Doctor J

Nice. Are they the same pickups that were in the Roscoe Beck model? Is there scope for coil serial/parallel shenanigans? It would be a cool platform to really mod the crap out of.

Yowsers! Very, very nice!

I love the Krell shape. Nice one.

D'Addario do a .147 string. That'll do it. Tune all the way down. Chuck that and the heaviest three strings from a heavy 4-string set onto that Precision and you'll be just fine. Pedals and other electric gimmickry can find it hard to track downtuned basses accurately.

If I knew who to kick to get another Rival Schools album, too, I'd be putting my boots on.

If you survive 3 you become immortal, no?

Surely the Levis ad songs qualify here? Stiltskin and Babylon Zoo IIRC?

Well, we don't stand under Dad, for a start.

I genuinely don't care. I have a mix of active or passive and don't feel biased in either direction. I don't see it as one vs the other. Either the bass works for me and fills a role no other bass I have does, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, it gets eased on out the door. Regarding tone sculpting, the one rule I have is that the bass sounds good with any onboard and/or amp EQ bypassed. It needs to sound good in its raw state, essentially. I enjoy having onboard EQ but my view on it is that it's there for fine tweaking an already good tone, it's not for trying to salvage something usable out of a sow's ear.

It's not just wacky theories, there has also been a lot of subtle manipulation which has worked on large swathes of the population. I've yet to be convinced that B****t was anything other than a Russian-financed effort to destabilise Europe. I firmly believe the EU was stronger with Britain and Britain was stronger with the EU, but I appreciate this is verboten so I'll jog on. Carole Cadwalladr had quite a few articles linking many of the protagonists to Russian money at the time, though, and it's becoming clear now just how deep Russian money has infiltrated the government. They also latched onto the Trump presidency effort very quickly and few could argue the USA hasn't been massively destabilised since. They were setting up social media groups to subtly disenfranchise and demotivate black voters while selling Trump as traditional white America's messiah. Gentle sewing of discontent. The right wing resurgence in central Europe is no coincidence either. The west has been under attack since the advent of the smartphone and social media provided an individualised manipulation portal from any interested party into the eyes of almost anyone. A quick read up on Russia's Internet Research Agency and Sam Harris' conversations with Tristan Harris are strongly recommended.

On a more serious note, filtering based on location, e.g. UK, EU, Rest of World, could be useful given the tax implications now beset upon us.

The line should be after the Mojo levels sub-sections, graded from one to five: one for some mojo and five reserved for those being anointed with sacred lemon oil on the day of the Feast of the Sacred Tonewood by the ghost of St. Leo.

It's an easy trap to fall into. The wife of a friend of my missus spent a fair bit of time devolving into a conspiracy theory believer after she spent more and more time on the internet while on maternity leave. She has recently started spouting the official Russian line on Ukraine which, while that isn't good, at least indicates where much of the misinformation originates which she is snared in. How you pull someone back from the state they've been manipulated into, I don't know, however. Some people just get caught up in these things unwittingly. It's easy to laugh at them, but much of this stuff is a state-sponsored attack on our societies via social media which has been going on for quite some time. It's dangerous and intentionally so.

If it means more Quicksand then I heartily support this development.

Think of the intro to Enter Sandman, hear it in your head, that's in E, tune the E string to that and use 5th and 7th fret harmonics for the rest.

Humour definitely belongs in music, just like love, life, sorrow and death. I appreciate that reads a bit like one of those tacky living-room wall slogans which are all the rage these days. A bit of light-hearted wit does not mean the music is not taken seriously. More humour, please, the world will be better for it.

I make sure the serial number is visible and clear in pics, when I put up an ad, and I usually put up at least 15 big and clear pics of every cm2 of the instrument. Let the pics say everything there is to say about it and then you don't get questions. Other than "Would you trade your nice bass for three not no nice ones and a red lawnmower handle" or "Can I pay you much, much less since you don't live on my street" types which, sadly, seem to be unavoidable

Soundcloud, I suppose?

It's still not working for me. It doesn't really do anything or say anything, just... inoffensive again. I mean, it's fine, there's just nothing in it which would make me want to put it on ahead of anything pre-By The Way.

It was more of an outdated and cringeworthy comment than anything else, I thought, even when the context was provided later, but there's definitely still an undercurrent of that attitude haunting the place, at times. It's seldom a thread about a female bassist escapes without some comments on their appearance, for example. Yeah, just a bit 70's.

Another here who got really unpleasant anxiety before gigs which didn't go away until the gig ended. No matter how well prepared I was, the anxiety was the same, to the extent that I would sometimes struggle to hold a conversation with someone before the gig. I got a bit of a handle on it after casually reading on symptoms of Aspergers a few years ago, much of which made a lot of sense to me and, after that, I was able to recognise the anxiety when it started, if that makes sense, and see it as a separate entity from what was going on. It was still there but I was aware of it from the outside and so it wasn't all-consuming as it had been before.

These days I'm just recording. Gigging with the band, we would go from A to dropped G only and retune on the fly. One string is fine, but a full retune would require two instruments, definitely. In a previous band, I was using floating trems with locking nuts so I always brought two guitars, one for each tuning. We always made a point of practising swapping guitars/retuning during rehearsals in both bands. 15 seconds is more than enough time to do either. Any more than that and you're wasting set time. We also arranged the setlist in blocks, so at least two songs were played in the same tuning before any switcheroos. We made sure we could change quickly and discreetly while the singer was introducing the next song. The audience come to see your band play and listen to your music, not faff about.

Yep, here. However, I seldom used the high string so I've set up a 4 string instead and flit between GDGC, ADGC, AEAD and BEAD as required. In my last band I was playing guitar instaed of bass and we tuned down to A with some songs in dropped G. On the bass, I've got a D'Addario .147 for the G/A/B string. It's serious business.

Why not turn the Hohner down, then, to a comparable output and bump up your input gain on the amp to compensate? Can you bypass the preamp on the Hohner, too, and compare the respective pickup outputs without the gain boost?