NancyJohnson

M-Audio BX5 here. They're powered and go painfully loud. I Just run a pair of cable from my PreSonus USB thing. Peachy.

Scratch that. It does. I found a Jazz to Hoppus body conversion online. The guy filled the bridge pickup rout with resin. Genius!

Just by way of curiosity, and bridge pickup routing aside, does anyone know whether the Hoppus scratchplate fits and covers the routs on a regular Jazz bass body?

Errr, yes and no. It's a 1978 Aria Primary, but to be honest it's a country mile better than the '79 Fender that I owned for years. There's links elsewhere.

Blimey. I'd be scared to ding it. Dinging is my thing...

The guitarist has a couple of Precisions...if nothing suitable turns up in the next month, then I'll use one of his or my Aria. Thanks for the offer!

Thing is, I've always tended to play with everything full on/open, so all I'd probably end up doing is find the best sounding switching set up and leave it as is; I know a PJ pickup set up works well enough...I rarely mess with tone controls, so I guess if I did go with a Jaguar, it would be one of the simple ones.

A while back I was rehearsing somewhere and i happened upon someone using what I believe was a US one...with all the switches. It looked really nice. Did some investigating last night, and yikes, Jags do seem to come in a lot of derivatives; probably just a PJ though...none of the switching options though, I'd never use them.

The happy medium being it's neither a P or J. I'm actually warming to Jaguar basses now too.

All the Gibsons went to assist in paying for the Lulls. I have a Hamer FBIV I could use I guess...

It's a four piece London punky band, the individual members are pretty well established (I can't say any more on this front right now)...I've known the guitarist for years and he's Gibson, through and through. Les Pauls, Juniors and Junior DCs. I guess I'm hoping there's a possibility that this might go onto something else elsewhere too, so I need to play things straightish. A couple of years back, I did a gig with the Johnsons and I was approached by a dishevelled guy who said I was a brilliant player (aaw, shucks, thanks) and asked where I lived and whether I was open to other projects. A bloke from another band on the bill asked me whether I knew who the guy was and told me it was Bill Carter from The Screaming Blue Messiahs.

I think it's more about keeping it traditional...it wasn't a direct, 'Oh you need to get a Fender,' it was more like, 'Have you got a Precision?' I've got my old Aria P-bass, but have an on/off hankering for a Hoppus and now just seems an opportune moment to investigate further! [Edit] Thanks for the kind words about my gear too Warren; I just figure a £5K bass is a bit overkill too!

Any owners on here? I have some gigs upcoming and I've been asked to play a Fender (shudder), so I'd like an honest opinion of the Hoppus bass. I'd prefer a black one, but at a push pink. I really don't want to play a Precision or Jazz...this just seems like a happy medium.

Do you think they were miming in that clip?

Reports now of $100m lawsuit being filed against Universal. Hey, on the upside at least nobody died, but on the downside the estates of a lot of dead musicians are now suing.

Could and might. I hear these fear-mongering words too often when there's some doubt in a possible future outcome. We could go to war. We might pay more for oranges post-Brexit. It's all supposition. This was the bit that alarmed me: The Prominent entertainment lawyer Howard King told the LA Times last week: “We have many very concerned clients. This has a potentially huge impact on their future, coupled with the rather disturbing fact that no one ever told them that their intellectual property may have been destroyed. There is a significant amount of discussion going on, and there will be formal action taken”. All I see from this comment is lawyers sniffing around Universal for a payday like vultures circling over the rotting corpse of a long dead antelope; this all happened more than ten years ago and nobody has leaked any information about this until now(ish)? If an artist signs to a label, surely(!) they get an advance and if they're lucky they may make money off the back of record sales. In the broadest sense, the label will put you up in a studio at their expense and whatever you record effectively becomes the label's property, master tapes and all. Intellectual property is by definition intangible; tapes are tangible, the content thereon isn't. If it were me, I doubt I'd be getting my panties in a twist about some old masters being reduced to ash; I'd doubt any of the artistes actually touch the tape once they disembark the studio and the contents of the tape go off for mastering. I'd wager most of the content was digitised many moons ago and most of the artistes quoted in the LA Times article are long dead anyhoo. It's not like the loss of the originals is like a total loss, the music is still out there and really, would we mourn the fact that there wouldn't be any more Chuck Berry collections?

Hi Ade. Aah, the John Lydon avatar. Concerning the Thunderbirds, it was a case of when the mortgage got cleared the floodgates opened; I think I was in double figures at one point and (somewhat disturbingly) there were one or two instances when I couldn't actually remember what I had. On the subject of bridges, I did have Hipshots fitted to all of the them until the Babicz ones came out (afterwhich I swapped out all the Hipshots for Babiczs). As I tend to play close to the bridge, the Babicz ones just felt more comfortable when palm muting and aesthetically they looked more in keeping with the old three pointers...the Hipshot was just a big old lump of metal, it didn't need to be as big as it was, but adjustment-wise there wasn't really anything in it to be honest, they both worked very well.

I went through a massive XTC phase a couple of years back and it amazes me to this day that, singles aside, I didn't connect with them first time around. I was drawn to them more recently because of the recent reissues that were overseen by Steven Wilson and Andy Partridge (which leads nicely onto the masters...). I'd read an article detailing Wilson's work and he pretty much said that the label's attitude towards the masters was ambivalence...they'd deteriorated to such an extent that they were unusable, so Wilson went back to digital multitracks; at this juncture we really need to get past this nonsense about future mastering technology (sorry Skank) being able to pull more content from tapes that would be 40+ years old or getting melancholic about these artefacts simply being lost. I'm not wholly aware of the format the original audio would have been captured in back in the day, but listening back to the box-set of XTCs 1979 album Drums and Wires does make you question why there is any need to retain the original masters at all. Sadly, well with XTC at least - and this applies to other bands too - there's also the case that mastertapes are also lost by other means than fire or flood; they're just lost. Reels of tapes in unmarked boxes in dusty record company basements.

Fire or flood? There was allegedly a catastrophic loss this side of the pond about 20 years ago when the Thames arrived unannounced at the Virgin Vault. This wasn't limited to Virgin artistes, but nobody is getting all tearful about the loss of original recordings from Japan or XTC. Personally, I don't really feel any loss unless there was content languishing there that didn't see release, yes harsh, eh? You would like to think that everything had been digitised years beforehand, so it's not like total loss.

JMB has the potential to be huge, but as Jack said, the main problem is that it's free, so any asshat can post there. Lutz/recording aside, I've been away from band stuff for about 18 months now, so posted up about three weeks ago. At least got some replies, but they're all from numbskulls. Might have another peruse now...

I never got on with the three-pointer at all and I went through a lot of Thunderbirds, a couple of which underwent bridge changes within a few minutes of them getting home. Bridges aside, I'm hoping that next year will finally see a short run reissue of the 20/20 bass and a proper Les Paul Junior DC guitar.