Happy Jack

On the other hand, some of these bozos are sources of great band stories for the years to come. Last night is a case in point. I'm playing DB in a rockabilly trio (at The Oddfellows in Apsley, in case you know it), just about to start the third set, when a mid-40s lady walks up to me. Here we go, I think, do we play any Abba. She points at my DB and says, "Is that a harp?". OK, this is a wind-up, right? But she looks perfectly serious. No, I say, it's a double bass. "A double bass?" says she, "I didn't know about them." Yes, I reply, it's a double bass, and usually when people ask about it, that's because they think it's a cello. "No", she says, "I thought it was a harp. What does a harp look like, then?". I ask her if she's familiar with Guinness. She looks startled but says that she is. I tell her to picture the Guinness logo. "That's a harp", I say. She frowns, looks around for support, there's none forthcoming and my guitarist is now wetting himslef laughing, so off she totters to the toilet.

I have the cheap gigbag that I used to keep my Harley-Benton uke-basses in when gigging them. It's NOT purpose made for uke-basses, and it's certainly too big to be used with a Kala, but as a cheap, rain-proof gigbag it'll do a job for you. In the front pocket, I discovered the original fitment Thundergut strings that came on the HB, cut to length (obviously) but virtually unused. Drop me a PM if you want it. It can be collected from Harrow or (by prior arrangement) from the West End. Alternatively, check my signature to see where I'm gigging and collect it at a gig.

I do realise that these front-mounted amps are designed to work that way, but I get nervous about the leverage too. Buy a length of this (or similar): https://www.wickes.co.uk/Wickes-Pine-Crown-Moulding---34mm-x-12mm-x-2-4m/p/121310 Instant wedgery to support the back.

By the time he's cut holes in the side for the pickup, the idea no longer holds water.

My ex-wife said that PMS could not be altered at all.

I've always been a big fan of the small stuff that passes people by in these home videos. Why didn't he take the coats off the wall and put them on the sofa or the bed, rather than brushing into them in a distracting way every few seconds? Could he really not be bothered to close that cupboard door before switching on the recorder? What's with the rolled-up chequer-floor mat? Above all, why is he filming himself playing indoors dressed for a jog across the park in mid-winter? I think we should be told ...

Although, and famously, none of The Beatles had any formal musical training worth mentioning.

Ah right, this isn't a plastic wrap for your bass then?

I played piano (badly) and guitar (very badly) as a teenager. I sang bass in various choirs (although I've always been a baritone) and would routinely sing along with the bassline of the big hits of the day - especially All Right Now by Free. Gave it all up when I was about 22 ... no great loss. Picked up a bass guitar for the first time on my 49th birthday (it had been bought for my teenaged daughter but she never played it) and I've never looked back. I grew up on Guernsey. Bass guitars were a rarity and I never even touched one until I moved to London in the mid-70s. Maybe things could have been different, then? Well, maybe. I remember sharing a flat with a bass player and it took both of us to get his bass rig up and down the stairs. I always was a lazy s.o.b.

I tried taking a double bass by tube just once, to an open-air festival gig with no parking anywhere near. My DB gigbag has wheels and is therefore towable, but the bass really didn't enjoy being towed along uneven pavements and up & down curbs. My journey was very simple, eight stops on a single line with no changes, but neither station has lifts so the DB had to be carried up/downstairs at both ends. All I can say is, I'm bloody glad that @Silvia Bluejay was there to help! For any public transport gig, leave the DB at home and take a Precision ...

Or you could just take up playing the harmonica, of course. Just saying ...

Try swopping out the Telefunken valves for some higher-gain models. A German engineer in a white lab-coat looking over your shoulder might not approve, but it's easy enough to get the sound you're after with a bit of experimentation.

I had several vintage Dynacord valve amps some years ago, all very Germanic ... bullet proof and built like tanks, but also alles ist richtig = we don't do distortion. These were some of the cleanest valve amps I've ever played a bass through, but in truth they didn't sound as 'rock' as my old Selmer and WEM amps.

I mined that blog for information on so many occasions ...

That really does take things to a new level. The pickup arrangement is simply beyond belief.

