Silvia Bluejay

LOL I never implied you in particular had a large belly! Honest I just thought that it might be more comfortable for someone with a large belly. Not sure about the strap button position, as I didn't notice any difference when I tried the Corvette and the Streamer in the Warwick shop. They definitely are heavy basses, though, which may have something to do with back/shoulder pain.

Going off-topic for a moment, the scalloped body on the Streamer is one thing I don't like! It makes it unnecessarily thicker - unless maybe the player has a large belly? I'm perfectly fine with the flat Corvette and Fortress bodies, which are only shaped for comfort at the top. So it really is a matter of personal taste.

Since you got no replies I'll offer what little info I can. I have three Rockbass models from 2005 to 2007. All have MEC pickups and one of the basses, a fretless Corvette 5, is passive. While the active pickups (in my Fortress 5 and Corvette 4) are fine in my opinion, I find the passive MECs a bit poor, TBH. As I said, I'm talking about Rockbasses as opposed to real-deal Warwicks "with a W on the headstock", which are far awesomer ( ), so this info may well be misleading; I hope this bump will get you some more relevant replies, at least.

[quote name='Happy Jack' timestamp='1398178279' post='2431235'] +1 My main band (The Junkyard Dogs) is lucky enough to have Bluejay doing this stuff for us. [/quote] I'm good at online-pestering unsuspecting fans and followers... That blog is good stuff and I'm tweeting this thread as we speak!

I second Rudy and Sam Ash, and would add the Warwick custom shop in the East Village for sheer GAS

On my desktop I have Adblock on all sites except Basschat. On my Android tablet I do without Adblock after I tried it out last year and it messed up my OS. Anyway, to get back to the dating adverts, some of them may read the cookies on your hard disk but others appear out of nowhere. This is a still relevant status update which I posted on my Facebook profile back in mid-January: [quote]I've deliberately left the marital status field empty on my FB profile - for lack of a "None of your f**king business" option - so it assumes I'm single and shows me dating ads with photos of men. Then I log on to Basschat and I'm welcomed by GoogleAds with photos of single women waiting for my call. My BC account has a gender setting and knows I'm female, by the way. I wish the internet could make its mind up on whether I'm straight or gay. And then p*ss off and leave me alone! [/quote]

The first Kareña gig with her current backing band - including Happy Jack on upright and Junkyard Dogs/SE Bass Bash drummer Paul on cajon - was at Charlie Wrights last weekend. [media]http://www.flickr.com/photos/bluejay_my_photos/sets/72157644143894193/[/media]

I opened this thread thinking it was about our Bilbo!

Yay! Brilliant stuff! We loved every note of the gig and stayed to the end, we didn't want to miss it

What you say makes perfect sense to me.

[quote name='molan' timestamp='1397687825' post='2426604'] Don't worry Silvia, it was only £150 extra off the, already heavily discounted, price - if you called we'd take £200 off! [/quote] I will if it's still there when I'm slightly less completely skint...

Gorgeous. I'm jealous - I want a lefty 5 string DB too.

And a Tony Iommi signature guitar, of course

[quote name='molan' timestamp='1397671281' post='2426353'] Just for fun I slashed a hefty amount off the price of a lefty bass today to see if it might generate any interest [/quote] Link please Barrie?

[quote name='Happy Jack' timestamp='1397653065' post='2426068'] I am so glad that you posted this ... I didn't want to have to be the one to do it! Although I think you'll find that "left hand dexterity" is an oxymoron. I can see where you're coming from, but I don't play a R/H bass in a R/H fashion because I am right-handed (which I am, by the way) and it feels more natural or better that way. I play a R/H bass in a R/H fashion because that's what I was presented with when I first picked up a bass - or, more accurately, when the 12-year-old me picked up a guitar for the first time. If that 1970's guitar had been L/H and I had been shown how to play it L/H it would never have occurred to me that maybe my right hand would be better at plucking, while my left hand would be better at fingering. Even as I write that, I still can't think why being right handed OR left handed should make one hand better at either plucking or fingering. Our primate ancestors by and large did very little of either ... [/quote] OK, so here we have people who say the plucking hand should not be perceived as the dominant one; therefore lefties can play a righty instrument with their "better" hand in the correct place. Yay. So,why isn't that true of righties then? Why isn't there an absolutely massive demand for lefty instruments, if you guys' "better" hand, the right, is more suited to the fretboard? Don't say "because there are not enough lefty models" - we've established that demand drives the offer, and there are a lot of righty players out there. If that myth was true of lefties, it would be true of righties and they'd have found a way to get manufacturers to help.

We'll have to get a nice screen to shroud the bass's identity in mystery...

