NancyJohnson

Anderton's have grown their business from a small local store to a Worldwide brand all from an extremely small shop (and warehouse facility) in Guildford; you can see they have a passion for the product. Here in lies the difference. Dawson's don't really share that passion or the nuance to grow the business.

Good news/bad news is debatable. I've had reason to visit Dawsons twice in my lifetime, it has to have been two of the most soulless instrument shopping experiences I've ever experienced. There's a parallel with Halfords that's unavoidable; clueless/lacklustre staff selling clueless fathers a first guitar/bicycle for their equally clueless sons. Kid wants something pointy, shiny and sparkly, father wants something the kid can keep and not grow out of, staff motivated by selling whatever carries the highest margin. I honestly felt for the poor unplayable instruments serving as demo models; just pulled out of shipping boxes, hung up and battered by all and sundry.

I woke up early one Sunday and started trawling through eBay for basses, saw a Hamer FBIV on sale for £350 as a Buy-It-Now thing. Did a little panic; aside from Nikki Sixx, I'd never seen one in the flesh and as they're so rare, there was nothing online to compare it to. Eventually found a photo of Mr Sixx somewhere; configuration was a little different, more knobs on the eBay one, headstock a bit different, stadium logo. Went back to the computer and bought it. Unbeknownst to me, the Hamer Fan Club forum had a thread going on it already. It arrived a few days later; no case, heavily wrapped in about six inches of bubblewrap. I was offered around £3,500 for it from someone on the Hamer Fan Club group. Porno shot:

Back in the day the inferiority of the sophomore album was generally known as the difficult second album syndrome. I'm very much from a rock/punk background and could, given the time for recall, cite dozens of second albums that fell well short of the debut releases by the same band. Off the top of my head, second albums by Van Halen and Living Colour were awful.

One of the best? No. It is the best.

I bought this a couple of months ago. [Edit] John East preamp incoming. This should come alive!

Last night, I was the happy recipient of nine finals and roughs from sessions I did with my band pre-lockdown and beyond. Given the disjointed nature of being a studio band, I have little or no memory of recording many of these. This morning is all about Lutz.

Have you seen the size of my hands?? It's easy! #sizedoesn'tmatter

As I posted earlier, the 8-string is actually narrower than my Euro LT 4 string.

Yep, the same; the strings are 4mm on centre. The image below isn't mine, but it demonstates how close the strings are.

I've got a Spector 8-String. The nut is 38mm, 12th fret is 54mm.

There's a wonderful art restoration channel on You Tube called Baumgartner Restoration, which operates out of Chicago. Julian Baumgartner regularly uses tissue paper (or later on a stronger Japanese version), which is pasted to the front of paintings to stabilise the paint layer while he reverses previous restorations (generally on the rear of the canvas). It's fascinating stuff and is similar to what @TheGreek, the honourable member for Hatfield, describes above.

I had an issue with a a UNI-PRE installation recently; buzzy, buzzy, buzz. I can install most things without much bother, but will admit once in a while the guts of basses just look like a tangle of wires. We exchanged emails, photos etc. and he got me sorted. He is a top, top bloke; we discussed his background (brilliant stuff!)...I've offered to do a piece on him for Basschat, just to put a name to a face. More people should be embracing his gear.

He sold me a lift.

It's just decoupage. The Lutz guitarist has a Joe 90 one on a double-cut body - pre-lockdown he had mentioned he was going to strip it all down and start over, not sure whether he did. I forget what glue was used, may have been Pritt(!) but probably something for wallpapering. I do recall the source images were done off colour copied images (heavy semi-gloss paper, like photographs), not from cuttings out of old TV21 annuals...this was just to stop the reverse of a double-sided image leeching through. Once it was done and the glue dried, he just sealed it with several layers of clearcoat. It was far from smooth, but looked great. He runs it with one pickup, one volume. In the neck pickup cavity he's got an action figure in there with a computer fan over the top. Very Phil X.

Yikes Wai. When you were in Dronningen you only used to use two!

A long, long time ago (in a Galaxy etc.), I smashed up an Ibanez Roadster bass at a gig. It was a horrible PoS and I'd just had enough... I'd kept the neck and used to keep it under the bed. We'd been burgled at our old house and I just felt that if it happened again while we were in the house I'd have something to swing and dish out some Johnson justice. I know there's probably a ton of SJWs out there that would be going, 'Oh, no, you can't do that,' but I figure, my house, my kit, my family and I wouldn't be bothered about asking any masked intruder what the fork they were doing in my house in the middle of the night. My brother used to do weekend gamekeeping near Windsor. He had an armoury of guns, one of which he always used to keep loaded in his bedside cabinet.

I do like mine, but it needed a bit of work to get it playing nicely. The factory setup was horrific; stupid high action, the pickups were a bit muddy (replaced with humbucker-sized P90s) and the machine heads were frankly awful (replaced with Sperzel locking types). It's brilliant now. Here's my good friend Luca Vulpio using it at a gig we played with his band. That's my old Thunderbird too!

Much like @AngelDeVille if budget allows, I'd take Gibson over an Epiphone if it was a like for like thing (Les Paul/Flying V/Explorer/Firebird); I still find the headstock design horribly off-putting. I suppose if I were looking for a guitar now, I'd go Gibson or Dusenberg, maybe even stretch abit more to see what I could get from Frank at Diemel (the matt black Firestar, with the pickup behind the bridge) or Gabriel at Echo Park (The '59 or La Carne). That said, Epiphone have done many original/standalone models; I own a sub-£500 Phantomatic, which is a hybrid of an Epiphone Wilshire body with a stock Epiphone Les Paul neck; I suppose I like it because it's not apeing to be something else made by a more expensive bigger brother.

A couple of years back I saw Corey Glover and dUg Pinnick on the same bill at The Cutting Room in New York. VIP. dUg was pretty good, Corey, in hindsight, was a bumbling, blubby, shambles He came out dressed in a pink hoodie, pink sweatpants and a tweed flatcap. At one point he started crying between songs. I honestly think he needed a bit of help.

I'll admit that a bit of me died when Muzzy left/was given the Spanish Archer. Still unsure which was the case.

While I have little love for Fenders generally, that's the dream colour scheme for a Jazz right there. Also, I love the prominent headstock logo.

Hmm. I can see the association, I'll grant you that you do see an awful lot of this: and this: I often wonder whether Spector love the association or whether they cringe a little at these. They're still great basses.

While my loyalties lie elsewhere, I'd still say buy a Spector. On that budget, you should easily be able to find a Euro LT (or two) off the shelf without much issue, top end of that budget might get you a US made NS or X model. They also seem happy for customers to approach them direct to circumvent the whole dealer markup.

I seem to remember a few years back - and this may have been a company like Seymour Duncan - used to have a table online of the tonal characteristics you may expect from each pickup. By aggressive, I suppose I'd be looking at pickups that are reasonably hot, that they are not vocied to ponk or some too dubby, like you say, it is possible to dial in tone via you amp (or processing). To lift a quote from elsewhere, I'm looking for a brighter/more aggressive sound, rather than a warmer sound with more mids or a more open/passive tone with increased headroom. It may also be the case that I could just stick with the pickups as they are (Spector SSD Design) and just stick a John East system in it.