Happy Jack

For home stuff, where how you sound solo is more important than how your sound sits or cuts through in a band situation, I chose to go vintage. For around £300 you should be able to pick up a WEM Dominator Mk.III, preferably the Dominator 25 model with the 15" Celestion speaker. Classic valve warmth and goodness, seriously old school, looks the business, and will go up in value instead of down. If there are no Mk.III 25s out there, almost equally good would be a WEM Power Musette ... essentially the same combo but intended for use with an accordion. Charlie Watkins (the W in WEM) started out making amplifiers for accordions in the 50s, and long after the accordion fad had died a well-deserved death he continued to make combos for them.

So just for once we have a bass that really is both a prototype and a transitional model? I was beginning to think that was just something I read on eBay listings for badly-modified Squiers and Encores ...

It's like that guy who nicked the bag containing my new trainers and my hi-vis vest ... he can run, but he can't hide.

Makes perfect sense ... after all, there are no cases in the USA are there? Oh no ... wait ...

Gavin, that's one helluva way to announce your arrival on Basschat ...

Thanks Russ, that looks like a website to add to my Favourites.

Absolutely this ^. It is inevitable. But I don't believe it's helpful to greet every new virus as potentially The End Of Civilisation As We Know It.

1 in 340 out of a population of 60m means about 176,000 people ... assuming of course that the very small sample, already targeted at those considered to be most at risk, can actually be extrapolated out to include the entire population. OK, 176,000 is a big number, let's take it seriously. The first thing to note is that the vast majority of Covid-19 cases produce symptoms similar to a cold. Of those that are more serious than a cold, the vast majority produce symptoms similar to flu. Of those that are more serious than flu, most sufferers develop very nasty symptoms that can be life-threatening to a minority of the population. And finally you reach the cases that the media are drooling over ... people dying. You can do your own research as to the predicted death rate from Covid-19 for Western Europe and choose which number you prefer. For the moment, I'm sticking with 1% but that may not survive contact with reality ... it might be 0.1% and it might be 5%, nobody knows. Yet. We'll find out quite soon. 1% too cautious for you? Fine, let's run with 5%. That means that the 176,000 cases we (allegedly, based on a dodgy survey) already have might generate 176,000 x 5% = 8800 deaths. Hmmmmmm. Does anyone actually believe that? If at least a month of pandemonium in the most heavily-populated country on Earth (China) has produced fewer deaths than that, why would Brits be dropping like flies? Sounds like b0ll0cks to me. Back to 1% then. Even that would produce 1760 deaths. Unacceptable. Intolerable. Something should be done! We need to change everything so that this can never happen again ... eh? What's that you say, Sooty? There are 363,000 new cases of cancer in the UK every year? And 165,000 of them die every year? Maybe we're focusing on the wrong pandemic here? https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-statistics-for-the-uk And don't forget, children, the proportion infected in China after over a month of this is still nowhere near 1 in 340. Just saying ...

I get that Phil, really I do, but that's a bloody big 'if' based on, putting it bluntly, nothing at all. Come to that, if it pans out as badly as the Great Plague of 1665, or (God help us) if it pans out as badly as the Black Death of 1347, or ... but y'know, actually it probably won't. Any sensible practitioner knows that you hope for the best but prepare for the worst. Any news source proprietor knows that you bang on endlessly about the worst case scenario (cos it's so much more exciting than saying "another virus has emerged - we'll be fine") until it fizzles out, then you claim the credit for solving the problem with your 'campaign against viruses'. Any politician, no matter how tiny-minded, corrupt and devoid of principles, knows that you make a big song & dance about how much you're doing to protect the public while looking for a scapegoat against the moment it all goes wrong. Very little of that helps those of us trying to live our daily lives and refusing to believe that the sky is falling, the sky is falling. Yes, we're all going to die, but not tomorrow. I'm not planning to, anyway.

Oh I like that, I like that a lot!

I remember posting on this subject about ten years ago, and the gist of my post was that you shouldn't use a scale that runs from 0 (no weight at all) to 12lbs (absolute monster) because it's so misleading. Below a certain weight, a bass (or any other instrument) is so light that it might as well weigh nothing. Above a certain weight, a bass is so heavy that it's virtually crippling you as soon you sling the strap over your neck. This will vary for each of us, but for me the two parameters are 5lbs and 10lbs. My 1963 Hofner Violin weighs 5.5lbs and feels light as a feather - I could play it all night and barely notice that I was wearing it. My 2019 Rickenbacker 4003s5 weighs 9.5lbs and I'm doing Pilates the entire time I'm on stage to prevent back trouble. My point? In arithmetic terms, the Rick is nowhere near twice the weight of the Hofner. But in the real world, the Rick feels easily four times as heavy. Anything that weighs over 10lbs gets picked up and just put straight back down again.

