Doctor J

Great bass, well chosen!

I'd vote for a UK/EU location filter as there's a 25% price increase depending on where you are compared to the item you're looking at which is often a bit of a buzz kill.

I started playing in 89 and, back then, 25 years was widely accepted as "vintage" and this made anything pre-64 vintage, which made sense given the availability and popularity of electric instruments really only started taking off from about 1950. "Vintage" was roughly 14 years worth of instruments, so not that many, and neatly correllated with the pre-CBS era when referring to Fenders. There wasn't anywhere near as much money tied up in the "vintage" moniker as there is now, however, and it has been marketed differently and aggressively since by those with financial interests in doing so, as more and more instruments - including the now-prized 70's Fenders which were derided as junk up until the mid-90's - started flooding in and more and more stuff of varying quality could be termed "vintage". Either way, Geek99 is right, now it means nothing other than the instrument is old and old does not necessarily mean good. Me starting playing is almost as close to the first P bass being made as now is to when I started playing, so the lovely pointy BC Richs of my era are legitimately vintage if a slab 50 P was vintage when I started 😂 I appreciate how much this concept could trouble the young people, however 😉

Thumb Fin in the way? It moves.

That's how Fender do neck pockets these days. The scratchplate covers a lot of lazy manufacturing practices. The stupid routing guide hole would annoy me more.

It used to be age, over 25 years. Then, as more basses reached that age, the people who owned the older basses took umbrage at basses not as old as theirs being called vintage as they felt it diluted the term. Now it means Fenders made up to about 1975 but, really, it's anything over 25 years.

Rattling off lists of pickups without being able to hear them is fairly pointless. When I was building a single coil P, I went through loads of videos and sound samples to try to find something which matched the sound I was chasing. An old P pickup is never going to sound just like the split P for a multitude of reasons, but there's still a lot of variety out there and a lot of different sounds to choose from, more than you'd think. I thought, in theory, I would prefer a double coil wired in series as I was after a healthy mid bite but, to my ears, a proper single coil was closest to the sound I was actually chasing. Leave the tone open and it's bright and aggressive, roll it off and it fattens up nicely. Anyway, here's what a Seymour Duncan SCPB-1 sounds like with D'Addario Chromes.

I've got a .149 for a B which I've used as low a G# every now and again. If I needed a low G all the time a .160 makes a lot of sense. I'd do it. Bigger is better the lower you go 🙂

If it's metal and they're playing that low C a lot, I'd tune to C too.

In this instance, Davide Romani is a little wide of the mark. The first Chic album was a P, but most of what came after in the late 70's and early 80's was the Stingray. The BC Rich was very much for looks, Marcus Miller had a story about that, and the Sadowsky was a lot later, into the 90's, I think. The Stingray definitely became his primary studio instrument for a good few years, though.

Wire the pickup directly to a bog standard jack, find whether the pickup itself is the issue.

Whatever it is, a Fender it is not.

The two string retainer shows Leo never got it truly right, no matter which time. Apologies to all offended cultists, of course. Get one of these and finally have some kind of consistent break angle for all strings over the nut. You will be able to put it in the same spot as the current one and cover the existing hole, so your headstock won't have an unsightly hole in it. https://www.public-peace.de/hipshot-string-retainer-3-strings.html?language=en

Swap the pickups around on the blend pot and find out if the noise follows the pickup or the pot.

Yep. I always use my L2K in passive mode. Everything works in passive mode, it just seems to boost the output. If there's one thing it doesn't need, it's higher output.

Possibly the finest recording of a Metallica gig, from early December 86. Newsted was bang on.

Very sorry to hear of your loss.

Well done, Leonard, great stuff 👍🏻

Related to Mick? Did you buy a pedal and he promised he most definitely will post it to you?

Racism isn't a trivial matter and accusations of racism shouldn't be so casually thrown around as it badly dilutes the importance of the message. You've gone from slandering all of them, including Filipino Kirk and Cliff, to just some of them. What did Kirk and Cliff do which lead you to accuse them of being racist, out of curiosity? Sure, Hetfield was a tool and I'd imagine him and Rose in a room together at that time was hardly a shrine to enlightenment, but do you really think a band who have been paying Mensch and Burnstein, their jewish management, 20% for almost 40 years really believe in National Socialism? Think about it for just a minute.

The Homeball is playing riffs and asking questions in the shadow of Slievenamon, dipping a genre-fluid toe in every musical orifice. This is I Ask The Questions, the debut album, an all-original collection of songs of selective appeal for your listening pleasure.

Most heavy metal musicians never would have had realistic expectations of the fame and wealth the chosen few of them eventually achieved. Metallica were a genuine niche band until the very end of the 80's. The kind of success they eventually found would have been completely unthinkable when they were making their first four albums. When I first saw them on the AJFA tour, they were playing a 1500 capacity venue. When I last saw them on the Black album tour, they were playing an 8000 capacity venue. They were the exception, in the genre from which they originated. Megadeth were probably the next most commercially successful but they were not even close to what Metallica, as they became 'tallica, achieved. The rest of their peers never achieved commercial success at all and mostly broke up by the mid 90's. The point being, unlike a lot of genres where being commercially successful is a genuine prospect and probable aspiration when the band starts off, in Metal, outside of the pouffy hair stuff, that was completely unthinkable until the start of the 90's. Success would have come rapidly as a stranger and they were ill equipped to cope with all it entailed.

Which record?

It's mega wild to me that people are so quick to judge and libel people they've never met with no foundation 😉

Oh, and anyone who wants to actually watch "the DVD" in question and see Newsted in context, it's from the 1989 Seattle concert during the intro of... wait for it... Am I Evil! Clumsy theatrics? Yes I am! Nazi rally? No it isn't. He also wrote this song for Flotsam And Jetsam but, sure, I suppose one frame from a 2.5 hour concert shows where his heart truly lies? https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/flotsamjetsam/derfuhrer.html