JoeEvans

She's 16 and fairly tall so no need for short scale. Some good suggestions there, thanks! Interesting to see the universal love for Harley Benton.

Any thoughts on the best bass to buy, new or secondhand, for a very low price? My daughter wants to start playing bass, which of course I strongly approve of and want to encourage, so I want to pick up something cheap and cheerful right now to get her going. I'm thinking £100 ish for secondhand, correspondingly more for new if I become convinced that it's worth going that way. Obviously if you have one to sell, feel free to pitch it!

See also: vintage Trace Elliot.

The ideal might be to fit an XLR socket to the bass and drive the preamp on phantom power from something like an ART Tube preamp, which can output via jack to go through your pedals. But if you had to use an external preamp to power your internal preamp, you could just use a passive bass instead...

No case sadly, will buy a gig bag at some stage.

It's what a normal bass would look like if you took a jigsaw and sawed off all the bits that weren't doing anything... I thought it was ugly as hell when I first saw it but it's growing on me now...

A rarity for you lovers of vintage Ibanez items... Axstar AXB50, just arrived. Closest in design to the Yamaha BX 1, strongly 80s look - it looks like a prop from Total Recall - but sounds great and the body is actually very ergonomic and of course very light. The main thing for my purposes is that it can go on a plane if you pay for an extra cabin bag, but I think I could become very fond of it anyway.

Why are rechargables not an option? I just did a quick Google and there are loads on offer from good manufacturers. Am I missing something?

More orange basses.

https://www.basschat.co.uk/topic/474391-experimental-tailpiece/ If you do go down that route, you need to use a water knot to tie the loops of cord, as other knots will slip under the tension.

I removed the tailpiece on my db and replaced it with four loops of spectra cord - I posted about it on here, will try and get a link. Might save a bit of mucking about if the bass needs a non standard size of tailpiece.

Thanks for this interesting overview everyone, looks like the only consistent themes are diversity and personal taste!

@BigRedX yes, my proposal wouldn't give an exhaustive list of the qualities of each timber. But if, say, 65% of listeners chose the adjective 'bright' from a list of options to describe the maple body and only 35% chose it for the pine body, regardless of how the other components were swapped around, that would pretty definitively end the 'it makes no difference which wood you use' line. I guess I'm looking for easy-ish steps away from pure opinion and towards actual evidence.

It wouldn't need to be that complicated. Make three bodies of woods with very different qualities (eg pine, maple, mahogany) and fit with electronics etc as close to identical as possible. Record the same musician playing the same piece on each, then swap all non-body components and repeat. Then play a number of people the recordings and ask them to describe them in whatever way seems appropriate. If each wood had a distinct character that would jump out of the data.

It seemed to me that in the clean sound comparison in that video, the ash guitar was actually a bit brighter than the mahogany... But impossible to judge properly whether I can tell without a string of properly set up double-blind tests. Does anyone know if such tests have ever been done?

Anything that functions as both philosophical metaphor on the nature of human existence and knob joke, simultaneously, is worthy of praise.

I seem to remember that position being put forward on a Jefferson Airplane album. It does hold up, both as metaphor and mild double-entendre...

I live in Bristol and have done for years; I love it, but although the music scene is great, it does tend to include a lot of pretty niche bands and some very enthusiastic archivists, perhaps leading to over-estimates of its scale... If you take out Massive Attack, Portishead and Roni Size, there aren't many names in there that people outside the city will know.

We're getting into deep waters here...

No man is an island.

I've recently read quite a few reviews of Steinberger-type small-bodied basses. Interestingly, they nearly all say that the bass has very long sustain and bright tone. That suggests an interesting possibility - that the body actually reduces sustain, by soaking up the string vibrations. It might be that the resonance of the body does affect the sound, because that's energy which is no longer in the vibrating string; different woods might absorb different frequencies at different rates, changing the sound. In other words, the tone wood is actually sucking tone out of your strings, and it's the rate that it does it across different frequencies that produces the sound of a bass

I guess lifespan, and hence annual cost, is part of the picture really - if you're buying a particular string because of its new sound, or conversely because of its longevity...

I'm interested in how much you all spend on strings - per set, not per year. Do you go Tesco Value (Harley Benton), Waitrose (La Bella) or Fortnum and Mason (Thomastik)?

That's the weirdest way of calculating volume I've ever seen...

Per capita calculation is essential... Also, for somewhere like Brixton, how many of those musicians actually grew up there and how many moved in as adults already involved in music?