NancyJohnson

BASS SHOOTOUT These are the basses lined up to test against your ears: i) Rickenbacker 4003 (Chis/ezbass) ii) Wal Mk1 (Trev/TrevorR) iii) Aria SB700 (Trev/TrevorR) iv) JR Bass JM4 (Jabba_the_gut/Jez) v) Spector NS2 (Cetera/Gary) vi) Epiphone Thunderbird - one of the new ones I think (Cetera/Gary) vii) Gibson Thunderbird (SilverfoxNik/Nik) viii) ix) x) xi) xii) xiii) xiv) xv) I have provisional offers for a Sire Jazz, Fender P and a Fender J from a guy attending who doesn't post here so much. I had a coffee with prowla/Paul on Saturday, he's kindly offered to throw one of his vintage Ricks into the fray. It would be good to get a Stingray into the mix, along with a Maruszczyk or two. Dependent on how many offers we get, I may need to cull some and just keep it to the more well known basses with a couple of wildcards. Don't hate me for this. I'd like to make the list final the day before, just so I can produce a final list and something we can all fill in and mark. PLEASE BRING A PEN ON THE DAY. If you want to be included, please add your bass(es) to the list. We don't need dozens, let's try and limit it to 15 as time is limited and we're all easily bored. Just to confirm, we'll push everything through my gear (racked pre/power and the Barefaced). We'll be doing clean/dirty and pick/fingerstyle. A couple of minutes for each bass. I'll be hosting, the wonderful Gary PB will be behind the curtain picking his way through 80s AOR classics like Journey's Don't Stop Believin' or Carry On Wayward Son by Kansas. Please note, there will be no slappin' or a poppin'. Requests directed to this rock god for this abhorrent playing style may lead to a punishment of standing in a corner for 15 minutes.

In addition to the Barefaced and TKS cabinets above, I'd be interested in an opinion of the Vanderkley 112MNT-Neolite cabinets. This would do:

Sadly, sometimes it does. It's funny...the early Nancy Johnson guys, well, we all get on famously, despite the hirings and firings, in fact two of the first lineup of that band are also in Lutz, the new project. I guess that the standard operating procedure early on was more about having a hoot than being too serious. That said, what the band eventually evolved into couldn't have been any more different. I doubt whether I'll ever speak to any of them face to face again.

OK, just an update on the bass shootout, confirmed I have: Gibson Thundrbird IV Rickenbacker 4003 Spector NS2 Epiphone Thunderbird (one of the new ones) Mike Lull JAXT4 I have a provisional nod from a mate who is attending (who doesn't post here) that he'll make a Fender Precision, a Fender Jazz and a Sire of some sort available. I'll bring along some other stuff. It would be nice to have a couple of Warwicks, a Stingray, a Wal perhaps.

Just watch this and Gypsy. Neil Finn looks pretty comfortable in the role really and it'll no doubt help him to shift more Crowded House albums. I know you probably all know me for doing the punky stuff, but Rumours and Tusk hold a very special place in my heart (I may have to listen to these tomorrow). Still cracks me up that Mick Fleetwood still wears the balls.

Reinterpretation, my friend. 😄

Well, two weeks after the seller offered me this bass for $8,000, then accused me of being a tyre-kicker and just wanting photos of his bass, he's just sent me a message saying it's up on Reverb if I'm interested. I just checked and the price is now $10k. Jeebus!

I've never really felt I needed a Stingray, but the new range is making me a bit moist to be honest. The roasted necks look beautiful, the bridge looks a whole less clunky than the old model. If I was on the market for one, I reckon an HH, stealthy black, ebony board. Stingrays aside, the stealth St Vincent HH is a beautiful thing to behold.

Ok, time to weigh in. I've owned about a dozen Gibson Thunderbirds over the last fifteen years, although none were 60s models. While I'd say a couple were probably keepers, they were in general all great basses except for the NR, which took an age to sort out. I eventually moved them all on as I moved over to Mike Lull basses a couple of years ago (see elsewhere). As per BigRedX, please do not for one minute think that just because the Epiphone models look like the Gibsons that they're identical, especially as they have the Gibson pickups. Honestly, this view turns my stomach, much in the same way owners of Rockinbetters (or whatever they're called) or Chickenbackers insist their basses play and have that growl like the real thing, because they don't nor will they ever. The Epiphones are just copies and putting a Gibson truss rod cover on it doesn't mean anything...it'll still be an Epiphone. Now I've got that out of the way (and relax), for little more than the price of a new Epiphone, you could buy yourself a used Gibson and probably recover your money on it when you decide to sell it on. Just go the whole piggy and get a Gibson. End of.

Gary has agreed to show off his chops...

Yep. Turn everything off and turn all the volumes down. Just in case you felt like skipping over this, I'll repeat. Turn everything off and turn the volumes down. Plug your bass into the pre-stage and then plug the pre-stage into the effects return on the Ashdown. Next (and this might sound weird), if you have a spare jack-plug or even one of those headphone mini-jack to 1/4" jack-plug adaptors, plug this into the normal input jack socket on the Ashdown (where you'd normally plug the bass in). Turn everything on. This should work. There you go.

