Maude

What, the painting? 😄

Oh yeah, these are definitely made from the finest Taiwanese shonkywood.

I've been looking at the neck and can't decide if it's ply or not. Certain things say most definitely ply but from other angles it looks like a 'normal' neck. These look 'normal', Where as these look like ply, and these two scream ply, Also when cleaning the gunk of the fretboard it reveal a rather nice wood pattern, but I think it may just be the stain coming off a cheap wood that's been stained to look like rosewood. I quite like it though. Also, who needs frets that go all the way to the edge of the fretboard, possibly a result of the 'plek' treatment these clearly went through. 😂

Well whadya know, it's a '69 😆 Pulled it all apart ready for refinishing, I think I have a colour scheme in mind but we'll see what stupid ideas pop into my head today. The heel had a balsa shim superglued to it and after a bit of scraping the numbers were visible. The bass was disgustingly manky under the controls and scratchplate, and some quality routing of a plywood cavity. All the hardware has been cleaned and the scratchplate will be polished tomorrow, being careful not to remove the Kay logo, everyone needs to know what this beauty is. Talking of such, does anyone here make waterslide logos for the headstock? I want a gold Kay logo on there as well.

👍 I think it's meant to have a weird L shaped bridge with a bracket through the A and D strings to screw the ashtray to.

Yeah I've got an Hohner Arbor Series fretless P with a ply body and it's just perfect.

I don't know yet, I'll be stripping it down later so will let you know, I'm guessing it'll say 1969 though. I'm always amused at the absolute contempt for a plywood body or neck but the self wetting excitement of a multi-laminate construction. As far as I'm concerned, if this is from the early seventies and the neck is still straight with a good action then that's a decent neck construction. Of course it's cheap shite but it's made it through nearly half a decade and I'm going to show it a bit of love. The money side of it doesn't matter, it's a bit of fun. Folks happily spend money down the pub on a few drinks or a meal with nothing to show at the end, I'll have a good condition terrible bass at the end 😂

I'm not sure I like your tone young man! 😂 Are you suggesting my lovely new bass isn't really worth bothering with? 😉 Haha, thanks for the info, I know it's a bit shite but that kind of why I like the poor thing. We're having a bit of a quiet spell at work and this'll give me something to potter with. It'll be lovely when I'm done, just wait and see. 😁

Also notice the red painted on fret markers on the wrong side of the neck, I didn't even see those until I got home. 😆 Silver flake would look kool and suit the kitschness of it.

I was thinking along the lines of surf green, or something 50's and pastel. 🤔

The bridge is in the wrong place as the seller said he can't get the E string to intonate and the spacing is all to pot, as you can see by the G string nearly hanging of the edge of the board. It'll need a new nut as the one on there has been filed for a lefty and then just left as is when put back to righty, so G string in an E string sized slot. But with a new nut and bridge I can narrow down the string spacing to how I like it.

That's right word puzzle lovers, that's 'new what the f**k have I bought this for bass day'. I saw an old Kay bass listed cheap enough on Facebook just ten minutes away so I went to have a look. I really quite liked the look of it and fancied another little project (like I'm not trying to do enough already) and expected it to be awful. But it looked OK, good frets, reasonable action, all original parts bar the bridge, and when plugged in I was even more surprised, it didn't hum, crackle or buzz and sounded really good, apart from a fairly non existing tone control. We had a chat and it turns out it is a righty, but was converted to lefty and then put back to righty, hence the upside down painting of the hotrod (yeah I don't know why you would either). Anyway it looked and sounded so good that I bought it, it's great in a kitsch, tacky way but I don't know whether to refinish it in a totally different style as per original plan, or try to remove the painting and just restore it. Also if anyone knows from the serial number what year it is that would be interesting, calling @Bassassin 😉 Here's the awful thing in all it's, erm glory? 😂

I can find out what model they are but not until next Saturday, no gig tonight, they are plenty loud enough though. Our drummer is a very heavy hitter so you need the monitor loud enough to balance with him and in smaller pubs our soundman has told me he has taken me out of the PA as the monitor was enough. Since then I try to keep the volume down and do a less bassy mix so it's clear without swamping the sound, else the soundman has no control. I'm rambling now but the point is that there's plenty of volume on tap.

We use behringer ones, I'm not sure which ones they are as they're our soundmans, but it's all I use (no amp) and I can clearly hear myself and everyone else that I need to. We do our own mixes on a tablet using the Behringer X Air app and then just reach down and adjust the volume as needed.

