Cato

The Mickey Shitenbacker thread was quite entertaining.

I might be wrong but I think they might have misjudged their market. the V7s are popular because they punch well above their weight at the bottom of the midrange price band. I'm not sure people see the Sire brand as £1000+ instruments.

I can't really remember but it would have been something by the Ramones maybe 'Sheena is Punk Rocker' or 'Cretin Hop'? I pretty much learnt to play bass by playing along to the 'Rocket to Russia' album.

I spent a good few hours last night just playing with chaining together various reverb effects. I'm not sure the resulting almost choral effect is of any practical use but it was a lot of fun.

Andertons definitely seem to err on the side of caution when it comes to packing. My Helix Stomp, which comes in box about the size of a shoe box, was shipped by Andertons inside another box which can't have been much under a cubic meter in volume packed in with what must have been a couple of trees worth of scrunched up paper. They did the same thing with the Boss RC30 I ordered a while back. It is a bit baffling, but ,when it comes to gear , I reckon absurd levels of over packaging are preferable to the alternative.

Just makes it that much sweeter when they finally arrive...

Coming on for $100000 of orders in about an hour? It's surely got to be one of Music Man's best days ever.

There's a lot of love for ToP on Basschat. I'd never heard of them before I joined up here, now I have pretty much their whole back catalogue on one of my favourite playlists.

Seems similar to G&L Kiloton in terms of it being a passive Stingray. The Kiloton is a lot prettier to my eyes though.

I think there's going to be a fair few of us waiting for your thoughts on the Mono Bass. The demo videos sound fantastic but they're obviously not going to mention any problems with tracking or latency.

I did read somewhere online that the tracking issue with the synths can be improved to some extent by introducing some compression into the effects chain, but I've not tried it yet. I sort of thought the Helix would be the last pedal I ever bought but I'm seriously considering getting something like a Future Impact. Weirdly the reverbs on the Helix, which I absolutely love, have also got me thinking about the Strymon Big Sky as well.

The only disappointing thing on the Stomp is the synths. The tracking is so bad on most of them that for all intents and purposes they're completely unusable. One of the synth effects (I forget which one) can't even be relied on to reproduce the correct note, which has the interesting but not particularly useful effect of changing everything you play into a semi random series of unrelated notes. In every other area the effects and amp sims are absolutely first class.

If that's a genuine "all original" '54 P bass then not only has it never been played, it's spent the last 60 odd years locked up in a darkened climate controlled vault. It looks like it's just come out of the factory. It's surely got to be a fake.

I just had a flashback to when I was a student and one night during Freshers week a small group of us were enticed into a rather dingy club. After few drinks at the downstairs bar we stumbled up the stairs into a room where, when my eyes finally focused, I noticed hardcore gay pornography was being projected on to a wall. Not vanilla guy meets guy gay porn either, things that clearly weren't designed for the purpose were being inserted in places that seemed to have a great deal of trouble receiving them and the 'insertees' really didn't seem to be enjoying the experience. As the saying goes 'There are some things you can never unsee'. The weird thing was that it wasn't a gay club or even a gay night. I think we just accidentally walked into the early stages of a 'special' private party. We left before things got messy.

Nice bass, nice bit of playing too. I've been largely free of Bass Gas recently, but if Gibson were to reissue the Ripper, Grabber or G3 basses I might have to get the wallet out.

Yep. Mickey Shitenbacker got it right first time.

I adapt to things like different string spacing spacing or neck depth really quickly. Different string tension really throws me though. I 've got an old Washburn Status which I keep mainly for sentimental value and don't play that much anymore. Despite being strung with standard gauge double ball end GHS boomers the tension on those strings is much higher than on any other bass I own and I find my right hand fingers almost tripping over the strings on stuff that I can normally play without thinking.

I'm not here to help, I'm here to enable and encourage.

Nonsense. Remember the Basschat motto. 'Whoever dies with the most toys wins'.

Guitar designs are notoriously hard to protect in terms of copyright. But I'm fairly sure I read somewhere that Eastwood actually aquired the rights to the Surfcaster design. I know Fender cancelled the original product line as one of their first acts when they took over Jackson /Charvel because they felt Surfcasters were in direct competition with their own Jaguar/Jazzmaster designs and also because their plan for Jackson/Charvel was to concentrate on the heavy market where traditional Fender designs didn't have much of a presence and the Surfcasters didn't fit that branding. Maybe when Eastwood came along 20 odd years later enquiring about an obsolete design they had no plans to revive Fender were happy to sell the rights on

It arrived about 2 hours ago, I thought I'd just plug it in quickly to check it was working before having a proper play with it tomorrow. 2 hours later and I'm only a fraction of the way through the presets and I've started the process of putting together my own effects chains. I'm definitely going to have the read the online manual, (the 'cheat sheet' instructions it comes with are pretty basic) but so far, so fantastic.

The tips of my fingers on my left hand are like leather. Weirdly the plucking fingers on my right hand are completely callous free despite 25+ years of finger style and some fairly intensive periods of playing slap. It's never caused me any problems though.

After a a month or two of umming and ahing about whether to get the HX Effects or the Stomp and watching countless reviews/tutorials on both I've finally put my order in and, subject to the vaguaries of the delivery service, the Stomp arrives on Monday.

It took me a while to get used to the preamp but I'm really happy with my V7 fretless. The maple fretboard was a big plus for me too. You just don't see many of them around on fretlesses.

I had a moment a few years ago when I realised I was thoroughly bored with guitar dominated music, even though I never stopped enjoying playing the guitar. Since then I've been listening to all kinds of stuff, a lot of funk, a fair bit of jazz and I've just gone through a phase of listening to drum 'n' bass and retro style electronica.