Cato

As I mentioned in another thread the Fender Custom Shop is a bit of a paradox. Expensive versions of instruments that were specifically designed to be mass produced on a production line by people with no luthiery skills to be sold at an affordable price point.

Not much wrong with your English, it's infinitely better than my Danish. Sometimes on the internet (although it's rare on Basschat) you find people who are determined to have a fight. Best thing to do is ignore them and move on.

Chances are even if the tech did it they didn't notice. As everyone says, these things are inevitable.

I've never heard anything but high praise for Enfield basses. You sometimes see them at absolute bargain prices too, presumably because Enfield are a fairly low profile boutique maker. As for the Quad system? I'm sure that the pickups are excellent in all configurations but a fairly large chunk of tone comes from pickup position rather than pickup type. So switching from a split P configuration to a full fat Music Man type humbucker while the pickup remains in the same position probably isn't going to produce the massive difference in tone which you might expect. Having said that I don't doubt that with the Quad pickups placed in the correct position they will do a spot on P/J/Ray impression on a single instrument.

That's the the kind of bass I'd happily hang on a wall as a piece of art even if it was unplayable. I suspect after a clean and a polish it's going to be very pretty indeed

One of the great things about now vs when I started out is the whole YouTube tutorial phenomenon. It basically means you can design your own 'course' , concentrating on the stuff you want to learn be that theory, technique or just learning the tunes you want to play. An you can do it in your own time, on your own terms. Having said that I don't regret the hours I spent playing rewinding cassetes to listen to the same 10 second passage over and over again until I could play it perfectly. I still use the 'listening' skills I developed back then today.

I think there's a particular paradox in play when it comes to custom shop Fenders that tends to get people's backs up. The original models, the really highly valued pre CBS models, were all made on a factory production line by a labour force with no luthiery training and designed to be affordable to working musicians. So Fender custom shop is left trying to justify sky high prices for a recreation of something that was designed to be made cheaply. In recent years they've done it by offering various relic'd finishes that are allegedly unique to each custom shop intsrument , now that the relic craze seems to have calmed down a bit maybe they've decided figured tops are the way forwards.

I think a lot of self taught players from my generation are a bit wary of formal musical education because it used to seem almost like an impediment to playing what you wanted to. When I first started playing in the late 80s a lot of my friends were also picking up guitars and many of them tried formal lessons. Back then it seemed that no one was really teaching 'pop' or 'rock' guitar the only lessons, certainly in my locality, were all classically based and the general advice from tutors seemed to be not to move to electric guitar before you'd achieved a basic level of proficiency on a nylon strung classical model. Sod that.

This makes me think there's more than a dead battery going on here. Unless you'd accidentally knocked the volume on your passive bass down to zero (we've all been there) then with neither bass making a noise then the issue is almost certainly further down the signal chain.

The closest thing I've seen to those pickups are on the Fender Hockey Stick 12 string Although those are rounded and the ones in the TOTP pics look more square. My best guess is that the TOTP bass is a one off, put together with whatever electronics and pickups the builder could get their hands on.

I learnt by working out and playing along to my favourite songs. It helped that my favourite band was the Ramones so the learning curve wasn't too steep.

Kind of depends what I'm doing. One of the things I discovered when I started home recording is that sometimes a bass that sounds overdriven when on it's own will come through as clean in the mix, especially with distorted guitars, but somehow the additional drive makes the bass more prominent Since then I've noticed with isolated bass tracks from a lot of very well known songs where I would peviously have said the bass was 'clean' there's actually a fair bit of drive on there. So sometimes I add drive to boost my 'clean' tone in the mix, if that makes any sense?

Never played one but I love the aesthetics on those old 60s British Fenderish inspired solid body guitars.

I've forgotten that strings with silks still existed. I think the last time I used them was pre internet in the early 90s and the local music shop only sold Rotosound Swing Bass.

