NancyJohnson

I was offered a Reverend artist endorsement a few years back; never too it up. Liked the Thundergun, reverse headstock.

The principal of backing track usage is fine if you don't need a full time keyboard player or your budget doesn't extend to a string or horn section. Obviously it's all a matter of how you want to do it and the cost thereof. Feasibly, you just have your whole set on a DAW running on a laptop/tablet. You should be able to split/assign the backing tracks to front of house and other content (click) to some kind of in ears. You'd absolutely have to be on the top of your game too; no room for mistakes, no room for swing.

Not particularly rare. No real correlation between price Vs rarity either, just selling for what equates to current market value. It's like estate agents going, 'I sold one just like this last month for ££, but reckon you could get £££ for this.'. (Don't get me started on estate agents, that's a whole other thing.). When I had my Thunderbird fire sale, most went for £800-900 a pop; pretty much what I bought them for. Luckily(?) for the used market, as Gibson frankly don't care about their bass range at all, since the 90s relaunch finishes are pretty much limited to black, sunburst or ivory; there will be a handful of special editions (the Nikki Sixx models, Rex Brown, Simmons, plus the Gothic/Yamano ones). You should be able to find any of these easily enough.

Stewart Copeland's Klark Kent anthology.

We supported a band of young'uns years ago, who thought that swapping guitars every song and using backing tracks (keys/pads/backing vocals) was the way to go; the drummer was using a little iPod Nano which was jacked into FoH via a mini-jack. It was a collision of problems. It was all very odd; as the iPod was going to FoH, you could hear the count in and then silence; they were absolutely reliant on the on the drummer keeping exact time. Of course this was never going to happen; they were always playing catch up or slow down as they were never in sync with what was being played on the iPod, so the backing tracks were coming in late or early. I'll remember their final song until they put me in the ground. The lead guitarist (frankly, I've never seen a guy so in love with himself; his girlfriend was nearby swooning and I definitely saw him mouthing, 'I love you,' to her), swapped to a different guitar, the wrong one as it happened, which was tuned down a full step. So you had the backing tracks coming in wrong, the bass and rhythm guitarists looking as though they wished the ground would open and the lead guitarist oblivious he was horribly out of tune, all the while whispering sweet nothings and pointing at his mates. Oh, the hilarity.

Mine is a late 70s Primary Bass. Friday night Gumtree purchase. It's a thing of beauty. (It needed a ton of work to get it up to speed...it was effectively a body/neck and Schaller tuners. Everything else needed changing as it was either non-functioning or missing bits. Aria Pro II produced Precision/Jazz Primary/Precise bass models. The Precision I have does have a Jazz brother...I check eBay periodically, but they're all £££.

It's all about the £££. Every retail business and supplier will have overstocks that need shifting to make way for new year supplies. Ta-daa! Black Friday. I worked ten years for a wristwatch company; we'd push Christmas orders out from June/July, extended payment terms and deals. In the case of the bigger chain jewellers/catalogue businesses, we get sales numbers back and sign off contribution credits to support any potential losses customer side during promotions like Black Friday. We'd rather pay a few £££ per watch rather than having it returned, checked and put back into stock. I'd never buy anything during these events, period.

You might be hard pushed to find many chrome ones on Thunderbirds largely to the finish mismatch; as most of the current crop of Thunderbirds carry black hardware.

I'm just off the back of a year in a band where the singer was only interested in the same dozen songs - one cover and eight or nine from his professional career - all but two were things me and the guitarist had done a couple of years previously which the band were already playing before I joined. Over the prior 10-15 years (I suppose where I was able to record decent demos at home on a DAW), songs would just flow out of me; I have dozens and dozens of complete songs, partially finished ideas. Of course I submitted loads of stuff, old and new - we were a four piece, but ultimately if the singer didn't like the material ('I don't think that it's suitable,' was the common line), then it never got past our little WhatsApp group - this even applied when the three musicians in the band said 'yay'.

These were my main two, both Gibsons. Bottom one was a very scarce Gothic; maybe 150 globally. Both had Babicz bridges.

