Isn’t your story also a case of checking your gear regularly? I’m guessing the jack socket is held on by a nut and washer that had come loose, or fallen off?
I’ve owned a few American built fenders, they’ve all been quite badly built. The main thing has been the neck pocket, everyone has looked like the guy doing it sneezed as he either put the router in in, or took it out.
I had a 5 string Marcus Miller bass that was embarrassingly bad. Maybe I was just unlucky? The neck joint looked like I’d done it. The little metal inserts/cups for the through-body stringing were loose and kept falling out.
You’re actually learning it, memorising it?
From my experience things can change when you get along to the technical rehearsals, that why you often see pencil annotations on the scores.
I’ve played a couple, like others have said it doesn’t take long to get used to them. The only thing that puts me off buying one is that it’s extremely difficult to play chords on them.
Yes. If you look at the chords in the real book, you’ll see they’re often written to include the extensions; 11th, 13th etc. See how it sounds to you. It’s good too if you can listen to a master of the art; Paul Chambers or Jimmy Garrison, and see what they do.
Do it, it’s like making a curry, the notes are spices. They’re diatonic, the chord tones are obviously the strongest notes, but others from the scale work fine too.
JMB is known for that. It seems to be either 16 year olds convinced that they’re the next huge thing, or middle-aged drummers who played the big bass drum in the boys brigade 40 years ago. In the case of the drummers the closest they’ve ever got to being in a band, is asking the one in the local for a request.
I think Facebook is pretty good for finding musicians. You’ll generally find pretty good musicians wanted and available groups on there. The time wasters usually get weeded out pretty quickly.