Doctor J

"Oh, you had a tech defret your bass? Well, Jaco did it himself with a butter knife" Checkmate!

Looks nice but why a slab top? Meh.

Is it more fetish or cult than snobbery? The amount of people here who have basses not made by Fender which have had Fender logos put on them... it's not a small number. Some cost more than a Fender they're pretending to be. Why do people feel the need to been seen or associate with one particular brand?

I like that headstock, it's definitely one of the better Fenderish efforts out there.

John Deacon and The Dusty End is a band name waiting for a band.

I'm looking at a Warmoth build with Lusithand electronics and Rautia old style multicoils whenever he starts taking orders again. I could be dead in four years and my missus doesn't play bass 😂

I wish they'd sell the pickups and electronics separately but I imagine that wouldn't be quite so profitable.

Great upper access is very possible with bolt-ons. It's just most people seem to be happy to play something designed 70 years ago with a very rudimentary (and cheap) way of attaching one piece of wood to another. Here's a selection of three 24 fret designs, a Warwick neck-through, Alembic set-neck and an Aria bolt-on. Upper fret access is dependent on an extension of the neck into the body for the set-neck and bolt-on, but it's far from difficult to make a bolt-on at least as accessible as neck-through. If you don't hear the supposed benefits and detriments of one compared to the other, and I am one of them, then why would you lose and sleep over it once the instrument itself is sufficient quality?

As long as it takes the guitarist to spot the only plectrum he brought to the gig on the dark stage floor, bend down and pick it up, then struggle to figure out which pedal he unplugged during that effort and get himself working again. Sustain is serious business.

Have bolt-on, neck-through and set neck. It doesn't make enough difference for me to care.

I've done it a couple of times. Kicking someone out is never a pleasant task but you went about it in a respectful and dignified way. The way the guy responded, with neither respect nor dignity, emphatically shows you made the right decision. Onwards and upwards.

Other way around, I think. Hugh was used for some, but not all, of the studio stuff while Alec performed live. Alec was one of the five, though, he was part of the core band in a way Hugh never was.

Perhaps he never spent years as a bedroom player, tweaking his technique and tone in isolation, and developed lots of good habits as an ensemble player from the very start?

Thanks

I've drummed in a few bands over the years. You see everything, sitting at the back. In one band, the bassist was a talented player and songwriter, but a little work-shy when it came to lugging gear and making sure things were done correctly. One day, he arrived at rehearsals with a new bass, a rather nice Tokai Thunderbird, and a set of straplocks which he proceed to try to install... with a butter knife. Sure enough, the knife was a little wide to get in and fully tighten the screws but he said he'd tighten them properly when he got home. A few days later, we were playing a gig and, just as we started a song mid-set, the bassist jolted like he had suffered a short electric shock and sank to his knees. Sure enough, he hadn't bothered his derrière tightening the straplock screws, the front one had popped out and, luckily, he caught the bass on the way down. After playing the remainder of the song on the floor, hunched over his awkwardly shaped bass, he tried to get the screw back in but it wasn't happening and had to play the remaining songs from the floor, straining his neck upwards to try to sing his BVs into a mic too far away to hear him. It was embarrassing for all of us.

Does such a step really exist?

That is amazing. Have you got a gig with Abba?

Any excuse to post a pic 😂

Alembic Orion, though I'm going to build something which I reckon will be even more of what I want.

Having wanted to try the EMG Geezers for a while, I picked up this old Highway 1 body, a while back, which already had them installed. The good people at Warmoth delivered another lovely roasted J neck last week and, as a result, I can positively and affirmatively confirm without doubt that neither of these are Precision basses, no matter how much they sound like them.

Nice.

The string is a straight line pulled taught over a curved line and, as a result, action is relative. My own preference is to have very little relief in the neck, to have very little clearance between the bottom of the string and the crown of the 8th and 9th frets when holding the string down at the first and last frets. I believe the more time you spend at the higher frets, the less relief you should have. The more relief you have in the neck, the more likely you are to set the action to suit the lower frets which results in a relatively lower action at the higher frets. Relief is like artificially increasing the action at the lower frets, allowing greater fret clearance. The higher frets do not benefit from relief in the neck, so do not see any additional clearance other than that which the strings get from the bridge. To see it in action, pun intended, try a capo at the 12th fret and see what the action is like at the high frets with much less of the effect of neck relief, or just look at the action at the higher frets in your video when you're holding the strings down high up the neck. Then let the capo off and see what relief does to the fret clearance at the higher frets compared to the lower frets. This is why you get the strings bouncing off the higher frets like in your video. If you change string size or type, set the neck relief to suit. Always the first step. Then set the action. Your problem will go away. I promise.

Yep, set it up for the new strings and your problems will vanish.

Well done, Skank, nicely done.

I built a 54 style P recently and spent a long time listening to videos of different single coil and dual coil variations of that pickup style. I listened to demos of small custom pickup builders as well as the big brands and was completely open-minded as to what pickup I was going to go for. Based on what I heard, the Seymour Duncan SCPB-1 Vintage Single Coil is, unexpectedly, what sounded best to me so that's what I went with. It's exactly what I wanted from the pickup in real life, too. I used it for last month's composition challenge. This is the bass strung with Chromes, DI'd with a very small smidge of EQ and some compression applied.