NancyJohnson

My Aria Primary bass - Gumtree purchase; job lot of three guitars and a practice amp for £45 She's had a bit of swag spent on her; new bridge (Hipshot Supertone), a Delano P-Bass pickup, Dunlop Straploks. I swapped over the white pick-guard to a black one. In the upside, when I got this bass, someone had fitted Schaller machines.

This is my old Epiphone Gothic. Someone had it as a project and had painted it a very fetching yellow, which worked in a strange way. I bought the body first, then a few days later the seller said he had the loaded neck as well, so I took that separately. I just took the scratchplate off, put a Gibson three pointer on and covered it in stickers. Owes me about £60.00. Plays quite nicely. It's strung BEAD.

No one musicial in the playing sense. My dad loved Hall and Oates, Queen and was always very supportive in my musical ventures. My mum always had music on...Beatles, Kinks, big band, rat pack, Doris Day, Frank and Bing, Dean Martin. I remember she loved soundtrack stuff, The King and I, South Pacific. In my teens she liked Kiss and Cheap Trick. I took her to see Kiss at Wembley on the first reunion tour. She died in March and going through her stuff I was surprised at the CDs she'd bought. Loads of Bon Jovi, Bryan Adams, REM, Beatles. Bless her.

I've always maintained that we all need to be on point and I've only had a handful of instances where I have a little panic about forgetting what comes next. The main thing for me was the worrysome issue of how my hands were standing up.

I filled a few big gouges in my old Aria with nail varnish. These were quite deep and it worked exceptionally well.

We seem to have covered this ad-infinitum elsewhere, but here goes again. I use a Matrix GT1000FX. 2U rack poweramp. Very lightweight, very able. 385w into 8ohms, 1000w bridged. There's never been an issue with any pre-stage that gets plugged into it. I'd never go back to an all in one head.

There's video of The Wildhearts Sunday set online. Devin Townsend guesting on guitar and Danny McCormack dislocating his knee in the first or second song.

I'm always on the hunt, so to speak, but find that an awful lot of current trending stuff does leave me a little cold. Honestly can't bear stuff like Ed Sheeran or this ramp of festival pleasers - I look at the line up for this years Reading and there's two bands I'd pay to see. Umm, The Front Bottoms and La Dispute. I've played with so much talent over the last few years. If you want to check out some, honest to god, great bands, dial up Spotify or whatever and check out Dronningen or Hawaii Zombies or The Black Bullets or Orange Bomb or Rage DC.

Out of everything I own, this is the one bass I could never let go. I got it for an absolute steal (the guy didn't know what he was selling), it's very rare now (possibly 20 globally), it plays like a dream and is coveted here by a couple of people and a few people in the US. Thing is I hardly play it at all; it's sitting in a rack about a metre from where I'm typing this. It would sell for serious money, but I just think if I did sell it, there would just be this painful ache inside me that would just never stop hurting.

I'm still pondering this dual cabinet thing...I'm pretty set on what I want; it'll either be a pair of Barefaced BB2s or the new contenders, a pair of TKS 1126s (1x12" & 1x6"), or a 1126 and an H115 (1x15). I'm very much leaning towards the TKS stuff at the moment, so it'll be a case of watching what comes through the for sale section. No rush.

Stuff like this makes me yearn for the mid-80s and sad for Stuart (and his family). His death was untimely and undignified. Shame. 😥

If we did go with something like the Hagstrom, we'd definitely need to better it in certain areas. The bridge is horrific. And god knows what the control panel actually does.

Yep...also check for slackness in the springs against the saddles.

It's wasps. They get everywhere this time of year. Check the machines are all nice and tight. Sometimes the source of these rattles isn't necessarily where you hear them from.

I've used SIT strings, nice kind of gritty feel. Amazon or eBay probably the best bet. I think Mark at Bass Direct had some cheap sets at the London show.

Yep, American seller. I think what hit me was that the seller actually thought I just wanted photos of his bass. He couldn't do enough until I said no...then he turned into the playground bully.

I don't profess to being a Prince fan, but I did own the Hits/B-sides compilation that came out years ago. That and the new compilation will make a decent playlist.

