Doctor J

The big thing to keep in mind is the Arias with dots have, IIRC, 16mm string spacing that the bridge. The ones with the cat's eye inlays are 19mm, I believe. Another thing is that those old epoxy/sealed MB pickups have a habit of coils dying. Despite the humbucker size, there's a coil for E-A and a coil for D-G, like a Precision pickup. Many of them have serial/parallel switches and get passed off by sellers as "faulty switch" as the pickup kinda works in parallel mode. Getting a replacement pickup which actually sounds like an original MB is not easy. Rautia aren't selling at the moment and the Armstrong versions only look the part. That being said, they're really good basses if you can find a spacing you like and the pickup works. The Ibanez shares the same characteristic of being incredibly heavy, generally, but less fragile, electronically. They're both good, but, in my opinion, much, much better basses have come along in the 45 years since they came out.

Being a Telecaster Bass, it can't be any older than a 68.

For perspective, I have a W10 PC with 16gb of RAM which I use for protools stuff and I've never seen it use more than 6gb, no matter how many plugins I use. Windows can be very frugal if you spend a bit of time making sure all that is running is what it actually needs to run, but it's a very easy OS to fill up with shite which hogs resources for no useful reason.

8gb is a lot of ram and your OS Win 10?) will use about 2.5gb of that. Perhaps run something like CCleaner and clear out whatever else you don't need which is starting up unnecessarily and using all that memory, too. As above, buying another 8gb of the same spec as what you already have will work just fine.

It's a bolt-on. Look at where the top side of the neck meets the body, it's a regular bolt-on neck pocket.

Sure, you get free stuff but you don't get the humbucker which is rightfully yours. Big Noise has FMIC is its pocket.

Thanks, everyone, and congrats, Nick. It's fantastic to be a part of this, so many excellent contributions every month. Well done, everyone 👍🏻

This might be at a price to interest some here, even with import duty https://www.bassic.de/kleinanzeigen/industrial-radio-midi-bass.28892/

And direct means they pass the increase directly onto the customer?

70's Freddie King cannot be topped

I've been using these for years. Love them. https://www.thomann.de/de/planet_waves_74t000_gitarrengurt_nylon.htm

Remove strings. Remove old bridge. 10 minutes. Install new bridge, string up. 12 minutes. It's easy to find out whether the difference is worth it to you. You know what you're looking for from the bass, no-one else here does. It's not too hard to find out if this bridge is it.

Yeah, there's something Fisher Price about it. I dig it, though 😀

Be aware, I had an Armstrong to replace a dead pickup in an SB-R80. The Armstrong sounds nothing, absolutely nothing, like the original MB pickups. It's the same shape, nothing more. It was a woeful mismatch with the other original pickup.

That is the bass of doom after all the little bits were glued back together by Kevin Kaufman. Before After

25k? No Way.

Everywhere, I think. The kind of music I liked was hard to find on radio or TV, though I did stay up every Friday night until 4am to see Power Hour/Raw Power/Noisy Muthas, or whatever it ended up being called, with a finger hovering over the record button on the video in case anything good came on. Interviews, band names on t-shirts worn by bands I liked, thanks lists in album inlays, all good sources. I did buy some albums on the strength of the artwork and the label it was on, too. Then, of course, mates and copied tapes went a long way back in the day.

Why? Because fashion is a perplexing mistress.

I can't believe you overlooked the Meltenbacker https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002978070985.html?spm=a2g0o.store_pc_groupList.8148356.12.416345edrycNhX and the Wrongo https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003623655796.html?spm=a2g0o.store_pc_groupList.8148356.66.416345edrycNhX

Look, I'm not saying you'll have someone's eye out, I'm just saying don't point it at anyone. That's some untonation, too.

It looks like it wasn't properly sealed before they painted it. They managed to get the rest of the body and neck done alright, so there's no excuse for not getting the headstock done properly just because you're covering most of it with plastic. Is that globs of glue coming out from under the right side of the plastic cover? I'm with Muzz, that's not acceptable on a $2.5k instrument.

Ambience microphone

Still a great price. They are amazing basses.

My mum bought this in 1975, still have the 7" here. There'd be all kinds of cancelling going on if it was released today.

I bought tickets for it in 2020 😂 I got refunded, though. At the time, it wasn't clear if I'd even be able to enter the UK to attend, whenever it did eventually take place. It's a very different lineup now to what it started out as but fair play to them for making it happen.