Maude

I have an Arbor Series fretless P. Same neck plate and highmass bridge as yours and made of ply, but it's one of my favourite basses, it sounds great a plays great. I've owned it for about twenty years and it's a 'never selling' bass.

With every new development another excuse for bad playing gets taken away from me!

We've got nothing for the next few weeks now due to cancellations, our next gig is now Looe Scooter Weekender on 16th May but I really don't know how we'll stand as far as rallies and festivals go in the nearish future.

What the.......... but it's............ how the fu......... so you've.............. Eh? 🤔🤣

I do kind of agree with you, I'm not snobby about what I play but it does baffle me that average punters will happily watch different bands, week after week, playing virtually the same set. I firmly believe that are so many great songs from the last century that we really don't need to all play the same stuff to please a crowd. Luckily one of my bands plays to a certain genre so we only play songs that fit with that, and the other band where I play doublebass has it's own style, so we take songs from all genres and change the arrangements to suit us. Both bands are popular so we can steer away from the above songs for our own sanity. As the first band is a Mod band we do All Or Nothing and Town Called Malice (I quite often sing "a man called Gladys" 🙂 ) and we occasionally do Get Lucky in the other band, on doublebass it's fun, but that's it from the list. But in the right band I'll happily play anything as long it makes people happy.

No need, just shoot me now! To be fair I could get a decent set from that lot but jeebus there's some some old toot in there.

I like how the inside face has got all scratched up, the neck screws must've been left a little loose to get that sort of movement. 😆

I like it. But I am at this moment restoring a 70s Kay bass. 😆

That looks superb. Fantastic job. 👍

Why is my 🐓 so small? That is a very small Cockerell, you have to agree.

Count me in on this one. I usually only buy one bass a year on average and I've already bought two this year already, so how can I fail?

The singer and guitarist in one of my bands have always been in bands together and one of their bands many moons ago had Muse as a support act, a fact which the guitarist has mentioned to me once or twice, to which I remind him he's in a band with me and ask, "Whatever became of Muse?" 😄

If it's only slightly too small then a wrap or two of tape would do the trick. No good if they're far to small obviously. 🙂

I'd have thought just saving the money from gigs, sales of recordings, session payments or whatever it is that you're using your current bass for would be the best way of saving for a new bass if the day job won't cover it. If you're not getting revenue from any of the above type of avenues then I can't really see why you'd be needing a 2.5k bass. Of course there's no reason why you shouldn't have a 2.5k bass for home noodling if your funds allow, but it appears they don't and asking others to pay for it is, to me, out of order.

I had to google that. Evaaaaar! 😆👍

I'm going to design some t-shirts with the slogan 'Plywood Is Not A Sin!' I like to think of it as a scruffy little street urchin who's grown up and turning his life around. 😁

This is the first colour I've gone for. It's a 70s Vauxhall colour I've always loved called 'Columbian Brown' (readily available from all branches of Escobar department stores) with an extra bit of pearl gold thrown in to get more copper tones from it. I'm doing the front of the body and headstock in this brown/Copper and the back of the body, headstock and neck in a deep cream colour reminiscent of those 70s plastic Bontempi organs with the fan inside. It'll have a black demarcation line between the two colours. If it looks like I envisage it should look like a slightly classier version of terrible 70s plastic tat. 🙂 It's quite hard to photograph the correct colour as the pearl gold changes it from deep chocolate brown to a bright copper but here's an attempt. Also this isn't the finished paint, it's had no polishing, once the cream and the black line are done it'll all have another two or three coats of lacquer to lose the join lines between colours.

Well, all the nicks, dinks and chips were sorted and I'd got it primed yesterday, so it would've been plain rude not to stick it in the booth today and give it the first layer of what should be a fittingly disgusting colour scheme. No pictures yet as it's air drying overnight, I've made the mistake of baking a plywood body before, it pops air out everywhere from the layers and cause little bubbles in the finish around the edges. As long as it's hard enough to mask onto I will hopefully get the second colour on tomorrow. On the microphonic pickup front, I'm not sure it is. It's quiet without excessive noise from body handling. Tapping or talking into the pickup doesn't really do anything and the only thing that makes a sound of any significant level is plucking or tapping a string. The coil certainly isn't just rattling around inside the housing.

How has nobody suggested getting a bass vi yet? Get a bass vi. 🙂

Cor look at that beauty, isn't she erm....... er......... well....... oh would you look at that, someone's at the door, gotta go! 😁

Don't these have a floating bridge? I'd bet the bridge is just slightly in the wrong place.

I like that, I'll have to remember Etsy. 👍

Ooh you absolute biatch! 😁

This is what I think, but it's very well blended together on the main run of the neck. Also there's ply and there's ply, this isn't going to be shuttering ply for a bit concreting. But as @Reggaebasssays, you can't see it on the shoulders of the head or heel end where you'd think it should be blindingly obvious. Either way, as I said earlier, it's still stable and straight after nearly half a century so it'll probably be alright for another couple of years.