NancyJohnson

Dunlops here. If I'm on the market for a bass or guitar they're a same day purchase.

We seem to live in a time where putting a well known person's name on something is a thing. A Geddy Lee signature model will not make you play like Mr Lee, nor will a bass owned by <insert name here> do the same. And before anyone says anything, yes I'm perfectly aware that I own a Lull Jeff Ament bass, but I really have little desire of being in Pearl Jam.

Whaaaaaaat? More information please!

I've been known to hook my little finger around the bridge...it does seem to give you more control when you're playing 16s. Bloody uncomfortable after a while though.

lol I bought a Euro LT with some of my mother's inheritance money (cough, it's what she would have wanted, cough) and while I don't own a single Gibson at this point, we're still sitting at Thunderbird shapes 3, Spector NS shapes 2. There's also a single Precision interloper.

Right, it's done. The Tone Pump is out and, at this juncture, I've simply bypassed the tone control pots and gone straight into the output jack (I've done this previously; to be honest, as I generally play with everything open, it's fine).. Had a quick noodle, I just feel it sounds cleaner tonally and a bit more under control. Incidentally (and I forgot to mention this earlier), I was also getting in intermittent loud popping off the neck pickup if I played to hard over it, and that's disappeared too. Happy now.

Well, I've ascertained that the pickups work fine (battery out, crocodile clips), so I'm just going to whip the TP Jnr out and rewire it passive. I've never really been that au fait with active pickups/electrics. I'm fine with the John East kind of thing, that you're simply adding a big chunk of preamp/active circuit between the (previously passive) pickups and the output jack, but it's the stuff like EMGs/Barts etc. where there just seems to be fork all circuitry in the loom that confuses me. Do the pickups themselves contain some kind of circuitry? The pots?

I still feel like pulling the whole lot out, plus I'm still uncertain how the stock pickups will operate if I just went the passive route. I may pull the battery out later and dig out my little crocodile clips.

On the meet and greet thing, I felt great that Tommy Lee didn't want anything to do with these things.

I'll admit girlish crushes on the first Motley Crue album and the one with John Corabi and I'll also admit to thoroughly enjoying Neil Strauss' The Dirt. I do dip into the Nikki Sixx Instagram page once in a while. Anyhow, earlier today I noticed Schecter are making a limited number of those hideous Thunderbirdesque monstrosities (in Theater of Pain livery) along with a greeny coloured distressed Sixx Jazz Bass. Interest piqued, I stupidly clicked through a link and saw he was pawning these off after US shows at $5,000 and $5,500 each respectively per night. $10.5k a night, with many slots already sold out. Bring a guest and your camera, the blurb says. For that money, I'd expect a decent dinner with a decent bottle of red and a chauffeur to drive me home. Rock and forking roll.

The 19 infers that it's the 19th time Danny-boy has reinvented a Fender design, maybe?

@Woodinblack I've read a few bits about the Jnr. this afternoon; that the tone controls are +/-12db bass and treble (so you need to locate a central position for a median/flat tone - there's no centre indent) and that the knobs just need to be rolled right back and then rolled forward to boost, however there a thread here (https://www.basschat.co.uk/topic/93320-spector-tonepump-is-not-boost-only/) that seems to clarify that it's cut and boost. Interestingly, there's a lot of posts about bass players removing them. Interestingly, there's a couple of comments about the Tonepump Jnr being too hot and that it distorts/clips the amp (which is the case with mine); if you roll back the volume knobs on the bass and play hard, tonally you're not getting as full range a tone as you are having everything on full and playing not so hard, if that makes sense. There's no facility on the Jnr to roll back the output in the body cavity. As @Conan posted Yes, the output is very hot, but can be tamed by judicious use of the bass and treble controls. In the real world, I just want a bass that I can turn the volumes up full, plug in and go, and forget about tweaking when I'm playing. I really haven't got any inclination on locating the bass's sweet spot or whatever it's called!

