Jean-Luc Pickguard

I've never seen a knotty pine neck & fingerboard before

Judging by the look of these, this young builder is perhaps exhibiting the same Dunning-Kruger effect as a certain guitar improver who is not to be named (unless in biro on a headstock) if he thinks these are £300 instruments.

If it was me I would cancel that visit as it is possible to have the virus and be contagious for a week before showing any symptoms.

There's no option for 'no' - which would the way I would vote.

That explains whos been nicking all the pallets from the back of Tescos

I had one of these. Mine was made in 1990 and had the serial number in gold below the 'made in Japan' as shown, but it had a plain neck plate without the lettering. The one shown has non-original pickguard, bridge, pickup and knobs.

MP3 music purchased through amazon is DRM free, and you can rip your own CDs to MP3 easily

or into a skip

The material used to make the fingerboard of my thunderbird vintage pros is listed in different sources by as being either rosewood or blackwood tec depending where you look. I have no idea which was actually used, the basses sound and feel great and the fingerboards certainly have the appearance of rosewood and whether they are real rosewood or pinus radiata which has been processed and compressed doesn't matter to me. I don't own any 'coffee table' basses, about half of my basses (& guitars) are solid colours and the rest are sunburst apart from the plain clear finish on a couple of telecasters and transparent red on another guitar. I would prefer a nice looking piece of plain-old mahogany, swamp ash or alder over something fancy and exotic. I think different woods *can* make a bass sound different, but not necessarily better or worse, and other factors such as the construction methods (bolt-on, glued-in, or thru neck), bridge type, pickups and strings can all make more of a difference, and of course the same instrument can sound very different in the hands of different players. My candy-apple red squier SS jag (with EMGs & hi-mass bridge) sounds as good as any of my more expensive basses - and that has a humble agathis body.

No good for my '81 Fraxinus americana/biltmore white ash precision bass then

I use a Roland Microcube Bass RX which has some nice valvey amp sims. It is small but not as tiny as the blackstar, but it can run on batteries or via a mains PSU. Mine was £100 secondhand and I use it every day for practice and/or noodling. It sounds remarkably good, my favourite tones are the fliptop & SVT emulations, and it can go a lot louder than the specs would suggest.

I wouldn't give £1.50 for it. If the body was from a real mustang it will have string-thru holes under the bridge visible on the back of the body. The grotty neck with its grotty tuners with its marker pen pen & letraset logo looks like it could be a fair bit longer than a mustang neck; it certainly has too many frets. I expect that will be impossible to intonate so will sound horribly out of tune.

These basses really need something to make them a little more distinctive. Maybe a humungous 2+2 headstock shaped like a partially eaten shovel?

Imagine the fireworks if Behringer decided to sell their own versions of Rickenbacker's products

get a ukulele - they're fantastic fun and great for annoying people

It could

I reported it on Sunday, so don't hold your breath

Yes, I had an X-15. The NM-15 helped with adding an additional live track when bouncing several tracks to a single track. I did use the compressor as I had to record every instrument with its fx when tracking. I don't remember exactly how I used it but I think I had it wired in a lot of the time.

I used one of these a lot back in the day. I’m sure it’s in a box somewhere in the loft. I don’t remember much about it though.

Bass playing is not a competitive sport. Our job of supporting the song and acting as the glue betwen the rhythm & harmony of the song far outweighs the need to play flashy stuff that draws attention to the bass, and away from the lead voice or instrument.

Its this kind of nonsense that has stopped me from buying music software. I use Logic pro X which cost less than £200 and I only use the included fx & instruments. Hardware is another thing that peed me off. I've had to shelve two interfaces, a tascam and a native instruments one as the companies wouldn't release drivers for an OS released after the product was discontinued. These two companies will never see another penny from me.

Not sure I'd want to share a tour bus with someone who eats that many hard boiled eggs

No reason was given at the time, but I recall I had cut at least one of the strings a little short on the bass I had brought with me into the shop that day. I think there was a single wind around the capstan. My view is that having more windings on the capstan pushes the bottom winding down so the string is forced to exit lower so it naturally sits better in the nut preventing potential buzzes & rattles.

Several years ago I had some advice from Martin Petersen in the Gallery which was to not cut the strings when fitting them to the bass. Since then I have always used all of the length if possible, but if the string is too long to wind in a neat stack around the capstan without overlapping I do snip some off but as little as possible. What is the basschat concensus on this?

The one fitted to the squier vista series musicmaster is the only 4 saddle bridge I know of with the correct shape however it is a string-thru bridge so holes through the body & ferrules would be needed. For an easy swap-out a standard BBoT (Jazz/Precision style) would work, but the string spacing might be a bit wider than is ideal. I would probably go for something like a badass or one of its clones where the string spacing can be customised.