PJB gear is great, I really like my Suitcase with the 4b extension cab and have absolutely no desire to look for anything else, it just does what I need it to. The B Social is perfect as my at home, practice amp. I usually use it with headphones with bass and phone plugged in but the ability to sit on the sofa (without headphones) and connect my bass and phone cable free and just noodle is great. I got mine as a b stock so didn't have to pay too much which made it affordable. If I had to only have one the Ashdown would be the one for sale. Enjoy your Cub, you made the right choice 👍

I have a B Social and a PJB Suitcase. The PJB is leaps and bounds ahead of the Ashdown in terms of build quality, the Ashdown is strictly a stay at home amp. I like Ashdown gear (I've had a lot of it) but the lack of any physical speaker protection completely rules out using a B Social for any kind of gigging situation, something will end up going through the speaker, either in the car or at a venue. Even putting it in a non rigid case would wreck it. The PJB gear is built for gigging, the Ashdown stays at home looking pretty for practicing and the PJB gets slung in and out of cars, vans and venues without having to worry.

Until I saw the upper and lower bouts I thought I was choosing seats at a venue!

Bloody fanbois! 😉 My 25 and 27 year old tattoos. Yes I was young and obsessed. 😁

I do the same with the good old Line6 X3 Live, one channel clean and with effects. It really helps keep a fat punchy tone especially when using distortion or fuzz effects. I used to, in my early days when money was tight and knowledge was low, run a bi-amped rig. I built a 2x15 sub cabinet and had an old pair of H&H 4x12 tower PA speakers which I built a 4x12 cab from. I made a head/rack unit housing a Peavey max valve pre-amp cross over unit, a stereo graphic EQ and a stereo power amp. The lows went to the 2x15 and the highs to the 4x12. It was Heath Robinson but it sounded great. Clearly this wasn't mad enough so I added an Akai Unibass, which splits your signal and leaves one channel unaffected and adds a fifth above to create a power chord to the other which can be fed to a separate amp (it does more but I didn't use that) and fed the fifth above to a 2x10 overdriven guitar amp which was housed in a matching cab which sat between the 2x15 and 4x12. Sadly no pictures but it was huge, and mental. It ended it's days as a more sober 2x15 and 2x10 bi-amped rig which is still wrapped in plastic in my workshop as it has little to no resale value but it too good to get rid of.

I saw The Levellers last Friday at Falmouth Princess Pavilion. Great little venue, only 600 capacity but a great sound. It was immensely loud but very clear, so much so I felt my knees go a couple of times with the bottom end. The band had great lights as well, insanely bright Motorhead style strobing. The band were absolutely bang on the money, very tight and very enjoyable. My wife is the fan really and I got her tickets as it was valentines night but I really enjoyed myself. Massive brownie points for a valentines surprise and a night out I enjoyed. Everyone's a winner 🙂

That looks far better than your description made it sound. It looks great. Did you use a heatgun/hair drier around the edges? A bit of heat shrinks the edges to stop the excess material creasing up around the curves.

As a buyer I don't quibble over price, I turn up when I say I will, I'm always polite through communications and will make the transaction as easy as possible for the seller as this will in turn make things easy for me. But last year I had three different sellers back out of an agreed deal for various reasons/excuses and it's really annoying and frustrating. None of these were on Basschat BTW.

I don't know the answers but I don't see how we can be "Global Britain" and massively cut down on travelling. I know this is getting off topic but surely we will have to regress into smaller more local communities in all areas if we want to cut down the insane amount of fuel we burn on travel. I've waded into a thread I'm out of my depth in, things change all the time and I just learn to adapt and get the most out of it and enjoy my quiet little life. I'll do the same with all these changes. I was merely trying to point out that it's not all closing doors, some will be opening.

That's a fair point but I'm just trying to find the positives. There's so much negativity in this thread. If there will be a flood of UK folks travelling to the EU to see bands now then surely the other side of that will be all the EU folks coming to the UK to see UK bands if we're not over there, bad for the environment but great for our tourism industry, so other sectors will benefit from this.

So EU bands won't come to the UK to play and UK bands won't go to the EU to play, so the UK bands can take the EU bands gigs in the UK, and EU bands can take the UK bands gigs in the EU, everyone keeps gigging and there's a lot less travel involved which is great for the environment. Yes that's a very simplistic view but we all seem to focusing on the gigs we'll lose rather than the new ones that will be up for grabs.