Doctor J

The nut has no influence on the sound of a fretted note, it's all between the bridge and the finger which pushes down on the string. Is it a dead spot you're talking about (usually around the B to D range, frets 4 to 7) or is it every note along the length of the G string? Have you checked the neck relief and string height, that the string isn't choking when you fret it?

And here's All Night Long, the difficult second album. Next stop, Fethard Ballroom!

The one thing this thread has made clear is that it's not a matter of would you... the pros have worked like foooook and been prepared to make huge sacrifices (sometimes economic, sometimes artistic) to be pro. Those who were destined to be pro are pro, the rest of us are not, no matter how much we may like to think that we prefer not to be 🙂

There are very few, if any, dud Stingrays so you can buy any year with confidence you're going to get a good bass. I've had three, an early 90's two-band, a later 90's two-band and a three-band from the early 00's. The shape of the necks and weight were similar on all. The two-bands were both ash bodied though I think the three-band was poplar. I'd say the biggest choice is in EQ and the thing to bear in mind, if choosing the more traditional two-band EQ model, is that the bass control is boost only, whereas the treble cuts and boosts. There is no bass boost taking place only when the bass control is fully wound down. A lot of people think setting it midway is a neutral setting and it is anything but. On the three-band, everything can be cut or boosted. Given the difference, try to play a few and decide which EQ model suits you best, rather than taking a guess based on what different people with different ears say to you on the internet.

Where you goin', city boy?

I hear that bandied around a lot but it's just a lazy excuse, in my opinion. What innovation? Most of Fender's output for the last 40+ years has been jumbling up existing parts and slapping a name on it. The only one which springs to mind and was remotely different (for them) was the Dimension. In a world where the L2000 and Stingray had created and filled that market 40 years ago, where was the space that the Dimension fit into in order to be successful? If their competitors are really 40 years ahead, perhaps it the other brands who actually innovate which keep Fender and their continuous regurgitation cornered in the past?

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There were never as many lawsuits as people think. For most of what people call "lawsuit" instruments, there was no lawsuit. It's another misued and abused term like "vintage" to try to make FS ads seem more intriguing and appealing 😉 It's more a Japanese cultural thing - Kaizen, continuous improvement. You'll notice most Japanese brands, not just Ibanez, make a particular model for a year or two, then release a new model and make that instead of the previous model. On it goes. They continually try to refine their instruments to incorporate manufacturing, electronic and ergonomic progression. Churning out the same thing for 70 years, with the occasional rebranding exercise and perhaps slight paint shade change, is sadly a business model our American friends embrace once the innovators sell out to bean counters and shouldn't be accepted as the norm.

I also have a lot of love for All Moving Parts (Stand Still). Funky Geezer.

I studied sound engineering, worked in a studio for a while, produced a few bands and thought it would be a nice way to earn a living. However, I realised that having to work on music I simply didn't like removed all the joy from it. Having bands in who I couldn't click with turned the thing I truly love into an excruciating chore, so I choose to do music for love and a "regular" job for money. My taste in music has always been a little too niche to make a living out of playing and fame is something I would run away from with surprising speed. Covers, weddings or sessions playing music I don't like are of no interest at all. Being an anonymous schleb who plays what he wants when he wants, and enjoys every second of it, sits just fine on my shoulders.

Ozzy? Bassline written by Mike Inez and played on the album by Bob Daisley.

It's Spiral Architect, but thanks for asking.

This is a bad thing, a very bad thing, actually. Saying a string is coated is, in truth, fairly meaningless. It's like the ads for things which are "plant-based" under the guise of being healthier, but are still highly processed blobs of sugar, salt and fat. How the string is coated is the important part. As mentioned before, the design and intent of the Elixir, coating the outside surface of the wound string as a whole, is to prevent biocrud getting into the windings because that is what makes your strings sound dull and lifeless. Putting a coating on and then wrapping does absolutely nothing to prevent biocrud seepage. In fact, all you're doing is adding a greater percentage of plastic into the string as the outer wind is coated even on the side which is touching the string core and never comes in contact with the player. It's a marketing exercise only and makes a string worse, not better. This was a lesson learned the hard way, having tried Warwick and then D'Addario's "coated" strings and putting them in the bin not too long after installing them. Elixirs are worth the money because of how they are wound, which I think they still own the patent to. I should never have strayed as it was just an exercise in pi$$ing money away.

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.