I've had a gen1 V7 fretless for a few years now. It's a great instrument, even though I bought as a cheapish first fretless (and back then I think they were under £400 brand new) I feel no need to 'upgrade' to something more expensive. The mid sweep on the preamp is a control too far for me so I generally use it in passive but that's my only niggle and that's definitely a 'me' problem rather than an issue with the guitar.

I'm thinking of the bending the paperclip back and forth until it snaps thing. No idea if the two things are actually comparable though.

To be honest I'm just a massive Thinline Telecaster geek.. I go through a cycle o geting the urge to put the recent CuNiFe reissues into one of my late 90s reissues to make it more 'authentic' but the truth is I really like them with the PAF style humbuckers they were born with. Like a lot of things in the guitar world there's a lot of myths and snakeoil about the original Wide Range humbuckers. As far as I know no other mass production guitar maker even went down the CuNiFe path and Fender only made them for 8 or 9 years between 1971 and 1979. Truth is that neither they or the Deluxe and Thinline Tele models that used them were that popular at the time, partly because the Wide Ranges were significantly lower output than the double humbucker Gibsons of the same period. But because of unique magnet and their relative difficulty to obtain, over the last 40 years or so these original , unpopular, CiNiFe Wide Ranges managed to obtain such a mystique that in 2020ish Fender brought them back for the first time in 40 years for their US Deluxes and Thinlines.

That's the skinny string version, they've being doing those for 3 or 4 years, but the equivalent 4 bass version they've been using on the recent Vintera IIs and Squier Rascals is just standard alnico.

There's one on Reverb that hasn't been butchered for £500 less. https://reverb.com/uk/item/54783511-1985-fender-performer-bass-burgundy-mist-w-original-box-gig-bag As a quirky shortlived bit of Fender history I can see a good example being worth £2000 to a collector of such things. But the refinished PJ monstrosity above is far from a good example. Some would argue, and I'm in that camp, that without the original pickups which are a big part of the original design's aesthetic character, it's barely a Performer at all.

All my four stringers are 34s but since getting the Bass VI I've learned that shortscale can be a lot of fun. I keep half thinking about getting a Squier Mustang to see how it goes but so far I've not taken the plunge.

If it's one of the original 60s ones then the 'mudbucker' at the neck will likely produce a much less focused sound than most basses, hence the nickname I think they changed the electronics for the later reissues. For a while in 60s the Rivoli was a more common sight in Britain than probably any other electic bass. They're mostly associated with Merseybeat and British Invasion bands but for a while they were really popular in the UK across multiple genres and were used on some very famous recordings by some of the biggest British bands of the day.

Never heard of this I had a Gretsch delivered to me in near zero temperatures in either November or December of last year which was actually left outside in full view on the doorstep outside because the local DPD driver often arrives anything up to an hour before the given timeslot and I wasn't home. No I wasn't happy. But I took it straight into my house and unboxed it where it will have gone from 0° to 20°C in about 3 minutes with no issues.

They're local to me. It's quite a quirky little place because their USP is not selling the common stuff. There are no new Squiers, Epiphones, Fenders or Gibsons in there. Instead you find stuff like Danelectros and Guild along with various boutique electrics and quite a big acoustic section, again not from the usual subjects. They do have basses but it's not a huge selection. They're only 15 to 20 mins from Bass Direct and Bass Bros so it's possible that's a deliberate choice to not try to compete with 2 of the most prominent bass places in the country. The shop is by appointment only. I've never bought from them but I did take a couple of skinny stringers in for some maintenance and a set up at the end of last year which was largely arranged by email, I think we maybe had one phone conversation. The whole process was smooth and I was very happy with the results. All in all they've got a very good reputation locally. I'm currently in the market for a baritone guitar and I'll certainly be popping in to check out Dano stuff and whatever else they've got and will happily give them my money should I like what I find.

I was shocked to realise my Washburn Status will be 34 years old this year.

I'd go with age. Although it kind of gets stretched out over time. In the 1980s Pre CBS Strats could be less than 20 years old. We're now well past the point where post CBS 1970s Fenders are described as Vintage and we can't be far off the point where the 80s stuff gets described the same.