project_c

I'm pretty sure that's a characteristic of the Fender Deluxe series. Mine does it, and so does every other Deluxe I tried back when I got it in 2012. (unless they're all faulty). Doesn't bother me much but it was odd at first. Let us know if the replacement is any different.

I usually play USA Fenders, but I just recently bought a short scale Squier Jaguar which I'm taking to its first jazz gig in a couple of weeks. It's dirt cheap and so much fun to play, and it has a surprisingly growly tone. As luck would have it, I may also be getting another identical Squier Jag from a friend soon (unwanted gift) so I may end up owning two of them.

I didn't know about the glove thing, that's genius. I have 2 cats that leave a fine layer of hair on every piece of clothing i own, and those lint rollers don't really do a good job of getting rid of it. I'm trying that in the morning.

That is an incredibly depressing guitar, covered in incredibly depressing stickers, photographed under incredibly depressing lighting by an incredibly depressing man in an incredibly depressing room.

EZ Drummer is great but you have to reign it in a bit to get a natural sound and feel from it. I find the presets and the different packs you can buy for it sound over processed, which can make it a bit unnatural sounding. The jazz one especially is guilty of this, but with a bit of toning down and editing it's excellent. The Funkmasters pack has great sounds and preset grooves if you like that kind of thing. It's a good match for a P-bass going in direct.

Only if you can afford my fee. I charge 1 packet of spicy Nik Naks and a bottle of antiseptic to wash it down with. If that's too expensive, any medical or cleaning product containing alcohol will suffice.

First impressions are good. I put quarter pounders in there, which makes a difference. The tone is a bit more high-mids focused than I'm used to, but it's not hard to find a sweet spot. The P side is as you'd expect, the J side is thin (also as you'd expect). I like it with the tone halfway down, the J on full, and the P halfway-ish. The setup is great, action goes really low, frets seem fine. Very growly if you dig in. Bridge and tuners seem ok (still testing those), neck is ok, it's a fun bass. Don't expect Fender Custom Shop, but I think i'll take it out on a gig, it seems to be doing a good job so far. I was ready to get a Mustang but I need access to the high frets. If Fender made a 'proper' USA Jag shortie with a maple board, I would buy one for sure.

I make up for my poor musicianship by having no stage presence or appeal whatsoever. I sit with my back to the audience, I wear dirty old clothes, and I pull terrible bass faces at the drummer whilst moaning about his playing. I drink brown ale and smoke crack on stage. If people don't applaud when I take a solo, I turn around and spit on them. I threaten men and make sexy growly sounds at the ladies. I often get so absorbed in the music that I soil myself on stage. I play mellow jazz standards in an intimate wine bar, on a yellow 1987 Kramer with a pick, going through 34 dirt pedals into an SVT and an 8x10 cab.

Actually I have to give County Music in Canterbury a mention. No high end bass stuff in there as such, but I bought a short scale Squier Jag from them a couple of weeks ago. I took in my own pickups and they installed them and set up the bass at no extra cost, and they had it ready in a couple of hours. I know a pickup swap is not a big deal but it's nice of them to do it for free, especially when I wasn't spending big bucks.

I much prefer to be left alone in shops and hate 'sales technique'. The only people more depressing than pushy salesmen are people blowing their own 'sales expertise' horns. It's a music shop, not a massage parlour. Jeez.

This is pretty much the perfect answer to this thread.

The OP made a comment in reference to politics, but it does bring up some interesting parallels. On one hand you have uninformed opinion based on 'belief' and a lack of ability to comprehend simple facts (about compression), and proudly shouting about it. Meanwhile on the other you have a rational explanation (of compression) from people who know what they're talking about, which gets completely ignored. It's an interesting reflection of divisions that exist elsewhere.

So the point of this thread is: you got suckered in by russian propaganda designed to fool old people, and also you don't understand what compression is so you're going to make a song and dance about it both on here and Talkbass. Great job.

I just bought myself a shortie Squier Jag. If anyone is considering trying short scale without worrying about the money, I can totally recommend this bass, it's £190 and there's really nothing wrong with it. All my other basses are US Fenders and I didn't expect much for such a cheap bass, but so far I have no complaints. I swapped out the pickups and put tapewounds on it, which cost more than the bass itself, but that was just to get it close to my usual tone. I think it's a fully giggable bass without having to do any mods. Im going to live with it for a few weeks to see how it holds up, but so far so good.

I have the Motown DI, it's great and I use it daily, I'm permanently plugged into it in fact but it doesn't do what you think it's going to do. It's not a magic Motown switch. You're welcome to try it if you're ever down this way (Shortlands). With a P, flats, a bit of tape saturation (which is where the Tone Hammer may be useful) and a one finger technique it does get you closer to that sound, but the DI is just a small step towards it, and you could easily get a respectable Motown tone without it. Honestly, any P with the tone rolled off a bit and plugged in direct will get you there, and I've gotten closer to it by watching Jamersons hand position and technique than by trying to find the right pedal or effect.