All played by the same person and on the same rig, with the same settings, probably. That sounds intriguing, and I've tweeted your post

I think you're agreeing with me, and refuting the theory I was quoting. And - I've posted this link before, but it's appropriate here too [url="http://www.lefthandedpiano.com/"]http://www.lefthandedpiano.com/[/url]

[quote name='skej21' timestamp='1397642158' post='2425892'] I must admit I am MASSIVELY outnumbered by my colleagues at work in terms of being a righty. All of them apart from me are left-handed and all of them have achieved a minimum of grade 8 and above on their main instrument playing right-handed and are mostly proficient on a number of other instruments too. Lefties are just as entitled to choose to play right-handed as you are to choose not to. Most of the guys I work with don't understand the concept of being a leftie on guitar/bass etc. One of them actually believes it makes more sense to be left-handed and play a "right-handed" instrument as the dexterity required for playing the notes on the neck comes from your left hand, exploiting his natural left hand dexterity. He does play drums left-handed though. [/quote] Being absolutely useless at doing most things with my right hand I may not be the best person to comment on this, but it looks like a spurious argument to me. I mean, if it was true, then there would be a lot of demand for lefty instruments by right-handed players who would want to use their more "dextrous" hand on the fingerboard as opposed to using it for plucking.

[quote name='mcarp555' timestamp='1397639785' post='2425851'] True, and that's the nub of what I'm saying. Contact the makers and make your voice heard. [/quote] No, I don't think we're on the same wavelength here. It's not writing to the manufacturers that would help in this case, whether or not the manufacturers themselves are lefty-friendly - they currently can't afford to do much for us (see all the discussion above). It's us who need to help ourselves. As a hypothetical example: if the only available lefty bass I can get my hands on is black, provided the rest of it is to my liking, I'll buy that bass rather than turning a red/sunburst/green righty upside down or, if I'm a beginner, learn to play righty altogether. Multiply that slightly less-than-ideal purchase by every left-handed bassist or would-be bassist, and you immediately double the size of the market, because all lefties would be playing lefty instruments. Demand would eventually trickle through to manufacturers, and red/sunburst/green lefty basses would eventually start appearing.

[quote name='mcarp555' timestamp='1397638027' post='2425824'] And here, ladies and gentlemen, is the issue in miniature: "Why didn't you just learn to play right-handed in the first place?" I wish there was a way to count all the people who picked up a guitar or bass and tried earnestly to learn to play it in the wrong direction, then gave up and decided they weren't 'musical'. This kind of narrowminded thinking ranks up there with "Why don't gay people just stop being gay?", "Why doesn't everyone like [blank] like [i][b]I [/b][/i]do?" You think it easy, you pick up a left-handed instrument and teach yourself to play. Discrimination, pure and simple. [/quote] While I fully agree with this, and also with the hope for change, I don't share the sense of entitlement. Companies lose money on lefty instruments, and they will continue to lose money (and consequently axe production of lefty instruments) for as long as half or more of all lefties - who are already a minority - choose to (or are forced to) learn to play righty. I think the work needs to start with lefties themselves - we need to learn not to be bullied into becoming substandard righty musicians. Manufacturers will follow the demand, once there is some. In the meantime, I think we'll need to put up with less choice in models and buy what's available. It's going to be a long process and take patience and resilience. Incidentally, the above easily applies to any other handed object or instrument on the market, not just in the music field.

I agree with Ped and, as I said on the other thread, Throwoff. Let's try thinking about it in different terms. If left-handed people comprise, say, 10% of the population and of the market for left-handed guitar/bass/etc., but half of all lefties learn to play the instrument right-handed, that leaves only 5% of possible buyers of lefty instruments. That's a tiny number that any company can not just afford to ignore, but even afford to annoy and be hated by. It won't make any difference to them in hard money terms. There's no way out of it. Hopefully, with time, the number of lefties who learn to play instruments left-handed will slowly increase and the market will slowly expand. But I wouldn't hold my breath.

The pickup should be held by some screws (top and bottom of the pickup if the images I'm looking at are of the correct model) which you can tighten to lower the pickup (or loosen to raise it, if you go too far).

Public Facebook album of another packed Fox gig on Sat 12/04: [url="https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.834716503208754.1073741840.407912292555846&type=1&l=dc574ecc74"]https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.834716503208754.1073741840.407912292555846&type=1&l=dc574ecc74[/url]

Totally agree with both these last posts. Unfortunately it's a fact of life. My personal preference for "lefty-friendly without being custom-built" is for Warwick. Most models are easy to obtain in LH, and with no surcharge. I love the Warwick sound, and the look of most of their basses. At first I wasn't too keen on the shape of their headstocks but I've grown to like it. I've only been able to afford models from the low-cost line so far, but I haven't been disappointed.