Erm ... dunno ... what do think it says? I've owned this bass for over 10 years and always seen an abstract pattern.

And here's exactly the sort of codswallop that we need to be ignoring. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-51699056 Coronavirus: Hospitality industry losses 'in hundreds of thousands' What was actually said? The head of the completely impartial and balanced Hospitality Ulster (who?) claims that cancelling the Six Nations would have "an economic impact ... that we would estimate in the hundreds of thousands". Evidence might have been nice. Some sort of explanation as to the basis for his estimates could have helped. But no, just print quotes from someone we've never heard of that suggest that economic catastrophe is now inevitable. I imagine that his next news release will be to ask the Government for a hand-out to offset the disastrous impact of two people (so far) getting ill in Ireland. Apropos of nothing, and just for context: The UK hospitality sector has reached more than 100 Billion Euros in 2018 with expectations of more to reach in 2019 despite the Brexit consequences and staff shortages. The number of hosting and food services facilities has grown nearly 20% in the last five years providing more than 330,000 working opportunities.

And the fretless equivalent is still £400! I guess that removing all those unnecessary frets probably does cost about £112 ...

Bwahahahahahahahaha!!! Can't argue with that one ...

OK, now I'm intrigued ... which bass were you thinking about?

I'm well aware of the potential downside, but thanks anyway. Si, did you think this was a refin, or am I thinking of another bass?

I have a classic vintage bass with a dodgy finish, and I'm tempted to throw caution to the winds and go for a complete refin ... not something I've ever contemplated before. I'm in Harrow (NW London) so I have easy-ish access to the West End, to the whole swathe of London from Barnet to Richmond, and to the bits of Bucks/Herts that are a bit further out. Is anyone in BC-Land happy to recommend a refin specialist in that zone who I could go and have a chat with?

List price of a Serek Mid-Western is currently US$2100 at the factory gate. Get it to the UK and that has probably turned into US$2800. Or, of course, you could buy this: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/serek-Midwestern2-Black-MW2-057-Electric-bass-Serek/153599959774?hash=item23c34562de:g:QFgAAOSwLztdUEwv Bwahahahahahahahahaha!!!

I had no idea that Top Pop existed ...

I think it's safe to assume that this is intended to be a joke.

Perhaps, Phil, perhaps. However, there's a very good reason why offical advice is so often met with cynicism and complacency. It's called History. And most of the comments that I suspect you perceive as negative, on this thread anyway, have nothing to do with official advice and everything to do with attempts to whip up a panic-stricken froth about this. The comment about malaria was a good example of some much needed context for this, as was my referencing the number of road deaths each week in the UK - something that we are not merely complacent about but genuinely proud of: Have you seen the equivalent figures for France or Italy or Spain or ... Coronavirus is merely the panic subject of 2020, much as previously we've had World War 3, the oil running out, everyone dying of AIDS and Herpes, a teen generation succumbing to alcopops (remember them?), the next Ice Age (long overdue), being eaten alive by Ebola, and many many more including previous Coronavirus outbreaks. Without an existential threat to prattle on about, most people don't seem to know how to live, so existential threats are discovered, or dredged up, or exaggerated out of all recognition. Meanwhile, people generally are appallingly bad at understanding statistics or at gauging risk through use of probabilities. Ask any of the 32,000,000 Brits who choose to buy a Lottery ticket regularly. Yes, you read that right. 32m Brits buy a ticket pretty much every week despite this: The chance of winning the National Lottery jackpot is 1 in 45,057,474, according to the Lotto website, while there is a 1 in 7,509,579 chance of getting five numbers plus the bonus ball. To win the Euromillions jackpot there is a one in 1 in 139,838,160 of all your numbers being drawn. People understand what a £22m Jackpot is and how it could change their lives. People don't understand what 1 in 45m really means and how ludicrously unlikely it is that they will be that one lucky person. Similarly, people understand what dying is and they're scared of it. People don't understand how massively the odds are tilted against them dying of Coronavirus, or how urgent it is that a Government as useless and mendacious as the current one must be seen as 'caring' or 'making a difference', so if you tell them that their very lives are at risk they tend to believe you uncritically, without using whatever brain cells or education they may have available. Is Coronavirus real? Yes. Is it bad? Yes. Are people dying? Yes. Do I wish it wasn't happening? Yes. Is it an existential threat? No. Is it a 'game changer'? No. Will it change the way we all live in future? No. Will it get a mention in the history books that will be written in 50 years time? No, apart from a brief reference in the chapter on Panics & Scares Of The Early 21st Century. Sadly, I won't be there to read those books, and anyway I seem to have developed a nasty little cough ...