Doctor J

Fender's quest to make Fodera prices look very reasonable continues at pace 😂

Reminds me of my old 77 which was less NOS and more POS 😉

Are they very faded jeans or are you actually wearing white trousers?

The current squeezes, clockwise, Levinson Blade B4, Warwick SS1, Bacchus Grooveline, ESP 400 Series, Godlyke Disciple, Zon Concorde, Ibanez SB900, Hamer Chaparral, Alembic Orion, Bacchus 24

You'll love my new video - "Leo got it right first time on his third go"

The Badass III is string-through. Is adding a small shim to the neck an option? It'll give you a bit of leverage regarding the action.

150 milleeeeeyyuuuuuuuunnnn?

I suppose this is as good a place as any to put this

A long time ago, this started in a wardrobe. Two wardrobes, actually, with some MDF and an old curtain. Then I realised I could save space by making a free-standing unit with two tiers, given the ceiling clearance of your average gaff. They're safe, they're secure, but they're also close to hand and there's no faffing around with cases, all for the price of a couple of sheets of MDF and chipboard from your local DIY shop.

Pickups are the most important part of the sound of a bass. Whatever sound you're looking for, the pickup will play a bigger role, more than anything else. How a pickup is made and what it is made of is very important to the sound which comes out of the instrument. Modern mass-produced budget pickups are not the same as what made the sound you're chasing.

You're possibly the only one. You might say there is nobody... next to you. I'm very sorry.

At least he didn't sell it for... Peanuts.

Same here. A Thumb is on the list for sure. Lovely bass, congratulations.

The quartet of Mother's Milk, BSSM, One Hot Minute and Californication are sublime. I've bought every other album as they have come out but nothing they have done since Californication has grabbed me at all. BSSM is perfect, though. It's genuinely a flawless album.

When the genre is describing the music, fine, it can be useful. Death metal tells you a lot about what you're about to hear. Nice. Hair Metal is cretinous term - probably conceived by some snotty intern at Kerrang during that time when they realised metal wasn't cool anymore, went to great efforts to distance themselves from being seen as a metal mag and lamely tried to poke fun at that which made them - as it retrospectively groups bands based on how much hairspray they used in an attempt to belittle them, rather than any recognition of the nuances of the music they played. It's a derogatory aesthetic description, not a musical one. Most of those lumped in were considered hard rock at the time, alternatively known as glam rock, but never metal. Lazy 21st Century journalism at its finest. Just like with all the bands currently labelled as thrash who didn't and still don't play thrash music, there is much to be missed about when journalists used to get paid and made an effort.

There was no such thing as "hair metal". That stupid moniker was invented about 20 years ago applied to any band ever pictured with big hair, regardless of the style of music.

Glen Benton David Vincent Ron Broder Pete Cetera

Tonewood benches. It's a trap!!!

I would start by looking at what I use in E. For example, if you're using .105 for E, .85 for A, .65 for D, .45 for G then, since you're only going to be a tone or semitone up from having E, A and D anyway, I'd use them as reference and go with a slightly lighter standard tuning set - .100 for F, .80 for Bb, .60 for Eb. For C, I'd go with at least a .125, but I don't like floppy strings and have found greater definition and tuning accuracy at lower tunings comes from bigger strings. My first downtuned-to-C band started back in 1992 when string selection wasn't quite what it is now, so I've tried all kinds of setups over the years. Personally, I much prefer playing aggressive music on strings with decent tension and trying to match the tension I like in standard is a much better option than trying to get away with loosening a standard set and living with something you wouldn't choose in standard tuning. Unless you have plastic fingertips, of course 😉

It's alright liking lots of things. Basses are great. I like all kinds of different basses so I've started working on things I don't like and things I really, really like. Really, Really Like: 38-40mm nut width Forearm Contours 4 Strings Don't Like: 41mm and bigger nut widths No forearm contours 5 strings and greater By compiling these lists, I feel I've really cut out a lot of potential sources of GAS. Everything else is fair game. Sweet.

Am I good enough? Sure, why not? Am I rich enough? No. Hell no.

I used to have a 1980 G&L L1000 which had the locking grub screw.

No reason at all. If you want to make it entirely reversible, just get a new nut now and file it for the bigger strings. If you want to revert back to EADG, just put the original nut back in. I play a lot of downtuned music so set up a 4 banger for BEAD. Because I do a lot of stuff in A, too, I have a very heavy set on so I can drop-tune the B to A without having spaghetti to play - .147, .107, .85, .65 You need to be physical with the .147 but it's very satisfying to play.

Fujigen built/build Japanese Fender, Ibanez and probably a good few more.

I just bypassed the amp EQ with mine and, often, biased slightly towards the bridge pickup. From there, adjusted the tone to taste. It sounded grand, had enough mids to be heard and more than enough lows once the guitars started sharing the mid frequencies. Usually, removing a little low end from the guitars shows the bass has more than enough lows without having to boost the crap out of it and make a thick low-frequency fog out of everything.