Doctor J

It's a hard life.

I think you're quite right to claim for damage but to get him to pay for a setup is a bit much. The seller isn't responsible for any climate-affected neck shift or playing style differences, especially since you're suggesting you just need to adjust the truss rods and you only need a 1/4" wrench to do that on an Alembic. They're a couple of € in any hardware shop.

Aston Martin - Status. Niche but high performance units.

Nah, Ford's business model is not based around making the same cars they were making 70 years ago. Morgan or Caterham, perhaps?

It's Godlyke Disciple with Barts in it. I just love the MM sound it makes so am biased towards not messing with that. I just need the appropriate Bart J to show up on ebay at the appropriate price 😁

Nope, the L1000 is fully passive. The L2000 has a preamp but I run my one passively. It's definitely not needed to give you more than you need. Those pickups are beastly without any help and cut-only controls are just as useful in passive mode.

I'm going to go the other way. I like the fat mids of the MM so I'm going to source a split-coil J pickup instead. I find I use the MM pickup more so will keep that as is.

😁

Every time Fender do "something different" I try to understand which gap in the market they're trying to fill or if what they have done is good enough to create its own space. Dimension aside (which fell into the "what exactly is this bass trying to do which isn't already done superbly well by a L2000 or Stingray" bucket), their "something different" seems to be mixing up a random jumble of parts from pre-existing instruments into something never quite satisfying which will have a short production run and vanish. And here we have another one 🙂 I think they continually put out this limited appeal, short lifespan tat for brand awareness only. They'll get limited column inches, facebook posts, retweets, youtube reviews and forum chat for the 1000th regurgitation of a P bass with a slightly different colour of paint but, ooooooh, gold foil... shiny! And here we are talking about Fender 😁

If there are only two conductors in the wire coming out of the pickup then you're not going to be able to do anything about changing the inherent sound of the pickup, since it is sealed with epoxy. Whether it is wired in series or parallel is entombed in plastic, essentially, and unchangeable. An issue with this kind of MM-J setup is when you set the EQ so the MM has the brightness you need, the single coil J is just too bright. They work better when both pickups are humbuckers. Can you get a tone you like from the MM if you focus on the MM alone, with the EQ?

The alternate side to this is known to anyone who has G&L L series where it, by default, has too much of everything and the controls allow you to passively take away bass, treble or overall output in order to sculpt the sound into what you actually want to hear in a way not possible on an instrument with low output pickups. It's extremely versatile, moreso than having to boost what you're missing with a preamp or your amplifier input stage. You don't have to run high output pickups at maximum output. The extra stuff is there when you need it, but easy to remove when you don't. There are rumours G&L will release Jazz sized MFD pickups this year. They will get my money if the do.

Wait until Eurovision time comes, there'll be a very long queue of folks quite desperate for everyone to know just how long they haven't watched it for and how they have no interest in it, no interest at all, none. I like a lot of prog rock, less interest in videos about prog rock, however, as prog rock is quite long enough on its own as it is and I have only so many years of my life left.

It's worth bearing in mind that lots of doom bands play Ric 4001 or 4003, beyond the point of it being cliché, who don't have this trouble and those Rics are 33.25" scale. An extra inch isn't a silver bullet.

Worst gig, for sure, Ian Brown in Dublin touring his first solo album. It's a short album, he was headlining and refusing to play Stone Roses material. I should have seen it coming. He filled 60 miserable minutes with every song on the album played appallingly, Aziz Ibrahim and his giant ego doing his best to look like the guitar hero he will never be and they even played a truly dreadful cover of Thriller twice. Worst of all was seeing all the goons in bucket hats going around saying "mun-ches-tuuuuuuh!" ad nauseam. I really don't do justice to how genuinely terrible it was, not at all. Honourable mention to Limp Bizkit on some NME tour about 10+ years ago. Three ridiculously bad support bands (one had a guy dressed as a goblin, another was a Japanese band with Simpsonesque Choco robot hour seizure-inducing strobes which lasted the entire show. Then LB came on, were utter shite and I left when they started their second Nirvana cover. Thankfully, I've been to so many great gigs it's hard to choose but one that sticks out, probably because it's reasonably recent, is Therapy? in Hamburg a few years ago. I saw a few of my favourite bands (Killing Joke and Voivod to name two) were playing sequential nights there, so went over for a week, by myself as none of my mates would come, and went to a gig every night. Therapy? were the final gig. I had a Joliet Jake experience (see the light, vibrate from back of hall to front of hall) during Norwegian support band Ondt Blod, who were just incredible and Therapy? were sublime too. It capped a great week of music in the best possible way.

A string retainer which brings some level of consistency to the break angle of all strings over the nut. Why Fender etc. persist with the A string having a substantially lesser angle over the nut than the other strings, for whatever reason, is one of the minor mysteries of life.

This is why we can be the most boring people in the world when we play people songs we love. You're playing the soundtrack to your life, the music which you associate with major moments in your history and it means nothing to them 😁

It wouldn't change the fact that Blues is their surname only 😁

I am continually amazed by how many people have learned to live with crap setups. Any instruments I've bought used usually come with ludicrously high action, starting at the nut and working all the way down the neck.

Nope, some manufacturers have both cores in one wire, others run two separate wires. Just depends on the manufacturer.

My old Hamer has an EMG humbucker in there. It growls. It growls good.

Your hot is inside the white sleeve. The earth is the currently exposed copper.

That's a very genre-dependent generalisation 🙂

If you were sent a tuner that is not 1/2" then demand the shop take it back and send you the correct one. You ordered a 1/2" tuner, you don't have a 1/2" tuner, it is up to the shop to sort it out. Do you have the packaging it came in? What does that say?

Would you not consider an Ibanez? You seem fond of the Willis bass. Ibanez have over 30 years of expertise in building 6 strings and the Japanese stuff is always toq quality.

I suspect Nilorius is thinking 34" scale B-B sixer, not a Bass VI.