overshadows interesting content every time. Make your podcast sound professional and you you'll have far more success persuading people who have interesting things to say to take part.

Like uk_lefty I'm right handed for some things and left-handed for others. The I first time picked up a guitar my natural inclination was to play left handed. Luckily the guitar I picked up was very obviously right handed and so that's the way I learnt. TBH I could have probably learnt either way, but ultimately I'm glad I persevered with playing right handed because the choice of easily available instruments is massively greater than it is for the left handed player.

Have you done something like this before? If so how successful was it in terms of audio quality? I think the fact that you are rely on each individual member of the discussion being responsible for their own audio recording is likely to be a concern. How does mixing the final conversation work with each contributor being in their own individual acoustic space? There is a possibility for it to sound rather weird especially for people listening on headphones. I realise that I am coming across rather negatively, but IME good podcasts need to have compelling subject matter, interesting and eloquent people taking part, and be technically well produced. Otherwise it's a lot of effort for very few listeners. The podcasts that are being mentioned as being examples of something simple and easy to produce are probably anything but. It's making it sound simple and easy that is the trick.

Skype comes with it's own separate set of problems, not the least of which is that audio quality can be very variable depending both on the available bandwidth at both ends of the connection and the fact that you are reliant on the person at the other end of the connection being able to make the best of the audio/recording equipment that they have, which will most likely end up being the built-in microphone of whatever device they are using to make their end of the Skype call. Earlier this year I endured a podcast interview conducted via Skype of one of my favourite web comics artists. The general sound quality of the interviewee ranged from poor to almost incomprehensible and was littered with plosives and sibilance. The interviewer by contrast sounded great although in his effort not to talk over his subject there were great pregnant pauses at the end of each answer that hadn't been edited out and consequently completely ruined the flow of the conversation. I stuck with it because the person being interviewed was someone whose work I admire and who also has plenty of interesting things to say. For pretty much anyone else I doubt I would have lasted even 5 minutes.

IME working with just speech requires a whole different set of skills and techniques to working with vocals for a song. With spoken work the most important thing to aim for is clarity and comprehensibility. Not necessarily something that most music producers are going to be worried about when they are capturing a "performance". And all those extraneous noises on the vocal track that disappear in the mix will be out there in all their unwanted glory for all to hear and get very irritated by if they occur with any great regularity.

That's easy - you get 4X as much room for your railway in the same physical space with N gauge. Question answered, no need for a podcast.

If you are capable of playing right handed then you it would be a good idea to learn this way for no other reason then there is a lot more choice of instruments for the right handed player.

For many years the only amp I had was a Carlsbro Wasp 10W guitar practice amp. Every electric instrument I had went through it - guitar, bass, synthesiser. In each case I got to annoying the parents/neighbours volume way before I had anything loud enough to damage either the amp or speaker. I even used to put the bass through a fuzz box before applying the tremolo circuit on the amp for synth-like effects. Sound is very much subjective. My little amp was brilliant for post-punk bass lines - clean clear and melodic. This was the bass sound I used on all my band's demos of the time including the one that got CBS records interested in signing us. Of course if the OP's nephew is into something with more extreme bass he might not be so happy, but in my case my amp got me started and was a definite step up sound-wise from playing the bass with no amp at all.

Compared with some of the Podcasts I've had to endure over the last few months that is pretty slick. It helps that both the host and his choice of guests are both eloquent and have plenty of interesting things to say. From what I've seen on YouTube for equipment reviews and general bass lessons, I'm not so sure that the average bass player is anywhere near as interesting or articulate. It also helps that the conversation has been well recorded. There's nothing more distracting than poor quality audio where you're struggling to make out what the podcasters are saying or dreading next sentence full of "P"s or "S"s...

