NancyJohnson

I borrowed the Tears For Fears Songs From The Big Chair boxset from my mate last night and spent an age earlier trying to work out how to rip Steven Wilson's 5.1 version of the album so as to be able to stream it on my network. Ripped it to FLAC surround and just gave it a full spin. It's a wonderful thing.

It's funny looking at the Telecasters on here. never felt any affinity for them (or Fender period); I was trying to work out why and I think it comes down to something a friend of mine said when I was about 15, it went something along the lines of, 'They look like toys, like those Top Twenty guitars in Woolworths.' Interestingly, friend went on to have a lengthy career in music, played with Sting, Numan, Tom Jones, Art Of Noise, was involved in the X-Factor/Fame Academy thing...never saw him playing a Telecaster.

"almost exclusively"

'That'll buff out.'

Whether or not the original instrument is finished in nitro or poly, why is it that relicing seem almost exclusively based on Fender basses? I know there's a handful of companies like Sandberg that do reliced guitars, but you never see Stingrays, Thunderbirds etc. and even then it's pretty much always Jazz-style basses.

I've got (for sale folks) a Line6 G30. No issues. I recently bought one of those 5.8G Lekato wireless systems off Amazon, just for home use...a bit tired of cables more than anything else. USB rechargeable, decent range (20/30m without issue). No complaints.

I don't think I actually called you an idiot, but hey, if it makes you feel better then just reinterpret my words in whatever way you want to support that claim. And yes, you were right. Go you. Congrats to you for your incredible foresight and business acumen. Give yourself a gold star. A lickle kiss? For me? Aaaw.

Shergold, as I understand it, is a guitar maker that's been dead in the water for some time and Rickenbacker, from what I understand, is still trading in some capacity. It's apparent that Eastwood are working with Hooky to make some. Fair play to them. My point, two years ago, was that you could likely have picked up a vintage Shergold off eBay for not much £££. Sadly my forking crystal ball was away for servicing in August 2018, but if I'd had it I could have simply predicted Eastwood's business plan 24 months in advance, saved you the bother of posting, 'Well, you said...' and maybe saved nearly a million people from dying of a virus. It was a poll to see whether anyone would be interested. No designs, no money changed hands, emails were exchanged for the benefit of feasibility, it was just a poll, now you're coming back and going, 'Look, I was right! You said they wouldn't make Shergold.' Again. FFS.

My problem? My ideas and tastes?? Conform??? Read the thread mate, try and grasp what Eastwood are all about and embrace that; they would never have made a 4005, a BassV or a Serek clone. Do you honestly think this was some kind of forking vanity project on my part? Not once did I push design schematics on to anyone, I just proposed something that could have been a fun project to follow...it just deteriorated when members here started posting the inevitable pink torpedo gags and crap about what they wanted. FFS. This sort of post just enrages me.

I'm just curious...what made you decide to sell any of your kit? So many times you see for sale ads, I'm selling my cherished bass, I've owned this since blah blah blah. I went years without any serious investment in gear at all. Mortgage got paid and the floodgates just opened, I one point I think I was at ten Gibson Thunderbirds, a Bongo, DJ5, it got to the point where I couldn't actually remember what I had. I was in W H Smiths one day and saw an article with Jeff Ament in Bass Player; I saw his Lull and it was like someone just threw a switch...almost immediately I lost interest in Gibsons and my primary focus was on getting the Lull. Then another. It saddens me a little that I don't have any Gibsons anymore, but ho hum, what I do have is arguably way better.

We hadn't even got to an acceptable number of people showing interest before members started down the route of saying what they wanted. Had we got, say 50 interested parties, we could have taken it private, haggled over the design perspectives and gone from there; personally it was soul destroying seeing what started as a fun and simple idea, turned into a me! me! me! thing. Even if I'd posted that it was going to be (at the most basic of levels) a 4-string, 34" scale, alder body etc. people would still have been saying they wanted short-scale, 5-string made out of bamboo and chewing gum.

