Happy Jack

Agreed, but Andy's services are very much in demand and by a lot of musicians better and more famous than me! I think he had just decided that this was one prject he should walk away from. 😂

On an 8-year-old bass, I'd say that "nice cracking to the finish" was actually bloody near catastrophic!

Easy for you to say ...

You've got me wanting one of these now (🙄) even though @Silvia Bluejay and I have been using an XR18 for two years without any situation arising where we'd have needed it! I can easily see it as a belt & braces thing mind, especially since Silvie's attention has to be split between the PA and her video cameras.

I get the upper register extension thing, Tony, and the Spuler you've posted has vestigial frets to make that extension usable. The bass in the OP has no such frets and would be pretty much unusable in that way ... certainly it would sound bloody odd if you tried! I'm still quite sure that the OP bass has a neck intended for use on a lefty (with integral thumb rest), but which has for some reason been fitted to a righty.

A distressed Squier affininty is just what you need to play Paddy McGinty's Goat ...

The way the edge of the neck continues beyond the fretted zone looks to provide an excellent thumb-rest ... but it's on the wrong side. If it's intentionally continued below the strings like that, then I am baffled as to what purpose it serves.

Judging by the shape of the neck up where your thumb might go, I'd guess that started life as a leftie and then the design got reversed for some reason. Either way, it doesn't do it for me.

I take the bass away from Andy and call up @gary mac. Foolishly he accepts the commission. Do you feel like taking up the story from here Gary?

Two weeks later Andy calls me again. He's found what the problem is. The rout for the jack socket has been drilled fractionally too small. The wiring was working fine when not in the bass, but as soon he tightened the screws to lock everything in place, one or more components were distorting slightly and causing a short. I tell him to replace everything. Every electronic component, every piece of wiring, take the bloody thing down to bare wood and start over. Andy says, the preamp has blown again. Aaaargh! I buy another GraphTech preamp. We are way past the point where any of this makes any economic sense, I should have sent the bass straight back to Cristian and demanded a refund ... oh heck, whatever. Andy's heart is no longer in this. The Grosmann has been hanging around his workbench like a bad smell for far too long, he wants shot of it and is giving it only the most cursory attention. He fits the new preamp, the bass works intermittently for an hour or so and then it doesn't. Game over.

After two weeks of this nonsense I lose all patience, take the bass to my regular guy in Denmark Street (Andy Gibson - he's worked on nearly a hundred basses for me over the years) and tell him, I don't care what you have to do, just get it working. He looks at the bass like he just trod in it and starts pointing out what's wrong with it. The bridge is an utterly dreadful thing, the wrong size, dysfunctional, and fitted at an angle. The knobs aren't fitted properly, the strap buttons are wrong, you name it. In particular, he points out that all the components used to build this bass (apart from the wood) are the cheapest, shoddiest things on the market ... things like the pots and the jack socket are only fit for the bin. On a £900 bass. Then he opens the cavity and starts laughing. He tells me the wiring seems to have been done by a 9-year-old, the GraphTech preamp is a good make and should be fine but there are bits of clipped wire hanging from it. The thing's a mess. Two weeks later Andy calls me. The wiring is way past salvage which makes the preamp unusable. I contact Cristian who immediately sends me a brand new replacement unit. Fair play to him. Andy fits the new unit. While everything is spread out on the bench it all works. He calls me and says, come and see, it's fine. By the time I get there he has re-assembled the bass and ... it doesn't work any more. Cue more wiggling and jiggling and fiddling plus extra head-scratching. I go away. Do please remember that this account is the SHORT version.

