Happy Jack

Erm ... a covert what exactly?

June 2021 is beginning to look dodgy too. Have you considered 2025?

At least it will make a good yarn.

Start with the chords, always the chords. Once you know the chord sequence, many basslines simply fall into place.

Well if the whole country goes back into bloody Lockdown on Wednesday, then all optimism will be sadly misplaced.

I gigged last Sunday, I'm gigging tonight, and I've just landed another gig for Tuesday. What's more, two of these three are actually paid gigs!

Fair enough. I emailed them yesterday. Let's see what - if anything - comes back.

Lightest Precision I've ever owned is my Mike Lull 54P. With a strap, the bass weighs exactly 8lbs, whilst being and looking like a Precision. If you want to take that down to 7lbs or less, then that means losing a pound from the body while the weight of the neck and headstock remain the same. It may be possible to do that without creating a bass that makes a Thunderbird look like the paragon of stability, but I'm really not sure how.

Sometimes serendipity seems to go beyond coincidence: Dear Jack Nicole, Thank you for choosing Studiospares and we hope that you are already enjoying using your gear. Because we really want to make sure that all our customers are happy with our products and service, if for any reason you have any problems with your purchase or are unsatisfied in anyway, we would like to hear from you. Simply click here and let us know.

One word: Neckdive. Or should that be Neck Dive? In which case, that's just two words ...

A couple of months ago I was in very nearly the same place Paddy. I'd been using Silver Slaps for years, thought I'd try some genuine guts for the first time, found I loved the D & G but hated the E & A. Paul suggested replacing the E & A with Evah Pirazzis, which I did, and they're a near-perfect match. I'm really very happy with them. I'd go with Paul if I were you.

My first thought when I saw those strings was, someone has already 'touched up' that knot and used a sharpie (or similar) which contains a fair bit of red. When you were playing all those riffs on the G-string your sweat or the sanitiser (alcohol-based, I'm guessing) has dissolved some of that ink and your fingers have then transferred it to the strings. I hope I'm wrong, really I do, but if that's what's happened then my feeling is that the bass needs to go back for a full refund. At the very least, I'd share that photo with the vendor and ask them to explain. And to answer your question explicitly, that discoloration is not even slightly 'normal' ... it's deeply weird.

There is a new version of Reaper (6.15) as of today. Rather wonderfully, it informs me that: REAPER has experimental native support for Linux, and the Windows version works well with WINE. Not being a great wine drinker these days, I'm experimenting with IPA instead.

One from the archives: I first saw this (or a version of it) perhaps 20 years ago ...

Brittany Spears is a basketball player. Was this who you had in mind?

That would be a negatory, Houston (beep]. Switching off/on, clearing my cache, deleting cookies, nowt makes a difference. Ah well, the only reason (since they moved their shop from the North Circular to Luton) I continued to make them my first-choice supplier was a certain misplaced brand loyalty. No matter ... there's hundreds of the buggers out there.

So a Dell Optiplex 3020 is a notorious bot-driven device?

I guess that makes me Papa ...

Shhhhh ... I don't like to talk about her when @Silvia Bluejay is around.

I wouldn't mind so much if they had actually asked me to do a Captcha thing and I'd managed to fail it. In fact, no Captchas were injured in the making of this topic, and I've had an account with these clowns for years. Given how many hundreds of competitors are out there on't Net trying to take away their customers, I am genuinely staggered at this degree of incompetence.

An email I sent five minutes ago to Studiospares: I've bought loads of stuff from you over the years, both online and from your old shop on the North Circular Road. If you want me to ever buy anything else from you, I suggest you get rid of the attached insulting nonsense. And do it bloody quickly. There's a lot of competition out there.

Pah! Next thing you'll be telling me that a Squier P-bass can sound as good as a pre-CBS Precision worth £6000!