As far as I know, there was not a lot of tidying up. The tone is a P with flats, with crazy high action, going through those transformers, which colour the sound in a much more subtle way than you'd think, with most of the tonal characteristics actually coming from the tape saturation - just an artefact of old school crusty tape recording. All of that has a fairly minimal impact on the sound. 95% of that tone is down to Jamerson's talent, ability, technique, life experience and whatever he happened to be drinking that day. There's a giant thread about this topic over on talkbass btw, but these techie discussions almost always completely miss the point. It's a bit like talking about how to make a delicious cake, and only focusing on what fork you should eat it with. Doesn't make that much difference.

There is a little more chance of the coating catching on something in my experience - if they rub against something hard in your gig bag for example, like the edge of a pedal or something. This may damage the nylon coating a bit, but even then, unless you really do scrape them they'll be fine. I put my tapewounds through hell on a regular basis, I sometimes dig in when I play, they get smashed against the frets, they get carted around London in a packed gig bag, they get played in a sweaty bar, generally they're fine and I keep them on for about 5 months or so, sometimes longer. If you gig a lot, and use a gig bag, it may be a bit safer to not string through the body, but if it's a bass that you mainly keep at home, no problem.

It's also because you can make grime using almost any free music app. And then you can pop down the park and chat over your homemade beats with your mates, film it, upload to instagram, and you've made and released some music in about an hour using nothing but free stuff on a phone. It's cheap and home-made, and requires no training, just a bit of attitude. In some ways grime is very close to the DIY approach of punk, even if the aesthetic is totally different.

I doubt inflation is factored into that chart. The price of a USA Jazz has pretty much doubled in that time.

The big companies need to re-assess their position in the market. I think Fender are trying hard by promoting new bands and doing online lessons, and the mex / squire stuff is better than ever. The others are struggling because their prices are prohibitive. Only doctors, dentists and lawyers from the boomer generation can afford the top of the line stuff (i.e. custom shop instruments), and their numbers are dwindling. The other issue is that the world is changing, and we value all kinds of stupid boll*cks over creativity. In a world where creativity is not as valued and rewarded as it once was, the tools of creativity are going to suffer too. Musicians are broke, they're not going to buy custom shop Les Pauls. And there's only so many 67 year old ex-rockers left, and most of them already have more than enough nice instruments. And then there's electronic music which is much more fun to get high to and easier to produce than anything involving guitars. And then you have the whole thing of music becoming a less important cultural contributor because young people have so many other ways to entertain themselves - games, netflix, instagram etc, fidget spinners (?) - the role of music, just like the role of cinema, has diminished quite a bit.

Love the gallery.

How would you know how artists work? Are you an artist? Do you speak for all artists? Picasso, Kandinsky, Chagall, Georgia O'Keefe, Raymond Pettibon and a million other painters all used music as an integral part of their work. Let me know when you think you know about how art works better than them, before going anywhere near my backside. The good thing about being a human is that we have a whole range of senses that we can utilise in whatever way we like. You're implying that if you use your eyes, you switch off your ears, which is stupid. Why not use both? That's what they're there for. You look at sheet music, don't you? Does it make you an inferior musician?Most of us combine our various senses to perform activities, they don't need to be used in exclusivity. It's a flawed argument. The intention behind it is valid, but it's flawed.

..But you do use your eyes to make music. You make eye contact with other musicians, you read charts, you occasionally check that your hand is in the right place, and that you're not going to fall off the stage. And plenty of artists use their ears to paint, especially when music is the inspiration behind the painting. You need to stop with the Jeff Berlin. People have different ways of achieving what they need to achieve. If unlined works for you, brilliant. For other people - especially visual people - visual triggers might be more important than you realise. Fretlines do not affect the size of anyone's penis. Using ears is great, using visual cues is also great. It just depends on what your goals are.

I think this statement is a bit of a clichè to be honest. It's a bit like saying 'use your brain' when trying to solve an equation. Great, if your brain already contains the necessary information to solve the problem. Using ears to correct intonation takes years, even decades of focused study. If you have that kind of time available, great. For the rest of us, there's fretlines, so we can get on with the enjoyment of playing a fretless without 35 years of listening to a drone. Just because the lines are there doesn't mean we stare at them all night. They're there to help. We don't stare at fretted basses when we play, but we occasionally check we're in the right place. If I didn't play jazz, I could probably get by without them no problem, but for soloing up the top end I definitely need those lines.

Lined for me, with side dots exactly where they are on a fretted. I don't care about violins, and side dots in weird places confuse me. I also only have limited time to practice and can't be arsed to wait until I'm 74 before I'm good enough to play a fretless in front of other people, so the closer I can make it to a normal bass the better. I also spend a lot of time playing above the 9th fret, where things get real tricky without lines. But unlined necks do look nicer, and if I was 15 and had years to sit in a bedroom and practice, I would probably choose unlined. But I am not 15 and I can't face the extra workload.