Happy Jack

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 ...

Simple answer - take the bass to a luthier for a set up. Complicated answer - this could be either a trussrod problem or a bridge problem. Trussrod problem If the neck has too great a curve to it, then the action will be too high. If you have to push the strings down by nearly half an inch at the 12th fret then you're bending the strings which will make them sound sharp. If this is the problem, then you need to tighted the trussrod. Do this a quarter-turn at a time, checking the string height after each and every quarter-turn ... softly softly catchee monkey. Bridge problem Judging by your measurements, looks like you have very nearly a straight line going there. If there isn't a problem with the trussrod, that tells you that the bridge has been correctly intonated, but has since moved or been knocked. Have you recently changed the strings, perhaps? Or has the bass been dropped or kicked by accident? Whatever. What you now need to do is to tap the bridge, gently but firmly, on the G side (because the G side is the furthest out of true). You're trying to get the bridge straighter. I recommend using the spine of a fairly heavy paperback book for this. After a few taps, if the intonation is getting worse, then you're tapping in the wrong direction ... tap from the other side. If tapping won't move the bridge, slacken off the strings slightly and try again. If tapping with slightly slackened strings still won't move the bridge, then someone has fixed the bridge with double-sided tape, and quite possibly in the wrong position. In that case, take the bass to a luthier for a set up.

Chances are that China now has 100,000 cases of coronavirus. The population of China is 1.4 billion. For the arithmetically challenged, that's 1,400,000,000 people. So a full month into the outbreak, one Chinese in every 14,000 has the disease. Looked at another way, out of every 14,000 Chinese there are 13,999 who don't have it. "Yet", I grant you, "Yet". Some more will get it as time goes by, but at the moment the odds are firmly in favour of humanity surviving this. Not all of those 100,000 will die, of course. The Chinese death rate (if we can believe anything their Government says) is a surprisingly high 5%-ish. Estimates for Europe are suggesting that we will see less than 2%, probably 1%. All statistics change over time. That's the nature of things. But if you were to assume, just for the sake of the argument, that one in every 14,000 Brits were to develop the disease, and that 2% of those affected were to die, it doesn't take long to work out that the extra 80 deaths - each an individual tragedy for someone - would represent two weeks' road deaths. You can't sell newspapers, or garner cheap clicks, by publishing this sort of thing. Far better to fire up the panic-stricken auto-headline generator, tell everyone that (1) we're all going to die, (2) it's all the fault of those slitty-eyed b@st@rds in Chinky-land, and (3) that this may affect property prices in the Home Counties.

Beautiful tone.

So I guessed that the 5734 and the 6034 were based on a '57 P and a '60 J, both with 34" scale. So then I guessed that the 5730 and the 6030 were based on ... erm ... a shortscale 30" '57 P and '60 J that never existed. Then I saw the 1930. Oops.

Thanks. I feel better now ... I don't need to ask whether it's for sale.

Just love that trussrod cover! What does the bass weigh?

They said it was Notlob ...

OK, so here's a strange thing. I was enjoying listening to the original so much that I picked up my bass, thought I'd have another go at that little bass lick that Porter puts in at the end of each line of the verse. Hmmmmm ... that's a little faster that I remember this song being. And I'm sure that the original is in E, not F. I know that's a TOTP recording an' all, but it both looks & sounds as if the whole bloody thing has been varispeeded up by a semi.

I wish I that very same hat that the drummer's wearing ...

"I remember George Clinton asking the rhetorical question in Parliament's "P-Funk (wants to get funked up)" " Can you imaging Doobiein' your funk?"" Yeh, but who knows WTF he was talking about?

It will be my immense pleasure to play this bassline (slightly simplified) in about four hours from now ...

Looks like a Classic model? I'm assuming it's the 34" scale rather than the (much rarer) 35", and I guess it's bloody heavy. What do these normally sell for? The info is not as easily available on line as I'd have expected.

In all fairness, "the day" was nearly 50 years ago.

Doh! Sorry - this is correct and my earlier post was a typo. Thanks for the correction @itu

So, Trigger, about this broom of yours ...

That was genius. Very, very impressive.

Oooooh, ya beach!

Our guy (Paul the Drums, as he's known at the SouthEast BassBash) was so keen to nail this that he booked a couple of sessions in a drum booth at Bell Drum Studios (Acton) and just worked on it until he had the whole thing down. It makes a real difference ... playing live, you sound so much more convincing if the drummer is playing it exactly right.