Dan Dare

"Dangerous talk"? Dear me. You'd have been right at home in the GDR or the USSR. OK, let's see your numbers. "Plenty out there in the young, fit, healthy range who are doing very badly with C-19 and dying"? Give us figures, please, together with proof that Covid was what killed them (none of this dying "with" the bug that the media is so fond of stating). Over to you.

I have some varnish cleaner/restorer for my fiddle that I got from a violin shop. Came in a silly little bottle. Heaven knows how many you'd need for a double bass.

Pots are so cheap, it just wouldn't be worth the effort. I kept the pots from my old J when I replaced them just in case a purchaser might want them if I ever sell it (or when my daughter does after I croak).

As someone who stuffs his top pocket with biros and repairs his spectacles with Sellotape, I've experimented a bit with this. You need foam that isn't too dense/hard and of the right thickness, so it compresses to the right degree and damps the strings without completely deadening them. I find it best to make it a little thicker on the low E side to get even note sustain across the instrument.

Exactly. The corona group of viruses are those that cause the common cold and related maladies. How many decades and enormous sums have been devoted to finding a "cure for the common cold" without success? Are they going to magically be able to find one for this? Isn't going to happen. Talk of a vaccine is just being put about to keep the populace quiet and compliant.

Tele for me. Everything you need and nowt you don't.

If you screw and glue the panels together, let the glue dry, then remove the screws, drill out the holes slightly, put a drop of glue in each, hammer in dowels and smooth them. That way, you won't destroy your router bit amid a shower of sparks when the time comes to round the cabinet edges.

All right. These then:

In the best of all possible worlds, I guess one should use the same make/design of cab, but mixing and matching will probably work pretty well, provided they are not wildly different (say a 1x10 and a 1x18) unless you combine a high quality cab with a dog. For example and assuming we're talking about decent cabs, one designer's 1x12 is pretty much the same as another's, whatever the sales blurb claims. They're all a pretty similar size and have been designed to achieve the same end result. Most makers are using the same or similar drive units, after all and pretty much the same design software, too. If you can afford to buy more of what you have already, great, but if you can't and you find something decent for a good price, it's got to be worth trying. I like my PJB cabs (have four of their 4x5s in total). I wanted something to give a bit more weight to the sound when I only take out one or two, so bought a used Berg' 1x12 (with no tweeter). The combination works very well.

Gawd knows. If I had my way, I'd be back out there tomorrow. I'm a senior, too (67), but I don't buy into the mass hysteria about this. If I was frail or had health issues (or had contact with anyone who was/is), I'd be more concerned, but that's not the case.

Would these be any good?

More like @rse on fire, I suspect...

Freak out, baby. Woooooo

Apparently, they used to pay him to sing 'Light my Fire' in the garden furniture department to boost sales of barbecues and incinerators.

That thing will be microphonic as hell by now. The p/us on my '72 Jazz went that way a number of years ago. Got Kent Armstrong to hot wax them for me, which solved the problem.

This thread has to be a wind up.

I've heard Yamaha use Gotohs. They'll be cheaper than Hipshot and of equivalent quality to the original.

Jazzjames is right. Get it looked at and if the problem is not a cheap/easy fix, move it on and put the £200 towards something new.

Most decent modern amps will make a reasonable job of most things. Replicating recorded sound in a live situation is not simply a matter of using what people on the records use or used. Bass would virtually always have been (and still is) recorded direct, perhaps augmented with a mic'd cab, but often not. The sound you hear on the records was/is created via a lot of expensive studio-quality equipment that you could not possibly take out on the road. Even if you have very deep pockets (and people to carry it), it will still not necessarily produce the goods at live volumes without PA support (and high quality PA support at that). You can end up chasing your own tail and wasting a lot of money trying to get 'that' sound/tone. Prices of a lot of average and even poor "classic" kit have been driven into the stratosphere as a result. A classic example is the myth that "An Ampeg B15 will give me that Jamerson tone because that's what he used in the studio". Leaving aside the fact that JJ's sound, as is that of all players, was largely in his fingers/technique, bass at Motown was recorded direct, via custom preamps (Motown built or had their own built) and so on. The amp was merely used for in-room monitoring so the band could hear the bass. Best to visit a few well-stocked shops, ask their advice, try a few things, read some reviews and find out what you like. In view of what you're looking to re-create, some valves would be worth trying, but they're not essential. Fwiw, I get a decent approximation of the Jamerson tone with a Carvin class D head and Phil Jones cabs, which are hardly classic or vintage stuff.

If someone who probably doesn't know or care much about bass amps/tone says that, it's highly significant. I think you may have answered your own question there. If you want that valve magic, can afford it and can live with the weight (little or no worse than the SVTs or big Mesas others recommend, after all), has to be worth another look.

18 for me. I'll play the other 7 happily as long as you pay.

Another of those ad's where they have no stock, so they make the price ludicrous so nobody will buy and they don't lose their place on the search engines, which they would do it they took the ad' down.

Nowt wrong with Mexican. As you (I assume) only want it because you prefer the way it plays, I'd get one and keep the P neck, so you can return it to original when/if you sell.

Make sure there is still some finish on the face of the peghead. Applying a decal to bare wood does not work very well.