EliasMooseblaster

So what is it, exactly? Is it a similar setup to the Varitone switches that Gibson used to bung in some of their basses?

It does feel like a long neck...it's fine if it's the first bass you pick up that day. Where you notice the contrast is if you start off playing a Fender-shaped bass - a Schecter Model T, for instance. You'll probably find that the 12th fret sits a little to the left of your torso. Then you pick up the Thunderbird...and suddenly the 12th fret is three feet away. On the plus side, this does mean that the hard-shell cases are about five feet tall when standing on their end, which makes them an ideal leaning post for the taller lady or gentleman who might find her or himself waiting idly for a train after other persons have occupied any available seating on the platform.

If by "dissuade" you actually mean, "egg you on," then sure: I'm more familiar with the Gibson version, but it's a wonderful instrument. I'll second @stewblack's comments about them sounding great - given the pickup placements you could argue you're looking at a Jazz bass with more "oomph," and the front pickup soloed sits in a similarly comfortable sonic spot to a Precision. Also, I don't know whether it's the humbuckers or the neck-through construction, but if you like to venture up to the "dusty end" of the neck, you'll find them very articulate. I've also not had a problem with neck-dive. THAT SAID, don't be tempted to skimp and go for one of the cheaper, bolt-on models. There are several good reasons why they're cheaper.

Well, this came as a bit of a shock, I have to say: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/mar/25/scott-walker-experimental-pop-hero-dies-aged-76 I always appreciated the fact that he just went ever further into the deep end as he got older - where a lot of artists would have fallen back on trying to recreate the vibe of some of their early hits to cash in on the nostalgia, his music just got stranger and more unsettling. Fun fact relevant to this parish: he was also the bassist in the original Walker Brothers lineup.

Oh, it's an agonising choice which I could swear prevents me from making it to my local jam night - the first question is, of course, "do I have enough energy this close to the end of the week?", but if the answer is "yes", then the next question is, of course, "BUT WHICH BASS DO I TAKE?", and I find myself weighing up different arguments for different basses until it's nearly midnight and the jam is finishing anyway...

If you're after small and portable, but with valves, and you're not overly keen on the Orange, would an Ashdown CTM-30 or Little Stubby be up to task? I think it's fair to say that their dirty tone is a bit less divisive; this might be down to them being all-valve rather than hybrids. They're in a similar ballpark to the Ampeg Portaflex series; I know you had some reservations about those being powerful enough, but I can safely say that a CTM-30 into an efficient cab (namely a Berg CN212, as suggested by Lozz) will go a lot louder than you'd think a 30-watter should! (It does also have a post-preamp DI socket, if you're gigging with PA support!)

Good to know I'm not alone in this system - I have two spaces permanently occupied by my skinny-strings, leaving three bass spaces on rotation. I was thinking just this morning that it might be nice to give the Schecter and the Shuker a bit of daylight...

We'll just tell them to google Rod Hull

Oh dear. Did their IT tech spill coffee over the ZIP Disk?

Sorry, I should have thought about the non-Spotifiers! it can also be heard via Bandcamp without any kind of sign-up or what-not: https://ralphbeeby.bandcamp.com (Thank you very much for attempting to give it a listen!)

That question of where we draw the line is a really tricky one. Ian Watkins of Lostprophets fame is an easy one to judge because it stands out as an extreme even among cases like Glitter, King, and Jackson. But at the other end of the scale, Mick and Keef have convictions for drugs charges. Now we might not disgust us in the same way, but the law says drugs are bad (mmmkay), so should we judge them to be bad people and stop playing their songs? Of course we don't; the charges seem too trivial. Turn it up a notch and consider Jim Morrison's conviction for indecent exposure. Now, his bandmates have protested ever since that there was no substantive evidence to back this charge, but he was convicted in a court of law - is flashing a live audience morally rephrensible enough to drive fans of The Doors away from their music? Apparently not. I don't know where the line is, and nor do many record companies, it seems: there is a CD reissue of two later Beach Boys albums (I think it's the Friends / 20:20 disc) which includes, among the unreleased bonus tracks, a couple of songs written for the group by none other than Charles Manson. Now, these tracks have only seen the light of day some 20 or 30 years after Sharon Tate's murder, but with some of her relatives still alive and having to endure the continuing pop culture references to the event, I would have thought that it was a little bit soon to be releasing those songs for public consumption.

