NancyJohnson

I was thinking more upon the lines of a multiple choice thing...keep it easy. If we have ten basses, it's simply a case of name of applicant at the top, and a grid of 100 squares. bass #1 is <cross in corresponding box>. Basses just set with the tone open, then closed. Same amo setting. No clues. No previewing. Just unplug each one and move onto the next. No mixer required. Easy.

It might make it interesting. I'm sure we'll have ten of the top basses there. Just play them and see whether anyone can identify them.

We seem to live in an age where we all need to embrace the way people do things and feel unable to say anything for fear of upsetting the person who made the original comment. I'm with everyone here. How the hell do you actually crack your hand/pick against the jack plug when you're playing a Status? I present for the defence a random photo of a Status bass. Aside from one or two of the more traditional basses they make, the jack output is behind the bridge saddles in pretty much every other one they make. Unless the OP is holding the bass in the weirdest of positions, the natural strumming arc of the arm will not/should not take you anywhere near the jack or the control knobs.

But ultimately had it not been for the whole mid-70s punk thing, they would have just faded into obscurity. Incidentally, on the subject of The Stranglers, a few years back I was at the wedding of one of my mates daughters. At the reception, I was sat next to Paul Roberts, the guy who took over vocal duties from Hugh Cornwell. Never having been a fan, I didn't have a clue who he was. It was a surreal experience. He kept on saying, 'Don't know whether I'm going to eat, I have a gig in Birmingham tonight.' Then the food came out. He nibbled and just said, 'Right, here we go,' then procured a radio microphone from his jacket, got up, walked over to a corner of the room, turned on some big band music and then crooned his way through about a dozen Frank and Dean songs, whilst walking around the reception and inviting people to do the odd line of Fly Me To The Moon. He was fantastic. In the evening, he did a medley of Stranglers tunes to about 30 people and a load of kids, then left and drove up north. I actually joined in on No More Heroes. Like I said, surreal.

Aah, hindsight and reinvention is wonderful thing.

Could we schedule a blind tone test this year? Might be fun. Just get a bunch of basses, a big sheet to hide behind and someone playing.

I never really got The Stranglers...being a child of the 60s and mid-teens when punk kicked off, The Stranglers just seemed to have notched up the aggression and been carried along in the wake of the Sex Pistols and The Clash (amongst others), but ultimately they always seemed pub-rocky and a bit old. If JB is indeed 80, then he was pushing 40 when he was tub-thumping at the height of punk.

Pretty much this. There's a ton of gear snobs that wouldn't be able to identify the difference between a plywood bass from the 70s and a £15k Fodera. During my mid-teens, I owned a Columbus Jazz copy; I listened to some old cassettes from that period recently and it sounded fantastic. Don't be disappointed that yours is made from plywood. If it floats your boat and sounds how you want it to, then great.

This has me intrigued. I'd certainly be interested in knowing how your technique results in you hitting the 1/4" jack...I just took a look at a few Status basses online and the output jack sockets all seem to be behind the bridge saddles and there's a load of knobbage in equally difficult locations. If you're hitting the output jack, then surely you're hitting the control knobs too? What model of Status are you using?

I'm having a bit of a clear out at the moment...three guitars and basses down this month alone. I really like the St Vincent a lot, but I don't know that I like it at £2.5k. Maybe.

Advice? Don't keep cracking your knuckles. Keep that Travis Bean. You really need to persist with XTC, they're really very very good. Oh, and accept the job offered by Richard and Dave; you'll never need to work in an office.

I'm getting all a quiver over these at the moment. The roasted neck on the non-stealth models is something to behold.

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.