NancyJohnson

While I'd concur with this, I feel the advice is more of a cautionary thing; the approach of leaving to let it settle should perhaps be more a case of allowing the neck material/glues/finish etc to settle. While it's unlikely you'll experience failure, truss rod adjustment should be little and not very often rather than lots once in a whwile,

This is a new phenomenon to me...we all have our own kit, we all bring our own kit, we all look after our own kit.

The beauty of mid-boost is all about getting yourself heard...finding the sweet spot tonally and boosting that; it may make your bass sound horrific in isolation, but remember you're not losing the lows and highs, you're appending it, finding and filling a frequency pocket nobody is generally sitting in. That said, in isolation, I just keep the mids flat. I love John's kit.

This may help someone moving forward - I spoke to John, he said there's a method of putting a jumper over the terminals that the switch uses so the bass is always active (ie no passive switching option). He just said that if you want this at an option you need to include this in the order and he'll include this jumper in the pack. Good to know. I suppose once I convert a bass, realistically I'm never going to go passive again!

This is up for sale somewhere, isn't it? Saw it earlier today.

If Austin made an Allegro that looked like a Ferrari, it wouldn't be a Ferrari. I've owned about a dozen Thunderbirds, they were all different, but there was one was head and shoulders over the others. I have no idea what Gibson-esque actually means from a tone perspective.

The TSE BOD VST is quite excellent should you need something to emulate a Sansamp BDDI and it's free. My last couple of projects were a mix of this and Sansamps; with the BOD, the only thing that I didn't particularly like was recording with a clean tone, but it all turned OK in the end.

Leamington Spa's most famous band. I bloody love(d) The Shapes. I'm not sure whether they did a Peel Session, but it was certainly Peel who played them.

A few years back I used the word ponk to describe a dull, lifeless, flat, tone - Brian Helicopter of The Shapes used a Rickenbacker 400* (he still does) - and pretty much nailed ponk with mids with The Shapes, if that makes sense. I suppose ponk with mids (Allegrissimo) was pretty much the punky tone/style of my youth. Or yoof. We have to remember that EMI/CBS/Polydor/UA (and to a lesser extent RCA/Stiff) were the big money behind those early definitive releases and in truth they weren't going to release anything that sounded too shoddy because it wouldn't sell. Noisy, yes, badly produced, no (although I'd say the first Clash album does, for a band that adored ska, sound very thin). It was all about money, even then. So what you hear on those old records shouldn't necessarily be the start point for a definitive tone. I guess (from recall) everyone who played bass locally used flats and in hindsight, ponk was the thing; I didn't even know roundwound strings existed until I broke a flatwound G and replaced it with a roundwound because the local music shop (Adam Music, Staines/RIP) only sold singles in rounds. I couldn't get over how zingy it sounded and I then went on to play almost everything on the G-string. Happy days.

Being around that time, it was primarily Precision basses or Rickenbackers. Interestingly, mainstream bands aside, there was a lot of boosted mids going on; if you want to saunter over to Spotify and dial up 'Batman In The Launderette' by The Shapes, that's the tone right there.

Years ago, my wife summed up guitar shopping in a different city as being akin to 'going to GAP'. Same stock everywhere, nothing to see here. The days of walking into a music shop and finding a wall of vintage Fender Jazz Basses for under $800 each (yep, New York, 1999) is gone. You're just going to see the same stuff everywhere. Blame Thomann and Andertons. My advice? Do your diligence before you travel, target the one or two places that may have what you want and spend the time gained exploring the city.

Luckily, I've got a few basses that - along with piles of outboard kit - are more than capable of delivering an approximation of the tone in my head, the rest is all about what the basses look like, if that makes sense. I dread to think what my profit and loss account would look like if I added up everything I've spent over the last 30+ years. My wife (I'm a guy, BTW!) always says 'never look back, always trade up', so whenever I start querying kit or wondering whether it's fit for purpose, then you've kind of made the decision to move along. Try some different stuff. Consider secondhand too. Also, consider some emulation to get want you want (I'm a sucker for Tech 21 outboard gear); the discovery of what a Bass Driver DI could do could have saved me thousands on amps!