God, where do I start? How much detail to go into? Is this a review or a graphic novel? Let's keep it as short and simple as possible. One year ago, between Lockdowns, I saw a bass that I really liked - a Grosmann by Cristian Grosu in Romania. Essentially a Jazz shape but hollow-bodied with f-holes, piezo pickups under the saddles (no mag at all), a quirky home-made bridge, and a lovely colour and figure to the body wood. I play a lot of doubling gigs these days, swopping between double bass and a Precision during each set, and I really liked the idea of having a bass guitar which would start by sounding more like a DB and deliver the same sort of signal to my rig. £900 was a bit of a punt on a bass from a manufacturer I'd never heard of, and from Romania of all places, but his website looked convincing and he seemed to have loads of very happy Romanian customers. They're mainly Metal players, but I won't hold that against them - I blame the parents. So the bass arrived, looking every bit as good as I'd hoped, plugged it in ... nothing, nada, not a sausage, bugger all. I did all the obvious things and got nowhere. I opened up the back plate to find an absolute rat's nest of wiring which I didn't understand and didn't dare touch, so I closed it up again and PM'd Cristian. Please imagine that this paragraph runs to well over a thousand words as Cristian and I bat the problem back and forth. He keeps assuring me that the bass was working fine when he sent it, why would he send me a bass he knew wasn't working etc. and (infuriatingly) keeps asking me if I like the bass! He seems to really struggle with the notion that I would not warm to an instrument that cost me a lot of money and doesn't work. Worse, with all my wiggling and jiggling and fiddling, every now and then I can get the bass to work for about five minutes, and it sounds great!

Given the way this story unfolds, why not start with a happy ending? Here's the end-point of the story:

£1500!!! In all the years this thread has been running, that has to be the most ambitious / optimistic / ludicrous price I've yet seen.

They used a companion product to Photo Shop. It's called Photo Cafe.

I was at Bad Company's first ever London gig, the Rainbow. Can't Get Enough was in the charts at the time. All the material they had was their debut album, Eponymous. Is that right? No, it must have been their eponymous debut album, Bad Company. So there they were trying to play a gig with just 40 minutes of material available. Hmmmmmm. They opened with Can't Get Enough, played the entire album (including Can't Get Enough), and then finished with ... erm ... Can't Get Enough. Then they went off having been on stage for well under an hour. The crowd got rather rowdy and eventually they came back for an encore. Literally. They played Can't Get Enough. I'm not making this up, y'know.

Not sure what all this "leaving the stage" and "taking a bow" stuff is all about. Try that at the Dog & Duck and you'd get laughed straight back into the Gents' toilet, and deservedly so. Really not fond of bands who introduce themselves, either - why would I care that "tonight ... on drums ... we have ... DAVE!!!"? But Encore! now, well that's another matter. The word simply means 'more' as in encore un fois = one more time in French. Every gig I play I prepare the setlist on the basis that the crowd might go wild and the band might be asked (or yelled at) to "play some more" or at least "one more song". That happens more often than not, and we'd be fools not to have two or three really good songs to fall back on when the shouts come. No shouts, of course, and we just stop playing. It's not a false encore just because it appears on our setlist.

https://www.homebase.co.uk/really-useful-christmas-gift-wrap-box/12811507.html I imagine there must be at least some people out there who actually buy a special box to store their unused Xmas wrapping paper, but I find this box much more useful for other purposes ...

Super-quick delivery of NOS flatwounds means that I can gig them tomorrow ... top work!

Ah yes, the famous "Squier by Wal" range ...

This is the point, really. The number of strings on its own isn't the whole issue ... neck width and profile are also very important. String spacing comes into it too, it's a complete ergonomic package. If you are short, and have short arms, then obviously short-scale might help a lot, but that's not a given. If you have small hands then you may be happier with 'tight' string spacing like 17mm or even narrower. I have big, clumsy hands with big, clumsy fingers. Combine that with an agricultural playing style and you'll soon see why I always prefer 19mm spacing (used on most Fenders). Before buying another bass, the best thing you can do is to set a time period and use that to try out as many different basses as you can. Given your size, I'd suggest that you start with a Hofner Violin bass, not because you're sure to like it but because it sets a benchmark for how small, light and narrow-necked a bass can be. If you can't stomach violin basses for some reason, then try a Danelectro Longhorn.

Is that because the bass is a 5-string, or because you have small hands, or because you're a small person?

Often the problem with cheap basses, no matter how well they play. I remember 10-15 years ago that there was a range of Far Eastern basses under the Jackson brand that were really good value and excellent to play so long as you held them up with a forklift ...