Don't go and see @TheRev without taking a nice bottle of cider. Poor lad hardly ever gets to drink any ...

On the height issue, I'm just short of 5'11" and always played my DB with the end-pin out about 6" (bringing the nut in line with my eyebrows) until I joined a rockabilly band. Now I keep the end-pin all the way in and the bass is little more than resting on the ground. It took surprisingly little adjustment in my playing position to get used to it, and the DB is actually far more stable with the centre of gravity lowered in that way.

Good review, and I agree with most of what he says, but I was quite surprised by his description of the pull-up Tone knob function. He seems to think that this is to 'thin out' the bass tone and pick up more highs, which I suppose is one way of describing it, whereas John Hall actually named it to me as 'the vintage knob' and he was quite right - pulling it up instantly restored the classic vintage Ricky 'clank' which had been missing without it. There are situations where the Ricky 'clank' works really well, but there are many more situations where (IMHO) it doesn't. I play mainly T-birds and Precisions, so that gives a flavour of how I like my bass to sound. The thing I liked so much about the new 5 is that it can sound like a vintage Rick AND it can sound far more mellow. On the string spacing thing, though mainly a fingerstyle player myself I would certainly have to play more with a pick if I got the chance to own one of these - unlikely to be an issue any time soon, since Rickenbacker seem to be keeping supply ridiculously low, perhaps to add to the mystique of the bass. The biggest problem with this review was his complete lack of a silly hat.

Incidentally, I've had two of these and both of them had really weak original pickups and dodgy pots. I sold the first one (in maroon red) because of that - it looked great and the sliding pickup system is astonishingly effective, but the tone was so weedy that I couldn't imagine gigging it. A few years later I stumbled across, of all things, a single Dark Star pickup. I bought it on spec, and then went looking for another The Rail. I found one (in black) and then had Andy Gibson in Denmark Street do a real number on it. He loves working on those things because Dave Swift is an admirer of them too (Andy works on all Dave's basses AFAIK). We ditched the original pickup, pots and wiring, he prepped a piece of ebony to add on to the sliding base so that it was 'squarer', and then mounted the Dark Star on the newly-enlarged slidey bit and did a complete re-wire. The bass now sounds absolutely awesome and lives right here alongside me in my tiny study on the landing ... it's my go-to 4-string bass when I'm learning or practising. On the other side is my go-to 5-string bass and that's a Status Streamline. Judge a bass by the company it keeps ...

After all the mods & upgrades I've had done, you could be a long time a-waiting ...

Where? Where?

How many times does this subject have to come up before people finally cotton on? ALL of these barking mad listings are, essentially, (virtually) free advertising and clickbait. He's not crazy, or if he is then he's crazy like a fox. It costs him peanuts to list these things at stupid prices, nobody buys them so he doesn't have to pay any commission to eBay, and then people like us spray the listing across the Internet and advertise all the other, sensible, reasonably-priced stuff that he sells. It's a very canny business model, and I don't understand why so many Basschatters struggle with it.

Silvie and I put a helluva lot of work into getting gigs. We plan it like a military campaign ... there's a strategy (what sort of gigs to aim for, and in what geographical region), there's tactics (who says what when we get into the venue, and which marketing materials to show), and there's logistics (make each raid as efficient as possible, plan a route that gets us to the right places as quickly as possible and at the smallest expense). I play in two bands, each of which does about 30 gigs a year, and every single one of those gigs is brought in by us. Despite endless talk about their efforts, no other band member in either band brings in anything at all. Trouble is, that's largely our fault ... the more you do for people, the more they'll let you do. We've found most agents to be an incompetent waste of time, and most websites to be an expensive waste of time. There's no real substitute for actually going to the venue and talking to the people in charge, and if you bring in the gigs by schmoozing those people then they become your contacts and will be there to talk to when you need them. Being persistent, patient and polite also helps ... there are pubs that only gave us gigs on our third or even fourth visit. The one guaranteed fail is to think of landlords as being lying scum who are out to rip you off. We've met one or two who would match that description, but dozens and dozens who are friendly, hard-working people with very little time and a lot of pressure to deal with. By and large, we find they respond really well to bands who are honest and friendly with them.