Happy Jack

The Bass Centre had long since departed from Wapping by the time I bought my first bass. On the other hand, last night I was playing a Westone 'The Rail' which attracted far more attention from the musos and punters than my Wals ever used to.

Asking for a friend.

As near as I can make out, he's playing sitting down.

Fit a 3-pin plug and go straight to mains. Just make sure that you use a 5A fuse and proper shielding ...

There never was an umlaut on the logo. I've owned many vintage Hofners and I have a 1964 Violin Bass 500/1 hanging next to me as I write. If you want to really get stuck into these things, the Bible for many, many years has been https://www.vintagehofner.co.uk/

Actually, that's several beasts sharing one instrument.

Those strings will still be going strong long after you're dead & gone ... if it ain't bust, don't fix it. Worse, those who start 'experimenting' with different strings on DB turn into perennial fettlers facing bankruptcy. On an amplified DB, there's not a lot that can be achieved sonically by changing strings that can't be achieved faster, cheaper, and more reversibly using the knob-thingies on the amp.

Checking out who Kenneth Lawrence is led to me to this very strange site: https://salefuet.best/product_tag/37018278_.html I have absolutely no idea what is going on there.

SOOOOO many questions. What's that made of? What are the dimensions? What distinguishes A from A2 from B quality? Do these meet all the relevant regs about import/export of hardwoods? What's the shipping cost? Would you send c.$200 to a complete stranger in India?

This popped up in my FB feed:

That website has been turning up in comments on Basschat for ever. I've never seen this guy as a crook. His joke listings are more of a publicity stunt to attract attention and comment ... and they work! If anyone is stupid/drunk enough to actually buy any of that stuff at those prices, then good luck to him.

Erm ... why did the body need restoring?

So this Active 10T will actually and definitely make me a better bass player?

This ^ And de-fretting an existing neck is pretty much irreversible. Do this and find that you don't like it and you're stuffed ... you no longer have the bass you liked so much, you can't convert it back again, and you've destroyed the resale value. +1 for buying an after-market fretless neck, then source the hardware you need (tuners, string-tree, etc.) pre-owned either here on Basschat or through eBay. No real need to buy new if you're strapped for cash. As a matter of personal taste I've never really 'got' lined fretlesses. They don't look fretless unless you get up close and you know what you're looking for, so you get no Wow! factor, and the only person who can't see the lines is you, the player. It all seems a bit silly. I've always preferred to have fret-end markers inserted instead. You look down at the edge of the fretboard/fingerboard and you see where the frets would be if there were any frets. I find that system to be well inside my comfort zone.

Thwaites are confident that the bass can be recovered, so my Kolstein now resides in Bushey until further notice. Strangely enough, they are far more relaxed about the sunken table than I am. Apparently it looks far worse than it is.

Bin there, dun that, got too fat for the t-shirt. As a complete numpty when it comes to electrickery, one thing I've learned about pedal boards is that sometimes they develop some sort of [non-technical gibberish alert] standing wave in the power supply which acts as a roadblock to the signal. There's nothing wrong with any of the pedals, or any of the cables, or the power supply, but the problem won't go away until you completely disconnect every single thing and then start over. The first time this happened I thought someone was playing tricks on me. By the third or fourth time it was just routine ...

[Poirot] Exactement, my little cabbage. [/Poirot]

Do they still make them? Your old one (yours too @bassace) is still in one piece ... just. The neck needed major surgery shortly after I acquired it from Roger and Laurence Dixon obliged, but halfway through Set #1 last night a crack big enough to insert a thumbnail suddenly appeared right through the heel, and at roughly the point where the previous repair finished. I had to stop playing the bass and quickly detune to take off the string tension before the bass became the world's most expensive folding pen-knife. 😟 I imagine that it can be repaired ... most things on a DB can. But now we're into cost/benefit analysis and whether or not it would make more sense to buy another/different/new/whatever instrument rather than chucking serious money at the existing one. Don't forget the slow but steady collapse of the table on that bass. 😱 It's a miracle it's lasted this long. I'll be calling Thwaites in the morning to see if I can take it in for an assessment.

My existing bass is teetering on the brink of oblivion and the best replacement for it that I can imagine is another Kolstein Busetto. If you have one one - or know someone who has one - that is looking for a new, gigging home please get in touch.

I started on vintage basses with Hofner. If you think it's tricky trying to sort out exact details for vintage (pre-CBS) Fenders, just wait until you start collecting 500/1 (Violin), 500/3 (Senator) and 500/5 (President) basses ...

I'm more interested in the heavy emphasis placed on provenance here ... "Melvyn Whittaker was a close confidant and friend of Tony Zemaitis and many of the instruments offered are some of his most prestigious and unique of all Zemaitis Models ever created by Tony." OK, right, so this Melvyn Whittaker chap must have been a famous and successful bass player whose name attaches value to his old instruments? Erm ... no. Google has only three references to him, and 99% of those three references are the quote above, appearing in places where people are desperately trying to talk up the value of these instruments. The other two are a single mention in a 2000 issue of Guitar Auctions (quelle surprise), in an article which is no longer available, and a not-very-good YouTube demo (presumaby for an auction) of a different Zemaitis bass which Melvyn allegedly once lent to Jaco Pastorius for possibly a single gig, possibly a UK tour, it's all very vague. Quite frankly, on the strength of the above, attaching Melvyn's name to this bass wouldn't encourage me to spend a fortune on a grotesquely ugly instrument which (I suspect) weighs North of 12lbs. What with Basschat being the biggest & best source of bass knowledge in Europe, presumably someone here must have known Melvyn Whittaker in his hey-day and can tell us why he has left so little trace.