I think 99% of people here have probably gone through the dilemma you're having now. I've got an old beater P-Bass that I've modded way over it's value, but that was largely down to these mods being necessary - when I acquired it there was a bridge saddle being missing, the knobs were sheared off and half the pickup wasn't really functioning - so I can see the desire to bring things up to spec. You have a bass that you enjoy from a playability perspective but it's pushing ten years old (and possibly has a resale value of c.£200); as you've said, putting new Simms pickups in it and/or adding a pre-amp will cost more than the instrument itself is worth. Personally, I'd go and try a few basses, see what ticks your boxes, if any. If you find something within a £600 budget, sell on the Ibanez and add the £400 and throw that at something new. There's a ton of great basses out there for well under £600 (a Sterling by MM 4HH will leave you enough change from that for a hard case and a fish supper).

The difference here is more likely about PMT (plus GAK/Andertons etc) selling many different lines to the masses (and thus relying on stock photos), while Peach are dealing with small numbers and have the time to photograph their entire inventory. Read into this what you want.

I've put in a couple of enquiries recently, no response either. U-Retro 3 and something for a P-Bass, both out of stock on his website.

I have a mate who owned a Jackson USA guitar that had a slight twist in the neck between the nut and about the 5th fret, heat/steam was useful there, combined with rapid cooling. (If you trawl You Tube, you'll find plenty of video of carpenters bending wood using steam.) I worked for a medical company that did these machines called 'Hot Ice'; it was a medical unit that could be used to resolve muscular issues by repeated hot/cold cycles in quite specific areas. Borrowed one for the weekend, we just clamped the guitar up, sprayed with a little water on the neck, applied the pads, heated it up, twisted a little, cooled it down and repeated. It always seemed to move back a little on cooling, so the final trick was to over twist it a little so it kind of settled back to what passed as normal.

There's a lot of good advice on Basschat; it just takes a bit of time to find the right answers. Report back on how thing pan out; every nugget us going to be useful to somebody.

Just to clarify on the terminology for neck issues; let's just use the terms back-bow (headstock arching away from you, strings bottoming out somewhere along the fretboard) and front-bow (headstock pulling towards you and high action mid-fretboard). Assuming the truss rod is fully operational and the end nut/bolt/whatever isn't maxxed out, the expression righty-tighty and lefty-loosey comes into play; if the neck has a back-bow, the truss rod is doing too much work and needs to be loosened (lefty/anti-clockwise), if the neck has a front-bow the truss rod isn't doing it's job and needs to be tightened (righty/clockwise). As my late father would say, 'You don't need to schrawnch it,' so quarter turns, allow the neck to settle, tune up and repeat if necessary. Overriding factors here can apply to string gauges/non-standard tunings and even amount of wood in the neck (I owned a Thunderbird with a very skinny neck that moved at will). I bought a 45 year old '70s Mustang neck a few years ago from a guy in the US - unbeknownst to me the truss rod was toast (or possibly made of toast) and the previous owner had put washers down the trussrod adjustment hole to try and give the nut something to bit against, but it was a lost cause; I sold it here as seen and I often wonder whether the buyer had any luck fixing it.

Find a luthier (or someone adept at working with resins and finishing)...Simms?

Or a Mark Phillips Custom.

The Rickenbacker issue was, as I understand it, more about John Hall throwing his weight around and getting bullish with legal threats while trying to (understandably) protect his company's product/brand. The sadness is that this forum just seemed to be easy meat and was made an example of; their gear is still visibly on sale (including copies) on a number of selling sites and Talkbass in the US. I think this level of protectivism backfired miserably though; while I'm sure they're all out there, I can't recall the last time I gigged with anyone who played a Rickenbacker in any guise.

I think the issue with filling those is the cleanup after. Initial thought was that rather than trying to create something to fill it (and then glueing it in) you could mask off the area and pour a little bit of resin into it, then sand/polish it back.

Not through JMB, no. I depped for a London band called Rocket66, which came about more by association than anything else. Covid started, so I followed this with two huge amounts of recording for two different bands, all done remotely. Currently bandless! Doesn't bother me.