Ooh. Why don't they include these in their line up? (I guess they're ZZ Sounds exclusive models.) The Moderne is lovely. I don't think that I'd be able to get away with playing one though. Would love an Explorer with the Moderne headstock. Or better still a MusicMan St Vincent HH.

If anyone would like to submit their basses to the 12.30pm Blind Lemon Rooster Tone Test, could you just shoot me a PM before the 29th as I need to prepare sheets for people to put Xs in boxes. Please bring a guitar stand. Ideally, I'd like to limit this to ten or twelve basses, otherwise it might drag; I don't feel we need to duplicate basses...for instance, there's no need to blind test five Fender Jazz basses, so one will do, but it would be fun to have a Sire P and J as well. Let me know what you have and what you're happy for <insert basschat member's name here> to dent play on the day. In my head I figure it would be useful to play a four short pieces on each bass with everything full on/open, fingers/pick, clean and then with a bit of dirt (GED2112). Maybe two or three minutes per bass tops. Vote and move along. We can mark each others papers when we're done. Paul/NJ

From a six string perspective, I just spotted a recent YT video for the 2019 Les Paul. Interestingly, there's two guitars in the background of the glamour shot that aren't detailed in the 2019 range (or whatever passes for what's been announced).

Thing with the Firebird X is that it shouldn't have progressed beyond a couple of prototypes. I believe you also needed some additional hardware to make it work properly, or at the very least use it to it's full capacity.

We're not on the subject of Fender here, though, it's Gibson. If you're aware of the current financial issues on Planet Les Paul, then you'll be aware that they need to satiate the demands of their creditors; they're between a rock and a hard place here...overpriced Les Pauls selling for £3K+, frankly shoddy looking Juniors for £700.00. Fender are just as guilty in the innovation area, but their business model seems a tad more robust at the current juncture.

The pleasure comes from the fact they have a clueless CEO at the helm who put his faith in the future of the company with the Firebird X. Isn't everyone just a little tired of Led Pauls and SGs? Christ on a bike, considering their reliance on a handful of 60 year old designs, if Gibson were a car company, they'd have gone bust decades ago.

Thunderbirds: They never stopped making them, but they did tweak the pickups, electronics and bridges. I think they genunely missed a trick by failing to move away from the colour options of sunburst, black or (occasionally) white/ivory. I couldn't give a rats donkey for the 50th Anniversary gold one or the other misfires; surely if you're painting all these effing Les Pauls a myriad of rainbow colours, how difficult would it be to slip a Thunderbird into the paint booth? Fools.

Been seeing stuff come through for the 2019 Gibson range over the last day or two. I'm not on the market for another bass, but from that perspective it's lovely to see they're continuing to hold faith in the new EB models and have decided to look backward and reintroduce the three point bridge on Thunderbirds and whatever the SG-style basses are called nowadays. Elsewhere, if you want Les Pauls and SGs, your demand is satiated and no doubt you'll be over them like a tramp on chips, but sadly (for a company so rooted in the issuing of heritage models), there's still no faithful Les Paul Junior DC or Firebird with a single mini-humbucker. Nothing like not giving the masses what they want to ramp up demand. And don't look at the prices unless you have somewhere soft to land when you fall off your chair.

Dave made mine...maybe all his are 4-pole from the outset. Never had an issue, parallel or bridged.

I'll just weigh in here on the bridged/parallel thing on the Matrix. I'm not point-scoring, but the solution is a bit more elegant than the Crown. If you look at the Matrix below, you have an area to the bottom left that's your INPUTS (confusingly marked B & A, but I suppose this is the reverse of the facia controls) AND output type selection toggle switch (Stereo, Parallel and Bridged). In the middle, there's three Speakon outputs left to right channel A, Bridged, Channel B. Flipping the output toggle to BRIDGE activates the centre Speakon output and the unit delivers 1000w into 8ohms. There's no wiring up to terminals. Obviously you can only use a single source input (into B or A on the left) in bridged mode. You can run the amp in switched parallel mode (single input, B or A), switch to Parallel, single or pair of speakers attached to channel A&B or A or B, same signal to both OR switched stereo mode (different input sources to B & A), switch to STEREO, two enclosures individually attached to channels A & B. Longterm I'm looking to run a pair of 1x12" cabinets to utilise the switched stereo mode to take full advantage of the GED2112 pre-stage. The ease of switching/outputs just makes it easy to run a single input into bridges as well.

Oh, concerning connections, the GED is hacked to mono output and goes into the power amp on one side (I'm looking to go 2 x 1x12" at some point), the DP-3X into the other and I just decide what I want to use. Simple really. It's currently running bridged. 1000w into 8ohms.

Doesn't seem a week goes past without a, 'What power amp are you using...' thread. Here you go. Just buy a Matrix GT1000FX. It weights next to nothing, goes loud, looks good, it's reliable and (tempting fate here) has never failed. I feed it copious quantities of Tech21 gear, GED2112, the DP-3X or when I'm feeling old school, a BDDI. It's done thousands of hours since I bought it. http://uk.matrixamplification.com/gt-1000-fx-2u.html You're welcome.