This Hamer FBVIII came up on a group I'm a member of; I know there's some multi-string bass fans here and also guys who are doing the Cheap Trick thing, so there's probably a few people reading this who are drooling now. Anyone who knows Tom Petersson's gear or are a member of the Hamer Guitar Discussion group will know this bass (I've been aware of it for a good 25+ years). So anyhow, as I have some inheritance money coming through in about six weeks, I sent the seller a PM for his cash price as his ad quoted he was either looking for an 'unbroken Thunderbird II' or a cash sale (he hadn't quoted a dollar price). I explained as I didn't have a Thunderbird for swapsies, perhaps he would like to give me a price. A few minutes later he pinged back a price. I'm not going to go into the price, but while it was a lot of $$ I didn't fall off my chair and it would be easily doable in a few weeks. (When the inheritance comes in, let's just say I'd be able to buy several of these.) I asked whether it came with the original case (yes) and would he mind sending me some better photos. Sensing a sale, he turned around the photos in under 30 minutes and then, unprompted, said he could provide a load of stuff to prove the basses provenance, then PMs arrived containing links to YT videos where Tom Petersson is playing this bass. He was obviously sniffing a sale. Everything was cordial at this point. I'd spoken to a mate in New Hampshire who offered to bring it in on his next business trip (which could in theory have saved me a fortune in tax), so the final hurdle was my wife. Hands up, I'll admit I've spent a lot on gear in the last two or three years so after a bit of a chat (and because I like my testicles), I thought better of it and as much as I'd have loved to own this bass, sadly decided not to proceed, but added if it was still available in a few months I would hit the seller up again. At this point things got a little weird seller-side. I mean, if you're selling something, you'd expect to at least send some photos and enter into a bit of dialogue about things, wouldn't you? When I apologised and told the guy it was a no, I was on then on the receiving end of a couple of strange, angry messages; '[I] didn’t think you were serious. Just another tire kicker wasting my time wanting pictures of my bass.' and 'Don’t bother me again unless you are serious. I hate when people waste my time. This is the ONLY ONE of its kind. If you don’t want it, someone else does...' He also remarked that there was the Hard Rock Cafe (the guitar graveyard). I dunno, I just found his rhetoric strange. I've sold stuff here, I've had stuff on sale where you email photos out. It's what you do. If the guy at the other end doesn't want what you're selling, they say no, so you just go, 'That's fine, no worries and thanks for your interest.' and the matter closes. Man alive, if I wanted photos of the bass, there's loads out there already; I really couldn't care less about whether it was one of a kind or not either. I've never been called a tire kicker in my life (I think this is what hurt the most!). Ack, there's no happy ending here. I just wanted to vent off how stupid and dumb some people can be (not me, folks).

About 25 years ago ('The Metal Years'), I had one that warned ladies not to stand too close to the bass stack as the frequencies might moisten their panties. I do wonder where my head was at sometimes.

In the last decade I've gone through ten or so Gibson Thunderbirds and now I have a pair of Lulls each loaded with a pair of his 60s clones. Playing tonally flat, the Gibsons were all a little different from each other, I'm not saying in a bad way, but there was an inconsistency from one to one...I certainly knew which ones I preferred, but as I've posted previously, preferred tone is subjective. The Lulls are fairly similar to each other, it's very close, although the NRT5 is slightly brighter at the moment (might also be something to do with string age as well). Thing is, I have an ancient Aria Pro II bass that's a wreck; it needed a bit of work and I guess all in it owes me £125 now. I put a used Delano pickup in it that had spent a few years in a Sandberg (bought for c.£60 on this forum); it really doesn't sound that different to the Lulls. Shocking, eh?

This is kind of what I was hoping would come up. Personally not a fan of the headstock or the ashtray, but otherwise cool.

Let me try and quantify where I'm coming from here. In the last 30+ years I've thrown a ton of money at trying to get what I believed to be my ideal sound; so many basses (some butchered to try different active/passive set ups), so many string choices, so many pre-stages, stompboxes, amps and cabinets. Customisation is a long, lonely and expensive road and GAS is as well. Along the way I came to realise that a) my gear in another person's hands will sound completely different to me and b) where I'm at now tonally is really just a short stroll from where I was when I first started out. Sure it's nice to have all this gear, all this very expensive gear, but the expensive stuff really doesn't sound that different to the really cheap stuff. The only reason I cited Rickenbacker here is that for me playing a 4003 the desired tone was there right out of the box. I borrowed one one lunchtime off a guy I worked with and tried it through two set ups and as a front end, it was exactly how what I expected it to sound like straight out of the box. The same guy had also put the Rickenbacker pickups in another bass and while it was similar, it was a stroll away from the 4003. You wouldn't know that guitar had Rickenbacker pickups in it is what I'm saying. It's akin to (as I've posted elsewhere) just because you have a Chickenbacker, it doesn't mean it's going to sound like the real thing. When you say you like Thunderbucker Ranch 66s, say why. Have you got access to a bass that has these in and you've played it through your gear?