If you peruse my old posts, you'll see dozens on my flock of Gibson Thunderbirds, reverse and non-reverse stylings; whenever I had a new one arriving, first course of action was to rid the bass if the three pointer. While the Supertone is well machined/tooled, the Babicz is just better by design. It feels better, looks better and despite being a wholly different animal to the three-pointer it doesn't look wrong or out of place (if that makes sense). I'm an advocate of the addage 'if it ain't broke', but the three-pointer is a truly horrific bit of engineering and that Gibson have (aside for a handful of times) stuck with it, speaks volumes. I'm sure that once you have it set up, saddles notched with a file to the correct depth, intonation set etc. it'll do the job, but nah. I wanted a bridge that gave me a full range of adjustability, didn't fall to bits when you changed strings or cut my wrist when I was palm-muting.

I've always preferred the tonality of a twin-pickup bass; all my kit is set up to allow the ease of just playing with everything full-on or open tonally.

Christ. From recent experience, singer wasn't really a musician in the true sense and that made things a tad difficult. Tried to treat him as an equal musically but genuinely believe that he found it difficult to take in things we were trying to convey, so he became less of an equal in a musical sense. He didn't really seem to be interested in anything that wasn't part of his agenda or his vision. He effectively lost his whole band (including me) over a five/six week period.

With my old band we were encouraged to 'dress smart'. It's odd when you actually receive a PowerPoint presentation about band image before you've even played a note with them. While - as my wife says - I might scrub up well, I do not have model proportions; I'm 6'4" and suffer my mother's English Rose thighs and arrse...no amount of grooming is going to turn me into George Clooney. I bought a nicely tailored black jacket before the first gig and was sweating so much in it while we played that it became restrictive and I could barely move move my arms, so that didn't get worn again. I'm way happier gigging in black trousers (I hate blue jeans, but am OK with black jeans), hi-tops and a t-shirt/Cubavera.

Because this is a bass that's not so important in the scheme of things, I don't mind throwing a little money/time at it in the spirit of exploration. Wiring it VT/VT > switch > output jack, should give me different tonal characteristics/properties than going the V/V/T route and applying a singular tone over both pickups. (I have five holes in the front of the bass so I figure I can just fill them up with knobs, why not?). I need to go through my box of spares. I know I have some .047 caps. Not sure whether I have any CTS 250K pots.

I have an 80s Ibanez Roadster project. Twin pickup model (P/J); if you're familiar with the model you'll recall it originally carried an active circuit - which was long gone when I bought the bass - it currently looks like this: At present, each pickup is wired into a volume pot, then into a selector switch (predominantly so I could just isolate the P-pickup), but at some point I want to wire a tone pot into the circuit. I'm wondering whether I might get something different tonally if I wire each pickup to its own tone pot, then into the selector, then out to the output jack. More Rickenbacker stylee than Jazz bass. Opinions?

I've got a P/J in the Ibanez. It's got very basic wiring, each pickup goes through a volume pot, then into a pickup selector switch. No tone controls. Sounds fine.

Arturia Minilab 3?

Been using Josi's pickups for yonks and currently have them in an old Ibanez Roadster project and I have a P94 in the neck position of an Epiphone Phantomatic (this had a P94 in the bridge, but I pulled it out as I wanted something hotter). Have used his zebra humbuckers in another project. If I needed to replace any pickups, I honestly wouldn't hesitate in going to Josi as a first port of call.

Happy is a little divisive. I'm never 100% happy with my kit, right now let's just say I'm content. I have a Darkglass AO900 and a pair of DG 1x12s; I don't tend to stray off the settings I have dialled in. It's loud enough, lightweight, portable. I have seven basses that do everything I want them to do. Four active, three passive. I'm as happy with the most expensive one as I am with the cheapest (c.£5.5K difference); they're all as gnarly as each other. Zero GAS.

They're used for extracting £££ from bassists that believe hype and nonsensical add-on products. Think of all those bassists out there that use(d) their fingers. Did Geddy Lee use a ramp? Mick Karn? Entwistle? Bruce? Flea? Jamerson? Kaye? Jaco?

My old band regularly gigged in and around London with a band of younglings called Dronningen...there's a couple of people here who tried out for them. They'd carry everything on these little trollies and use public transport, guitars and amps, bits of drumkits, etc; they carry the absolute minimum. Whether this would work for them if they were playing in the middle of Herefordshire is debatable, but in London it's doable.

It's not a thing, no. Well, it might be if you have some kind of affliction where your hands are the size of a red crab, but no, it's not a thing.

People! Please stop screwing needless/useless/nonsensical 'upgrades' onto your basses. Bass player #1; "Leo got it right!" Bass player #2; "What this bass needs is a ramp, a scrunchy thing around the nut, a drop-D tuner and a @Stub Mandrel Tone Shim."