I'll take nickel if I can get 'em, but I'm happy enough playing stainless steels - I happily used Rotosound RS66 in stainless steel for years, before a friend pointed out that they also did a nickel-plated version. So it's nickel if I have the choice, but I'll happily default to stainless if, say, offered a discount bundle of Warwick Reds.

This sounds like very sound advice - especially this last paragraph. It might be seen as being in poor taste while the new film is fresh in people's minds, and he's in the headlines again. Once the dust has settled, it's probably safer to test the waters with your audiences. It is an enduring and morally murky problem, that some great art is made by some truly terrible people. In some cases, it's easy to dismiss the music along with its creator - Lostprophets and Gary Glitter being obvious examples - as they were popular at one point, but haven't pervaded popular culture to the same extent as Michael Jackson. See also Chris Brown, convicted for domestic violence - reviews of an album he released not long after his conviction focused on what an awful man he was, and barely discussed the music within. But plenty of his fans were quite prepared to treat the album and its creator as two separate entities. I expect plenty of Jackson fans will be prepared to do the same - you could argue that they've been doing it for decades - but while he's in the news, you'd be right to worry about objections from other people.

New single I finally popped out recently, for those who enjoy a bit of Davy Graham / Bert Jansch / that kind of thing:

Nice tune, that - thanks for sharing!

Drop E? So is that a 7-string (or baritone) tuned down a fourth - with the bottom string the same pitch as a standard 4-string bass? Sometimes I wonder how many sludge/doom metal bands have seriously experimented with playing their rhythm guitar parts on heavily distorted Bass VIes...

I enjoyed that. I'd certainly be intrigued to hear more of her stuff - thanks for sharing! I had to stop watching the video though, as every time the camera angle showed the paraphernalia in front of Ms Wilkenfeld, I found myself peering at the bottom of the screen thinking "I'm sure Mrs Mooseblaster has a water bottle like that..."

A friend of mine joined some kind of metal band (like the good friend I am, I never got round to listening to them) where the two guitarists played everything in C-standard. As he already favoured 6-string basses, he found it was easiest just to tune his bass up a semitone...is there a term for the opposite of "drop" tuning?

Now this is a very important point: how has a thread loosely centred on P/J basses managed to get this far without me jumping on my flightcase to bang on about how wonderful the Schecter Model T is? Still one of my favourites (that I've owned), though in the name of full disclosure, I do believe the P pickup is a little bit further back than it would be on a "traditional" Precision. That said... ...it's subtle. I'd say it has a little bit more "honk" to the tone when isolated. Just to complicate things, my passive Model T has SD pickups (the actives have EMGs) and none of my other basses do, so I've not been able to compare like-for-like with pickup placement. If you back off the tone control a bit, this difference becomes even harder to detect. With other instruments piled on top, no one's going to hear the difference.

See also that the insufferably pretentious Dandy Warhols' insufferably pretentious signature song Bohemian Like You is not actually about two blokes befriending each other and realising they both come from Prague.

I was disappointed to find out that Don McLean's most famous song, American Pie, had nothing to do with pastry.

Ah, a bit more like a T-bird's bridge pickup? I must admit I don't think I've ever played a Ray, so I'm less familiar with the nuances of its tone!

Hmm...I've tried a couple of Sandberg TM4s (Jazz front/Musicman back) which had a coil split switch for the MM pickup, so you could have J/MM blends or J/J. Now, Sandberg also do a VM4 which has a P pickup at the front. I don't know how easy it would be to find one of those with the MM coil split, but at least you'd have the core P and MM tones to play with.

That's a good point: when I (briefly) taught bass guitar, one of the finger-stretching exercises I used to get my (few) students to do was go up and down a few two-octave scales. F or G major over two octaves is a good warm up for the fretting hand on a four-string. Doing the same on a five rather takes the challenge out of it!