Just a quick one for people in the know. I've recently acquired a Spector Legend 8-string bass, it's got two SSD INC soaps and a Tone Pump Jnr preamp. I've come to realise very quickly that the TPJnr really isn't doing it for me at all, god knows how it's factory settings are configured, but it's nigh on impossible for me to unplug it and change to a different bass without having to change all my amp settings to get a similar tone. Soooo, here's the thing. I'd like to remove the guts of it - the Tone Pump at least - and just go with a (four knobbage) passive set up in a VV/TT configuration. I'm not actually certain how the SSD INC soapbars require the Tone Pump to operate. Any suggestions for a twin passive soapbar set up? The pickup routs are 3.5"x1.5"; I think the Bartolini Singularity BB4S B&T pickups will fit...

I remember seeing a Fender Jazz with a part fretted neck, it was in the hands of Conrad Lantz of a NWOBHM band Venom. I just did a quick Goog search and there's quite a few photos of him sporting similar basses with similar neck configurations.

This is interesting! How does the wrap terminate? What is the edge like?

Julien Mullen in Reading. The guy is brilliant.

Reinvention. It's funny, isn't it? Man has reasonably successful bass guitar business making copies of guitars made by another business, sells out, starts another business doing pretty much the same, then enters into business doing the same again, then resurfaces again doing pretty much what he started out doing in the first place. It's almost like this from Red Dwarf: Kryten : It's the old story: droid meets droid, droid becomes chameleon, droid loses chameleon, chameleon turns into blob, droid gets blob back again, blob meets blob, blob goes off with blob and droid loses blob, chameleon and droid. How many times have we heard that story?

I think the thing is that when you caually see these, the guys on them are just copying someone else's lines. Monkey see, monkey do. I'd much sooner see these guys doing their own stuff rather than pretending to be Flea.

Had a bit of a noodle...pleasantly surprised. Neck is very comfortable. Only a couple of things; would have liked the tone knobs to have had a centre-notch as they have a +/-12db boost/cut, so it's not easy to hit a flattish position, or too easy to just boost everything. Will probably shim the neck when I change the strings. Action is 2 or 3 mm at the octave. Can't drop the bridge any lower and I do love a rattly action. Pickups are fine; Output more than adequate (actually dropped them a few mm).

Well, I was lying in bed at the weekend and put in a cheeky eBay bid on this and it came home for 350 post-Brexit pounds. After I sold on my Waterstone, I still had a hankering for an eight or twelve. So it's a Korean Spector eight string...the jack socket was a bit loose (fixed), put on a new set of fundamentals and stuck it through the dUg earlier. It sounds huge, amazing really. I'm sure it'll be on new Lutz stuff.

I think first up was The Sweet. The three or four singles Blockbuster, Hellraiser, Ballroom Blitz and Teenage Rampage, along with b-sides. Next up my foray into albums, Sparks. Kimono, Propaganda and Indiscreet. Finally, Japan. The first three albums.

If you have access to a Spotify/Apple service, search 'Lutz Buzz Mixes'. The dUg is all over that.

DP-3X. It'll do everything any of the other Sansamps will do. It's almost too good. I've run a BDDI, VT Bass (rack and stomp), an RPM, a Landmark head, GT2, GED2112; I know each to their own, but the dUg is more versatile than any othe stuff I've mentioned. It's blumming outstanding.

I never played in anything more complicated than a bass, drums, guitar plus vocals. I've done big/small rigs and right now I have a set up that pretty much trumps anything that's gone before. I bought a Darkglass A/O mainly for the output wattage more than anything else, I tend to run a Tech21 dug DP3X into the effects return. This just goes into a Barefaced Big One (15/6). It's an incredibly versatile set up. Basswise, well for me at least, is reasonably unimportant; I can tweak and get the same kind of tone irrespective of what I plug in.

An epic song from my youth? I suppose you could draw pretty much anything from mid-70s Sparks/Mott The Hoople/Queen, through late-70s Japan/Clash into early-80s US post-hardcore. It's just not possible.