NancyJohnson

I've owned an early Warwick Streamer and a couple of Spector NS-design models (Euro LT and a far east 8-string); the body shape is a tad small for my liking, but the shape/rounding/body-arch is very comfortable, very organic.

While it's not possible to quantify a design I detest, it would be fair to say I'm drawn to the Thunderbird body shape and everything else strikes me as a bit meh. I often used to chuckle internally when people waxed lyrical and obsessed about the love of car brands like Porsche; this blind faith in whatever Porsche made was 100%, when clearly this isn't the case. Same goes brand loyalty for guitars and basses; while I've owned several, I don't really like Fender stuff at all. Yes I know, 70 years and millions of units sold stands for something but the business is based around reinvention/reinterpretation rather than innovation now. Same goes Gibson. While I love my Lulls, I would never consider any of the Lull P or J clones that they make, even if they gave me one.

Buy a Lekato unit. Unit can charge both sender and receiver beforehand and just jack the receiver into the front of your signal chain. Battery life is five to six hours. https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07TWQL2JS/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I've got Uni-Pre units in three of mine and have fitted them to other basses previously. Great units. John is a top bloke; I've contacted him direct a couple of times and his after service has exceeded expectations in both instances.

After I posted this, I was desperately trying to remember something I'd heard years ago that had made it onto an album that related to this. Quite simply, it was a track called 'Discount List' off the album Feel It by Californian pop/punk band The Penfifteen Club. The track is a 90 second expletive-ridden answering machine recording left by a female fan who had attended a couple of band shows and now pretty much expected discounted or free entry to shows; sadly the track did not get upped to streaming platforms.

Truth is, nobody cares, really. There, I've said it. Nobody cares. Your circle of friends don't care and your circle of friend's friends don't care. Hurts to say it. You might get 5% turn up once out of curiosity, but that'll be it until such a point as you may be playing a big room, then there'll be this expectation of free tickets etc.

From a safety perspective, treat yourself to a cheap wireless setup.

I favour right-angled jacks when the signal exits the bass; never had one pull out of a bass by mistake (like straight ones). With the Strat socket reversed, it worked to a fashion, but wasn't particularly elegant. The flat plate is just dreamy. Right-angle jack plug or Lekato wireless.

*I think the message here is that we need to put some faith in local guys who are more than capable of making stuff like this.

They have them at PMT, £120.00. The Ritter bags are available easily enough (£80).

A few years back I landed a Hamer FBIV, photo of which is below. I wanted it all black, so that Christmas my good lady got me a replacement bridge/machines; ain't she lovely (the bass, that is): The one thing I detested was the jack output was a Stratocaster style one, so I kind of got round that by doing an Alex Lifeson and flipping it upsidedown. I mean, it worked, but still didn't like it: I searched eBay once in a while for a flat plate - there's not many out there and they're generally in the US or Japan, so at my wife's suggestion, I put a post up on our village FB page asking if anyone locally could make me one. Up stepped teenage hobbyist, who'd been doing small work for a local model railway group, et viola! Beautiful work. Happy bunny.

I think Bass Direct had one that suffered finish damage because the bag was too tight/wrong shape. I owned an LT4 and I'm pretty certain this used the same gig bag as the Euro-X, which is mental, given they're wholly different shapes/lengths. Lazy. It's crazy that a manufacturer can put so much care and attention into making a custom £2.5k instrument and the route to customer potentially falls over with the gigbag not being fit for purpose. Going back to the case/bag thing, when bass is at home, it lives in the Tourtech HSC (I have HSCs for everything), when it goes out, it's in the Ritter. Beautifully padded, loads of pockets, very lightweight.

The TourTech bass HSCs fit fine. If you need a lighter alternative, Ritter make a lovely gigbag (Bern series). It was a bit shameful of Spector shipping these in their one-size-fits-all gigbag; it was too tight.

Not a full time dep, but asked to step in a help a band in need. Short tour, south of England. Did my homework, gigs failed to materialise, so parked. Few months later same thing. Did my homework. One evening rehearsal in Brighton Electric (which was fun considering I was working in Denham, north of Heathrow at the time). We were to do a warm up in High Wycombe (bottom of the bill) and then two or three showcases in central London. High Wycombe was awful; I mean, we played fine, but there were only about five people in at that point. Guitarist cut the set short, drummer moaned constantly about everything and then the London dates were cancelled. Didn't see a penny.

Nope, it's a TBIV. It's a typo. 😁

But then I need to put a price on it.

It's a factory conversion. TBII, plus additional pickup.

Now then. I have a Darkglass A/O900 head - I don't want to necessarily list it as being for sale, because I don't want to sell it as such, looking for a trade/swap deal. I'm wondering whether anyone has a (somewhat less aggressive) Microtubes 900v2 that they might want to swap.

I honestly don't see the point. On the face of it, nobody was really making anything that has any personal appeal to me.

These were simpler/happier times. My first bass had a grounding issue; I quickly worked out that by connecting a bit of twisted wire from the pickup selector switch to the spring on the back of the G-string saddle solved the buzzing, so that was the fix and that's how it was until I sold it. Nobody died.

Nope, we honestly didn't.

Just throwing this out there, I've been playing for more than 40 years and while my (current) preferred amp to speaker connection is Speakons, for the intervening years I just used a regular jack to jack cable. When times were particularly bad (as a teen) it wasn't unusual to have hotwired cable using bell wire, electrical cable or whatever was on hand. You know what? Not one blown speaker or damaged amplifier. Nada. At one point early on, I was running a particularly cheap and nasty bass combo and decided to connect another speaker to it. In the spirit of Eddie Van Halen, I cut a 4" hole in the back of the combo, had about a yard of hi-fi speaker cable and hooked everything up sight unseen with little crocodile clips and electrical tape. I suppose that 4" hole would now be considered a port. No soldering, no idea what out of phase was. Worked fine. We really do need to stop getting our panties in a twist about what's right (or wrong), eh?

I don't mind the finishes, but in these days of all this historic reissue nonsense, you'd think that they'd go the extra mile and get the body geometry and the nuances correct. On the left a 1964 TBII on the right, the Epiphone. Headstock wrong, knobs wrong, sidejack, wrong, body similar, close but no cigar. Still a no from me.

Well. I think you can knock me off the list; last week - and after a considerable amount of pre-2024 research - I bought a Harley Benton GPA-100 power amp. £68.00. I just really needed something small to run my EUB through rather than keep having to set up all my Darkglass kit. Bloody lovely it is too.