Re-reading this thread earlier, I honestly started it with all best intentions, the mindset that we could ape what the Lakland Owners Group had done previously and the remit really couldn't have been easier or clearer (if you wanted a Precision/Jazz etc. then just buy a Fender etc) and this was not really intended to be a route for Eastwood to produce a knock-off of Serek designs because it was the more affordable route (and f*ck any litigation they may be subject to as a consequence) and so on. I had a few email exchanges with Eastwood and they were extremely positive about trying to do a Basschat bass for us if only we could decide on the specs and the sadness is that had we gotten our metaphorical poop together, we could all be enjoying these by now. We're all different I suppose, so it was never going to work. Looking through these pages, my heart just sinks reading the suggestions of a Fender Bass V or the Rickenbacker 4005. I just don't understand how people could even suggest these for gods sake, Rickenbacker are probably difficult enough to deal with at the best of times...the Eastwood guys are smart enough not to touch that design with a barge pole. With the best will in the world, it's almost like people here don't even have a clue what Eastwood's remit actually is. You would stand a better change cloning a 4005 by going to Ali Baba or one of the plethora of Chinese knock-off sites. They're really not about copying Fenders or Gibsons, aside from a handful of designs, the bulk of their output is frankly quirky updates of long lost designs, things you might expect to see in Hanna-Barbera Jetsons cartoons:

Good things come to those that wait. I'm just shaking my head that this was all over two years ago.

I'd had a John East unit on an old Jazz bass and decided to install a three-knob unit on one of my Lull basses earlier in the year. Things didn't go well, but John was quite brilliant in helping out. I also put a four-knob unit on my Spector 8-string a couple of months back. Top kit!

Just as an addendum here, I probably learnt more about music from my mum and dad. There was always music on in the house; my mum (who passed away a couple of years ago aged 87); while she was a huge fan of The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, The Kinks and The Small Faces, her musical roots were Sinatra, Martin etc. She took me to my first concert (Elton John, Hammersmith, Christmas 1970-something), I took her to her last (Kiss, Wembley. 'I can't do this any more.') Until a few weeks before her death, I went down to the house and she was listening to Rod Stewart, Bon Jovi and had a copies of Quiet Life (Japan) and Destryoer (Kiss) in her car. Just because she was old, doesn't detract from the fact that she'd been listening to Bon Jovi 35-odd years ago, when she was around my age now. My dad loved soul and reggae, but his overriding passion was for Hall & Oates (which makes my head tilt, even to this day).

Today? Today is a Veruca Salt type of day. Two (very) attractive girls with guitars, I mean, what the hell was there to go wrong??

The lessons didn't help in the slightest, no. We had two teachers during my secondary school education that didn't seem to have any love of music beyond classical; this was late 70s, when we had rock, soul, punk, disco, prog, reggae etc all fighting for some kind of dominance.

Over on another group I follow the Spark is being offered with $40 (yes, dollars) off the price. I don't know whether this will work for UK purchases (I guess is all sales are in $, then you'll get the Dollar price). but there's an offer code of REFERRAL40 that you can use at checkout.

I suspect that the Adjustanut bridges people have so much disdain for may be different from what was on my old Streamer. Mine looked like this and it worked brilliantly:

Today I'm just leaving Japan on. I procured a CD yonks back of some recordings from 1977 that pre-date the first album and that's on now. I'll profess I've never actually fully listened to these recordings until now and they're excrutiatingly awful.

While I'll admit Band On The Run and Wings Over America rank highly in my favourites, I've never really been a Beatles fan (a few songs) nor do I really know much about McCartney's output post-Beatles. Last night I put together a playlist of everything I could find on Spotify in chronological order and I'm about ten songs in so far and the only one I know so far is Maybe I'm Amazed.

Pull Me Under by Dream Theater.

It's fine, honestly. Yep, strings off, adjust the truss rod to get the neck straight as possible. Restring, tune up and check whether the neck has moved. If it has, detune, give the truss rod a quarter turn, tune up again. This is just an exercise to ensure the truss rod is doing its job. When I'm tweaking, I'll just continue adjusting until I get to a point that the notes are all cleanish through the whole neck...I can't better describe it than that!