I see the point about the artificialness of a script, but depending on the format some podcasts could most definitely do with one. Especially this with just a single person. If you really don't want to have a script then be prepared to be ruthless at the edit stage. You'll need to lose all the hesitations and other irritating vocal ticks. Keep the dialogue or discussion fast moving and relevant. If you are going to have sponsorship and/or advertising then IMO the content needs to be super-slick, otherwise as an advertiser I would wondering where my money went, and as a listener I would want to know why my favourite manufacturer is wasting their money on this rubbish instead of making their products cheaper. I get exposed to lots of podcasts via my girlfriend who has a thing for supernatural and unexplained phenomenon, and therefore I get to hear the full range good bad and ugly. In this genre the standout podcast is "Lore". It's well researched, properly scripted and eloquently presented, and as a result the presenter/producer Aaron Mahnke now has his own video series on Amazon Prime. What I don't want to hear in a podcast are the words: "I don't know". This has almost become a catch phrase of the podcast/vlog community. It's not a live broadcast and you have the whole of the internet at your fingertip to find out. So there is absolutely zero excuse for not knowing.

A few things that every podcast/youtube producer should be aware of: 1. Use a script. And if the format is that of an informal discussion have someone who is in charge of the direction the discussion should be taking, and can get things back on track when it veers too far off topic. They should at least have a set of notes of all the main points that need to be covered during the podcast. And if it is just discussion, have guests who are reasonably eloquent. It doesn't matter how knowledgable you are on your subject if you can't convey that knowledge in a way that is interesting for others to listen to. 2. Edit. Get rid of all of those ums and errs and awkward silences, and make sure the podcast moves along at an entertaining and informative rate. Lose the mumbling and rambling, and keep it snappy and to the point. 3. Get some decent mics for everyone so that they can be heard properly. Learn how to EQ for the spoken voice and consider recording each contributor to their own channel on a multi-track recorder so that each can be individually processed to make them as legible as possible without affecting the others. 4. If there is going to be video make sure that the people and their surroundings look presentable. Anything that distracts from the main content of the podcast/video is diluting the message or subject. 5. Keep all the non-talky bits as short as possible unless they are an essential/integral part of the podcast. Intro music/titles? No more than 10 seconds max, 5 seconds would be better. If you can't say what you need in under 10 seconds you are saying too much. Especially stuff that is going to be repeated in every podcast. If you must have loads of credits etc. put them at the end. People will skip over them, but if it's all at the beginning listeners may not even bother listening.

Fender's management are all fairly anonymous. While as a company they appear to be doing only marginally better than Gibson, they don't have a high profile CEO who seems to be on a mission to be single-handedly run the company into the ground and refusing to give up the reins, even when it appears that the only hope for the survival of Gibson as a US-bsed guitar manufacturer is for him to resign and walk away for good. On the other hand the Mr Hall and Mr Ball might not come across as the most pleasant of individuals, but their companies continue to make guitars and still manage to turn a healthy profit.

Of the two bands I'm playing with currently, I found one through JMB, and the other because I was a fan and was following their Facebook page and saw that they were looking for a bass player.

That looks brilliant. One of the many things I've thought about over the last 10 years is getting some of my favourite 4-string only basses made as 5-string versions. Good to see that I'm not the only one with this idea! I see though that you are changing the pickup system entirely for your new bass. That was always one of my concerns - getting suitable new 5-string pickups made that would retain the sonic characteristics of the the original 4-string bass.

I would find the Squier perfectly fine for gigging with a couple more modifications, provided that it had a wider (and possibly shallower) neck. The more I practice with it the easier it does get, but I'm still finding that I'm tripping over the strings on some parts. Since I can play everything in the lower ranges fine on any of my 5-string basses, it is for me very much a problem with the neck (which is actually far narrower and deeper back to front then any of my guitars) so finding a Bass VI with a more comfortable neck is my priority. And of course I'm not going to be hard pressed to find anything more comfortable than a neck sized to my specifications. Having tried the Revelation Bass VI with it's 43mm wide nut (and more modern profile shallower neck) and found it slightly better, I'm hoping that when I get my hands on the Burns Barracuda later in the week it should give me a better indication on whether an on-the-peg model will be OK or whether I'm going to need to for a custom build to get something suitable for my playing style.

That would be my guess too. Have a look at the inside of the cover and see if there's anywhere that looks as though it might have had a wire soldered to it.

Cocktail sticks and wood glue. Cocktail sticks are harder wood and will give better purchase for the new wood screw.