NancyJohnson

Reckon the only bass that bucked that trend was a Rickenbacker 4003, it just sounded different, but in a good way. I'd really love to track down some of the old stuff that I had during my formulative years...old Jedson, Arbiter, Columbus...just to see whether the same rule applies.

Just going back to the OP, to this day I'm still fascinated with the music community drive to try different pickups. I've got six basses at the moment...these range from a 1978 Aria P-Bass copy (which has a Delano pickup in it), through to a £5K custom build Mike Lull; I've maintained that I've never really had any issue dialling in my desired tone with any of my basses. OK, granted there's this hybrid Geddy Lee/Jean-Jacques Burnel tone thing going on, but equally if I needed to go 60s ponk or 80s SWR I could easily dial up an approximation of of that from my amp, considering any nuances would be lost in the mix. I still don't get it!

Does anyone make an off the shelf Precision scratchplate with the D&G element closer to the neck?

I've been using Warman pickups for ages. Don't let the low prices sway you, they're wonderful pickups: https://www.warmanguitars.co.uk/product-category/pickups/bass-pickups/

I just put a John East pre into my 8 string; there's a lot of discussion about the EMG/SSD pickups being awful, but the thing has come alive.

Just as an aside here, during my first dalliance with Larry (there's been two or three)...this must have been 2009 or 2012...I was in New York for the US Open Tennis, so it was one of those years, he told me about the Kilo and told me he'd got Billy Sheehan and Jack Bruce as endorsees, but that I should keep schtum. I was looking forward to giving the Kilo a punt, but it just kept being put back, so I went with the LH1000, which really wasn't that great. I really needed something that a head that was going to give me a bit of dirt, so I ended going the outboard route (Sansamp) and now I'm on Darkglass AO900. About a year and a half ago, I was looking for a smaller alternative to the Big One and was looking around at going with a pair of 1x12s - I did have a pair of Aguilars, lovely cabs but too hi-fi for my tastes, I did look at the HD112s, but I felt I just couldn't go back to Korg and try to get a deal on them. I guess if I did get something different, I'd consider selling on the prototype Barefaced and going with a pair of Big Baby IIs.

I met Larry at the old Manny's, amazingly he listened to my band there and then, asked what I was using (at the time Ashdown), was I interested in going with his stuff. To his credit, he must be offering artist endorsements to hundreds of people a year, but I took the bait, he handled Korg in the UK, and over the next few years used a combination of HyDrive enclosures...the 115/410/210. The LH heads were nasty and I never got on with them...noisy and buzzy...but the cabinets were amazing really; I did well over 100 gigs and several hundred rehearsals with them. Oddly, the only reason I moved them on was because I won the Barefaced Big One at the SE Bash three or four years ago. I have very fond memories of my time with Hartke, but now they just seem to be one of a dozen companies all scrapping in a limited marketplace with some rather bland low end product, whereas (when all this was fields), it was an aspirational brand

As mentioned earlier, I had a playlist on Spotify of about 1,400 tracks, just a collection of cherrypicked tracks from albums, stuff I've Shazammed over the years etc. I just like sticking it on shuffle; the familiarity of the material is comforting. In the last few minutes it's played a couple of old Christmas songs back to back (Macca's 'Wondeerful Christmastime' and Louis Armstrong's 'Zat You Santa Claus?'). Today I'm going to be channeling Christmas music. It is, after all, only 204 sleeps away.

Anderton's have grown their business from a small local store to a Worldwide brand all from an extremely small shop (and warehouse facility) in Guildford; you can see they have a passion for the product. Here in lies the difference. Dawson's don't really share that passion or the nuance to grow the business.

Good news/bad news is debatable. I've had reason to visit Dawsons twice in my lifetime, it has to have been two of the most soulless instrument shopping experiences I've ever experienced. There's a parallel with Halfords that's unavoidable; clueless/lacklustre staff selling clueless fathers a first guitar/bicycle for their equally clueless sons. Kid wants something pointy, shiny and sparkly, father wants something the kid can keep and not grow out of, staff motivated by selling whatever carries the highest margin. I honestly felt for the poor unplayable instruments serving as demo models; just pulled out of shipping boxes, hung up and battered by all and sundry.

I woke up early one Sunday and started trawling through eBay for basses, saw a Hamer FBIV on sale for £350 as a Buy-It-Now thing. Did a little panic; aside from Nikki Sixx, I'd never seen one in the flesh and as they're so rare, there was nothing online to compare it to. Eventually found a photo of Mr Sixx somewhere; configuration was a little different, more knobs on the eBay one, headstock a bit different, stadium logo. Went back to the computer and bought it. Unbeknownst to me, the Hamer Fan Club forum had a thread going on it already. It arrived a few days later; no case, heavily wrapped in about six inches of bubblewrap. I was offered around £3,500 for it from someone on the Hamer Fan Club group. Porno shot:

Back in the day the inferiority of the sophomore album was generally known as the difficult second album syndrome. I'm very much from a rock/punk background and could, given the time for recall, cite dozens of second albums that fell well short of the debut releases by the same band. Off the top of my head, second albums by Van Halen and Living Colour were awful.

One of the best? No. It is the best.

I bought this a couple of months ago. [Edit] John East preamp incoming. This should come alive!

Last night, I was the happy recipient of nine finals and roughs from sessions I did with my band pre-lockdown and beyond. Given the disjointed nature of being a studio band, I have little or no memory of recording many of these. This morning is all about Lutz.

Have you seen the size of my hands?? It's easy! #sizedoesn'tmatter

As I posted earlier, the 8-string is actually narrower than my Euro LT 4 string.

Yep, the same; the strings are 4mm on centre. The image below isn't mine, but it demonstates how close the strings are.

I've got a Spector 8-String. The nut is 38mm, 12th fret is 54mm.

There's a wonderful art restoration channel on You Tube called Baumgartner Restoration, which operates out of Chicago. Julian Baumgartner regularly uses tissue paper (or later on a stronger Japanese version), which is pasted to the front of paintings to stabilise the paint layer while he reverses previous restorations (generally on the rear of the canvas). It's fascinating stuff and is similar to what @TheGreek, the honourable member for Hatfield, describes above.

I had an issue with a a UNI-PRE installation recently; buzzy, buzzy, buzz. I can install most things without much bother, but will admit once in a while the guts of basses just look like a tangle of wires. We exchanged emails, photos etc. and he got me sorted. He is a top, top bloke; we discussed his background (brilliant stuff!)...I've offered to do a piece on him for Basschat, just to put a name to a face. More people should be embracing his gear.

He sold me a lift.

It's just decoupage. The Lutz guitarist has a Joe 90 one on a double-cut body - pre-lockdown he had mentioned he was going to strip it all down and start over, not sure whether he did. I forget what glue was used, may have been Pritt(!) but probably something for wallpapering. I do recall the source images were done off colour copied images (heavy semi-gloss paper, like photographs), not from cuttings out of old TV21 annuals...this was just to stop the reverse of a double-sided image leeching through. Once it was done and the glue dried, he just sealed it with several layers of clearcoat. It was far from smooth, but looked great. He runs it with one pickup, one volume. In the neck pickup cavity he's got an action figure in there with a computer fan over the top. Very Phil X.