JoeEvans

If you buy a decent secondhand fretless and don't enjoy playing it you can sell it for what you paid for it, so the experience will be more or less free. What's not to like about that?

Personally I would only use the term 'luthier' to describe someone who makes hollow-bodied acoustic instruments. The skills and processes involved in making electric guitars and basses are just too different - a violin-maker could probably have a decent stab at making a cello, but someone who makes electric basses is working in a completely different zone to my mind.

I have a white fretless Tokai Jazz Sound from the early 80s which I love to pieces. Some years back I had the chance to buy a black fretted one from more or less the same year, and I snapped it up sight unseen, thinking that it would be really cool to have the pair like that - black and white, fretted and fretless. But despite being as similar as could be on paper, the black one somehow entirely lacked the charm of the white one. I couldn't even really put my finger on why - something in the combination of neck shape, tone, weight, the feel of the finish - it just felt wrong and I didn't like it at all even though it was incredibly similar. But I sold it to someone who loved it.

A good place for a monitor is to get it positioned so that your body is between it and the body of the bass. Ideally the monitor would have less low end in it than the FOH sound, so that it's clearer for intonation as well as less prone to feedback.

These are some really attractive basses...

I think the absolute worst would have to be Roy Harper in about 1991. He played for about two and a half hours and my god it was the most boring thing I've ever witnessed. And the venue was all seated and sold out, and I was fifty miles from home and relying on friends for a lift back - friends who appeared to be captivated. So I felt trapped and unable to leave...

On the other hand, I regularly find myself looking rather obscure information about setting up integrated database systems, and the AI answers I get are about 50% completely wrong and 40% so irrelevant as to be neither right or wrong.

You do read a lot of stuff online about how AI is going to take everyone's jobs, but that might be because the jobs it will definitely take will be the ones that involve writing poorly-researched web articles for very little money.

At one stage in my youth I was in a band called F*** Me It's The Daleks so I'm certainly not going to judge...

I feel like the only rules for a band name are that you shouldn't feel any level of cringe when telling anyone about it, and you shouldn't need to spell it out.

Exactly - now both your immediate conscious minds are focusing on keeping your playing connected, and your unconscious minds can get on with the actual playing.

Out of rhythm is much, much worse than wrong note. So I think the main thing in terms of approach to playing is to get in the groove, dance around a bit so that you're engaging with the rhythm with your whole body, and concentrate more on what the drummer's playing than on what you're playing. Then let your fingers take care of themselves.

The pronunciation is just as you'd expect for a French regular verb.