Doctor J

"I need to leave this bass with you for a short period of time..." 😂

I'd recommend "Small Victories: The True Story of Faith No More" by Adrian Harte for anyone with an interest in them. It was a very enjoyable read with lots of things I had no idea of.

You're telling me!?!?!? I hadn't been here in a good while as I had to sell a lot after splitting with my missus. I'm back a few weeks and already there's a GMR in the back of a van on its way to me as we speak. 🤣

I had that t-shirt too, got it when they played with Prong on The Real Thing Tour. I sold it on ebay a few years ago. It's quite desirable, it would seem.

It's a pain which never ends.

A production which breathes, not under the weight of click-tracked clicky close-mic’d drums, where you can hear the sound of the room it was recorded in, where the guitarist sounds like he’s trying to control a feral beast, it’s a beautiful thing 🙂

The production is perfect, it's authentic. It has balls. That brief squeal of feedback every time Jim turns up the guitar... ah man, it has got such wonderful grit. You can hear depth around the drums. Bill's tone is sublime. It's a great production.

Marcella would put a US National Anthem singer to shame, there. That was textbook over-singing, delivered with as much emotion as ordering takeaway on a Friday evening. Other than that... not too bad, I suppose.

Have they split up again?

I split with my missus a few years ago and the resultant legal bill resulted in me having to sell quite a few really nice instruments. Once I made the decision that many had to go, I found it quite liberating, to be honest. I still miss some of them (a battered but very playable Stingray and an irreplaceable PRS EB spring to mind) but life goes on. I still have my old ESP 400 Series, which is the one I truly don't think I could do without and remain a bassist, as well as a few others. Now that all that business is behind me, however, I find myself browsing the For Sale section as a potential customer again thinking "Ooooh that looks nice!", digging the same old hole for myself 😂

Essandess has been in Kilkenny for a long time. My first experience of customer service there was so bad I never went back. A new place opened in Kilkenny a few years ago but didn’t last long. In Clonmel, Premier closed a couple of years ago. Again, a new place has opened up but the stock isn’t great. I was in Musicmaker in Dublin a few weeks ago and they have barely any stock. I haven’t been into X-Music in a long time, they seemed to cope with the Thomann arrival better than the rest.

I bought a Stingray from here years ago which was delivered in its case, with no box and no cling film, either. There was just a single wrap of brown packing tape and the unlocked latches keeping the bass in as it rattled around the hold of the plane and back of the van.

Yes. It consists of most of Vulfpeck.

At the moment , this one is getting me every time

I share your pain. One of mine sprays every now and then. Luckily for me (and him) he hasn’t sprayed a bass yet but I have had a cab which wasn’t so fortunate.

The older I get, the more I prefer Mosely era and the loose, almost shambolic nature of the songs. That being said, The Real Thing is flawless, it’s still an incredible record.

Nice. It can also be wielded in a zombie attack without fear of breaking, practically indestructable.

The day adblock stops working is the day the internet and I say our goodbyes. I don’t know how anyone can tolerate the continual ad intrusion. It’s great for blocking those nasty google trackers, too.

Did Paul invent the B-Bender? 😂

When you say oomph, do you mean something tonally that it lacks or is it just a lower output? If it's a tone thing, well, you've already got a preamp in your amp. See if you can get the kind of tone you're looking for with the existing pickups and the EQ and gain stage of your amplifier. If you still think it's lacking, you may need to replace your pickups to get what you need. You don't need to get actives, there are plenty of passive pickups to suit all kinds of tonal requirements these days. The choice has never been greater but you still need to be able to define what it is you want and then hunt down the pickups which will do it for you. For me, the pickups are the most important part of the instrument. Get them right and you should be able to run with no EQ and be really close to your desired tone. If I have a bass I need to tweak the bejesus out of to get the sound I want, then either the pickups get replaced or the bass gets eased on out the door.

I used to think so but now I think I was just using it as an excuse to buy different kinds of basses. I play like me and will adapt to the style of music no matter what I’m playing.

Do you know which way the coils are orientated? Is it one over the other or one coil for E&A and one coil for D&G? There are quite a few bass humbuckers built that way and, if you go single coil, you're just turning off the coil under a pair of strings.

Yep, be yourself at all times.

This is also my experience. I find these kind of videos excruciating. Few can resist injecting “wacky personality turned up to eleven” and a minimum of 70% of the video is yapping not playing. Horrible.