Happy Jack

The important thing is to place your finger where it produces the note that you wanted. All else is nonsense.

This is an excellent post. My only addition would be that lined fretless is an abomination, and completely pointless at that ... when you're playing a bass, you can't actually see the frets! What you need to see is the ENDS of the frets. Ibanez recognised this 50 years ago and produced this: It's a rubbish photo (sorry) but you get the idea. The bass (Ibanez 2366 FLB) was supplied with these fret end markers in place. I liked them so much that I later had a guitar tech do this: That's a Lakland Skyline Duck Dunn where I switched to a fretless neck. The job of installing those fret ends was (apparently) very simple, and was not at all expensive.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-52843846

Then enjoy the fact that you will never (as in NEVER) need to buy another set of strings.

It never died, Tut, it never died!

Ooooh, look what I found! I've seen a few Marina basses over the years, but always in (rather unattractive) solid colours. Now isn't this a lovely piece of wood?

And stuff foam under the strings. Lots of foam. The more foam, the better. You just can't have enough foam if you're playing with a pick.

In all fairness, it was a piece of artwork in a music studio rather than a musical instrument.

That remains one of the nicest (modified) examples in existence.

Nowhere near as-new condition, needs some maintenance that it's never going to get from me, but still fully-functional and working pretty well. Even got the original box, By God! Pickup only from HA1 3RG.

The real sacrilege would be to sign a modern bass.

I routinely switch (on EB) between 35" scale and 30.5", and I occasionally pick up a uke-bass. Each instrument / scale length has a slightly different technique, of course, but it's all electric bass. The only thing that could be affected by routinely practising on short scale before gigging on long scale is muscle memory. I don't own a 1/2-size DB so I can't be certain, but I suspect that the same is true.

I'm not convinced that I even knew there were two flavours at the time! It was this one: Note the lack of a battery compartment.

Passive bass with a graphite neck for extraordinary punch, Precision on steroids and without the OTT elements that a Seymour Duncan 1/4-pounder can bring. Relatively lightweight, drop-dead gorgeous in red/black, not hugely ergonomic with a fairly sharp slab side to it. In the truly enormous pantheon of Basses I Rather Wish I Had Never Sold my old GP Artist ranks much higher up the pecking order than you might imagine.

The correct answer is, "Yes, but I'm WAY better than him".

I always take at least two basses to any gig, but I wouldn't now describe any of them as 'spare'. If I take multiple instruments, then I'll play everything I've taken. In all honesty, though, this started out as taking a spare to every gig, so I suppose I should really fall into that camp, if only for old times' sake.

Totally agree about the string spacing. When getting started, you can easily treat the Low B as an extended thumb-rest, which actually makes the bass very easy to play as a 4-string. Once you start using the B-string 'properly', don't get carried away with playing really low notes ... think instead about playing across the neck rather than zooming up and down it. If you're playing in E, for example, make your foundation E the 5th fret on the B-string rather than the open E string. You may be surprised how much more versatile you become.

It's in the fingers, Mark ...

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