JoeEvans

I think there's a pretty broad zone of solid, playable basses that are better than basic cheapies without being stunning deluxe coffee tables. Something like a Reverend would be at the lower end of the zone, good enough for any actual musical function but under a grand new. For £1500 you get pretty much anything in that zone if you're happy to go secondhand.

Buy a secondhand ACG. Simple.

Couldn't the earth connection to the rails in the sliding pickup just be a bit of copper braid, squeezed against the rail by a piece of closed-cell foam, neoprene or similar, in a little recess in the pickup housing?

A DPA would be a great choice anyway, whether or not it was used on that bass, although it isn't a cheap option.

Since about 50% of them are root notes, and 25% are fifths, you can mix up the order a fair bit without it changing much ..

On the plus side, you get the pleasure of being in a band, but you have to play way less notes than anyone else.

I think the thing with low action is that it goes with softer playing - you can't play as hard with very low action, and playing harder definitely changes your tone.

If I was selling I would happily do the following to reassure a buyer that a bank transfer would be ok: - Video call showing the bass, and invite the buyer to record the call. - Hold up my driving licence during the call (with the licence number covered to be on the safe side) and then send a scan of the licence (again with the number redacted). - Step out onto the street during the call to show that my house number and street name were the same as on the licence - Send a link to my employer's website, where there's a photo of me on the 'Our team' page. But the seller takes a risk as well in sending a bass, because there's always the possibility of some scam in which the buyer claims it never arrived. So I'd ask for the same evidence from them. I think if you have a phone call or video call with a seller or buyer and talk this kind of stuff through, you'll quickly get a sense of whether there's the right level of trust in place.

It's kind of a leap of faith, I've done it but it made me a bit nervous. Might be worth discussing acceptable ways to make it a bit safer, eg the seller could send some evidence of who they are, address etc?

The great thing about playing bass, especially with a darker, softer tone, is that very often playing the exact right note isn't critical. You have to get the rhythm right, but a different note is often fine. I once played a couple of bars a semitone up, noticed and shifted down for the next bar, and it actually sounded pretty good in context, but when I mentioned it afterwards, nobody else in the band had noticed.

I think that in any market you tend to get sellers offering a spread of prices to try and work out what the market will bear, but the items that are priced too high don't sell, so you notice them, whereas the bargains get snapped up pretty quick, often before they even reach a public platform.

I think the right hand fingers do a lot - hard or soft skin on fingertips, hard or soft plucking, on the neck, by the bridge or in the middle, effective muting to reduce boomy rumble, etc.

Which basses have you liked the most of the ones you've owned? Top three?

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.