molan

Really sorry to hear this Darren Might be worth having a stock list you could mail to people with prices as I think not all the stuff listed on your web site is currently in stock.

I sold a CIJ fretless for about £400 I think (I really can't remember if it was an RI model or not though!).

I saw that BassGear in Twyford have just had a shipment of these in - will definitely try to get over there & try them out soon!

Spoke to Phil at BassGear earlier this evening and there are still some tickets going for this. Given that they are free and it's very rare to get a builder with the class of Jens Ritter over here in London it would be good to see some more BC'ers coming out for the evening

I'm sooooo tempted to order a full custom build Fodera Monarch 4 - have a call booked with them next week to discuss body woods, top wood, fingerboard, pickups, pre-amp etc. Really looking forward to talking about what I want in terms of sound & feel and how they might be able to go about building this for me

Unearthed some pics of PT live with Jamiroquai playing the Fodera NYC5. Looks pretty cool to me!

[quote name='alyctes' timestamp='1319839015' post='1419317'] Been a fan for a long time. It was the segue from "Undercover Man" into "Scorched Earth", on 'Godbluff', which first trapped me. Guy Evans, what a great drummer. And Peter Hammill's solo stuff is up there with the best of them. 'Sitting Targets' is a hugely underrated album. I always sort of thought VdGG were an interesting version of Genesis, who I found very bland and noodly. [/quote] I still love Godbluff and play it fairly often. Can't really pick a favourite track these days but as an impressionable tenager I think Scorched Earth was probably the one that stood out the most: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQbfNZOH0Ag

I had a real Gong 'thing' going for a while around '75, perfectly timed for the Shamal era Saw Sham '69 at Reading Festival in '78 and Steve Hillage appeared out of nowhere to solo over the top of their final number whilst surrounded by a stage full of skinheads. They didn't know whether to lamp him one or stand well back because he was too much of a freak for them

I was monitor engineer for Hawkwind once - great night but very 'Spinal Tap' at times No-one was allowed to touch or speak into Dave Brock's mic at any time - not even a simple 'one tow, one tow' was allowed in case we passed germs' onto it. Their roadies all appeared to be some sort of cross between Aleric the Goth and and Obelix the Gaul but with the very poshest English public scholl accents. Upon arriving they asked "what kind of gear this town could offer". When one of the local crew asked what they might be looking for they reeled off a list of substances they had a large stock of already, but professed they were a bit short of really high quality, organically grown, grass. Had a long conversation with Dave Brock about the problems of rust around the wheel arches & sills of late '70's Merc SL's and what a "great town" Stevenage was because it had a ready supply of filler & just the right touch up paint for Dave's Merc - all very rock 'n' roll After a great performance the band hit the back stage area to partake of the, newly found, local refreshments. Our road crew were fiendishly fast and dismantled a massive rig in about 20 minutes flat. It was really funny to watch the band emerge from a cloud of fug in the dressing room to discover a totally empty stage with no signs of the 2 hour gig they'd just played - you could really see some of them having serious flashback problems and trying to work out if they'd already played a gig or had only just arrived Probably my favourite ever night working road crew. . .

I've played quite a few different Foderas, Monarch / Emperor / Imperial & 4-5 different NYC's (although I think this thread is really targeted at the custom basses rather than the 'production' NYC line). I currently own an '86 Monarch 4 which is an '83 & vaguely similar to the original Wooten in that it has the slimmer body, no rear cutaway, original EMG pickups, HAZ pre-amp, wooden butterfly etc. It is, for me, simply the best bass I've ever played. Sounds great, pretty flexible tonal options from the HAZ/EMG PJ setup, lovely neck, nicely worn in and ultra comfortable. Every Fodera I've played has been really nice and the build quality is only matched by Alembic (in my exprience) but I consistantly find Alembics harder to get on with - just that old 'horses for courses' stuff again.

[quote name='steve-soar' timestamp='1319666471' post='1417151'] The New York City bass that is manufactured in Japan? My head hurts. [/quote] It's complicated, lol. All materials come from Brooklyn - woods are selected from the Fodera stockpile & shipped to Japan for carving and routing etc. The guys that do the work were trained in the Fodera shop and Joey Lauricella & Jason DeSalvo (two of the three Fodera partners) visit regularly to help on quality control stuff. The bodies & necks are then shipped back to USA for assembly & finishing by the same guys that make all the customs. I really can't see how this saves them a bean in production costs as Japanese labour must be as expensive as New York! All I can say is that the newer NYC's Ive seen have all been, as PT puts it, "flawless", easily a match for any NYC Sadowsky I've owned.