Dan Dare

At £6 a packet, has to be worth a punt. Getting what you pay for is relative. The price of strings at the factory gate is tiny compared to the retail price by the time the importer, wholesaler, retailer, Uncle Tom Cobley & All have added their percentages (standard retail markup alone on musical stuff is 100%).

Try Lab Gruppen, Camco, Powersoft or MC2. All light, all seriously nice and all seriously expensive.

If you don't have a speaker connected, you will need to use a dummy load for a valve amp, unless you like paying for new output transformers.

Exterminate. Exterminate.

Commenting about under-rated musicians is an over-rated pastime 😁

Remember it? I did it just yesterday.

Fever, Got the Rockin' Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu, I Don't Need no Doctor.

Those crazy prices on eBay usually mean an item is out of stock. It saves a seller from having to take their listing down and then reinstate it. The price automatically adjusts to something ludicrous once an item is sold out so people won't buy it. The seller will then revise to show a sensible price once he has stock again.

You may miss the slam you get from a big power amp and pre combination if you get something like a TH or similar mini head. Why not keep the Aggie pre' (which is a nice bit of kit) and look for a lightweight power amp - Lab Gruppen or similar? eBay often has Martin power amps (which are re-branded Labs) selling used for not too much money. I picked one up to use with my PA monitors not so long ago.

Just to add another suggestion to the expensive end of things, AER Amp One.

How much do you want to spend? Tiny + good bass sound can be expensive - something like a PJB Bass Cub or Double Four, for example.

A lot of those appear to have 4, not 5 bolt holes.

I think GHS's suggestion is sound. I had that problem when I tried Tomastik flats. The A is very skinny/low tension. I had to wind the bridge saddle almost off the thread of the adjuster bolt to get the intonation near correct. It still wasn't perfect, but the saddle would have fallen off the bolt had I adjusted it any further. I gave up in the end and swapped it for a D'Addario Chrome, which is slightly heavier. So if you're having to wind it in the opposite direction and the string is much heavier than the one it replaced, that would make sense.

I think Beedster has it right. The classic J bass sound I refer to is probably not hi-fi, especially with the wiring routing one pickup via the other's pot However, it just sounds so right, to my ears anyway. The J Retro turns the instrument into more of a competent Jack of All Trades, at the expense of that one sound that we love a J bass for.

The original question was who leads - bass or drums? The answer, imho anyway, is neither. I'm not being facetious here, but we - bassists and drummers - are the rhythm section (I'm obviously referring to bands). We don't "lead" (or we shouldn't, ideally). As such, we should support the melody instruments if a piece is instrumental, taking the lead from whoever may be soloing (if someone is), or if a song, the singer, again taking the lead from him/her. We should attempt to work together, with neither leading nor following the other. There will be cues that each may give the other, but that will change from moment to moment.

Neither.

Plastic beer bottle crate. Nice and lightweight.

Odd that, rather than him sorting out his issue, everyone else is expected to fit around him. I'd wager that, far from using a Brian May tanner, he is using a light pick and digging too hard into the strings. Used to play with a guy who did just that and who always broke strings because he pushed against them with his thumb in order to compensate for the fact that his cigarette paper pick would bend rather than shift the strings. Could never get it through to him that he needed to use a heavier pick and to improve/lighten his picking technique. But then, he was a guitar player...

Bill's advice is good. If you just want to add a bit of low end weight to a mainly vocal PA (I've done it in situations that didn't call for my main PA and subs), a bass cab can work, but watch the volume and don't try to put high levels of kick, bass, etc through it. As well as high passing the signal to the amp that powers the top cabs, you'll ideally need to remove mid and high frequencies from the send to the amp that powers the bass cabs. If you have a digital mixer, this is all simple to do, of course. Some analogue mixers can provide a low passed signal for subs and you can use a graphic to remove low frequencies from the signal to the tops. Reasonable active subs can be picked up quite cheaply used. Most have on board processing which will provide a high passed signal for top boxes.

Jack's Instrument Services in Manchester will make you pretty well any plate your heart desires. Good value, too. Have a look at their website.

J Retro is well made and versatile. However, I tried one in my J bass and removed it in the end. Although it gave a wider tonal palette, I felt it robbed the instrument of something. I couldn't get that classic J sound - the one where you run one pickup wide open and back the other off a tad - using it.

Given that a PA cab of sufficient quality, not to mention size, to reproduce bass properly costs as much as a decent bass cab and is no easier to transport, one may as well use the right tool for the job.

"Still has the name tag on. Don't touch it. Don't even look at it".