Cato

Pretty sure Fender don't have any kind of copyright over that style of writing. There are complete 'Fender' fonts available online that people have extrapolated from the 5 different letters of the Fender logo. I reckon you could use one in a decal saying anything you like (apart from 'Fender' of course) without breaching anyone's copyright or being accused of deliberately misleading people.

I've always thought the Limelight thing was pretty dodgy. I understand they're doing it for 'complete authenticity' rather than with the intention of deceiving but at the end of the day they're still badging the instrument as something it's not. And a few buyers and sellers down the line who knows what it's being sold as?

The two bass player thing kicks in at about 0.50.

As a teenage Zep fan in the late 1980s buying and watching the video of Song Remains the Same was a huge disappointment, especially as I'd already seen this which IMO is an infinitely more exciting live performance. The seeds of what came later with extended live versions of album tracks are there but at least Dazed and Confused is limited to a mere 10 minutes rather than the 29 minute live version on TSRS. That excess was very much of it's era though, by the time I finally got to see Page and Plant together at Glastonbury in 1995 the songs were much closer to the original album lengths.

Barring the Immigrant Song the whole of Led Zep iii doesn't seem to get the attention it deserves. It' s definitely my favourite Zep album. 'Going to California' and 'Misty Mountain Hop' on Led Zep iv get a bit neglected next to the album's more famous tracks. Personally I think 'No Quarter' from Houses of the Holy is just about the most interesting thing they ever did. Way ahead of it's time..

One of Dee Dee Ramone's basses came up on Four Rooms on Channel 4 a few years back. That's about the only time I remember thinking it would be cool to own a 'celebrity' instrument. Although now I think about it Nile Rodger's strat has a certain appeal just because it's been part of so many hit records.

I had a similar thing with Stratocasters. Apart from a couple of brief try outs in music shops as a teenager I didn't go near them for about 25 years because I thought they were boring, possibly because I associated them with middle of the road 80s dad rock. Last year something changed and I started gassing for one, finally bought one at the start of this year and now it's my favourite skinny stringer. I suppose the moral is 'you'll never know until you try it'.

There seems to be something happening in the world of budget guitar paint. Squier have started putting out some really nice finishes especially on the skinny stringer Jaguars and Jazzmasters and Epiphone likewise are offering Les Pauls and particularly SGs in some really eye catching colours. Hopefully we'll start seeing more options on budget basses soon.

I saw an Andertons clip recently in which, amongst other things, it was suggested that it's easier to bend strings on a short scale. I suspect that only applies if you haven't got it strung up with large gauge flats though.

Do you mean G to A?

I think the time it would take to tune something like that every time you picked it up would annoy me, let alone the hassle of changing the strings.

Guitars with active electronics are still widely produced and are used extensively in various metal genres. They generally don't have EQ these days but I'd bet that there's at least a couple of production models out there that do.

They didn't use pitch correct but I'd bet they used overdubs where the artist went out of tune. There's in an interesting piece here about how Motown recorded their vocals. https://www.musicradar.com/tuition/tech/how-to-record-motown-influenced-soul-vocals-432250 There's a fair bit more to it than just a singer and a microphone going straight onto tape.

That's very much the fashion, not just in hip hop but in just about every genre of chart music at the moment. If you listen to Radio 1 for any length of time at the moment you'll probably hear more songs with deliberately unnatural, highly processed sounding vocals than not. For many performers such as Drake and Billy Eilish it's a key component of their 'sound' and ,presumably, their appeal. Eventually the pendulum will almost certainly swing the other way and there will be a fashion for more raw, natural sounding performances, although pitch correction has become so ubiquitous in modern pop music that even then I suspect there will be a fair bit of much more subtle tweaking going on.

These 'top ten best whatever' lists are pure clickbait, even on otherwise respectable sites like Music Radar. The reviewers don't even pretend to have tested every available make of string according to consistent criteria. At best it's just a list of strings that people working for the site like, at worst there may be some undisclosed financial or quid pro quo deal going on between the reviewers and the 'winning' manufacturers meaning that the whole exercise is essentially a thinly disguised advert.

Sounds to me dangerously close to a 'tonewood' debate which will inevitably lead to endless arguments over claims which are more or less impossible to satisfactorily substantiate.

Meh. Spice Girls had great PR. But All Saints had much better songs.

There's a sort of harsh nasally just about breaking up tone that I associate with the early 70 rock music which I think comes from people trying to get a distorted tone out of amps like Fender Twins which were specifically designed to not to distort. That's what generally springs to my mind when I when people talk about 'bad' guitar tone. Although, having said that, I've just listened to a few early Kiss and Alice Cooper tracks which I thought were clear examples of such a tone only to find that I actually liked the guitar tone on all of them. I think this comes closest to what I'm rambling on about.

I doubt there's a water tight 'correct' legal answer to this. There's too many aspects of the restrictions that are untried and untested in a court of law. I suspect if the police or other authorities decided to take action the event organiser would be culpable before the band (unless the band are the organisers) but there's no way to say whether the police might press charges against the band and whether those charges would result in convictions if they were contested in a court of law until it actually happens. With a lot of the pandemic restrictions the decision as to whether to take any action against any breach is mostly at the discretion of the officers attending the alleged breach. In any given situation they might do nothing, ask people nicely to disperse or start issuing fines. If you look at fines for breaching the restrictions in different areas of the country there are a lot of inconsistentencies that suggest some police forces are much more relaxed about fining people for breaches than others. TL:DR version. I don't think anyone knows.

Charvel have really upped their game over the last few years. They've obvously not forgotten their rock and metal origins but I think the more recent models of both bass and guitars have potentially a much broader appeal.

That makes perfect sense, thanks.

I've had mine from new since 1992. The red ones cames with black knobs. Where I think it mainly differs from a full fat Status is the preamp. I've never been sure exactly what the 9v active preamp does. The controls are volume, pickup pan and tone, there's no EQ. There is something going on with the tone contol,on mine when it's on full it adds an almost painful amount of treble, it's the only bass I own where I have to roll back the tone to get a 'normal' sound. Anyway, preamp mystery aside, they're great instruments. Enjoy.

Doing a bit of googling it looks like they had some sort of relationship with Fender. There's a bit about the brand here https://www.tdpri.com/threads/fender-sunn-mustang-club.312516/

I don't know anything about them other than I remember seeing them in the Argos catalogue in the early 90s I'm pretty sure they were priced at between £80-100.

I'd happily give the award to Prince. Not only was he technically superbly proficient he was also a top class songwriter which, for me, tends to be the area where most 'guitar heros' are weakest. In a nutshell Prince had the talent and he used it to make music that large numbers of people actually wanted to listen to.