Belka

Thanks!

Still not sure about this to be honest. It's just that I've seen quite a few basses purported to be from late '65 with unbound fingerboards and lollipop tuners, but I have never seen a '65 or '66 bass with binding and elephant ear tuners. I mean, I've just never seen one. Not saying they don't exist but if they do they must be very rare. Andy Baxter has two late '65 J basses with unbound fingerboards and lollipops at the moment (neck stamps on both show late '65). I've scoured Google images and the vintage stores, and I can't find a single example of a '65 Jazz with binding, or any J bass that has binding and elephant ear tuners. Binding did appear in mid-late 1965 on Jazzmaster and Jaguar guitars however - perhaps this is what Leo meant.

Just out of interest, do you have a link to this memoire - would be very interested to see it.

There are some minor errors I can see on that site. It says that binding on J bass fingerboards appeared in mid to late '65 while lollipop tuners came out in '66. That's definitely an error - it was the other way around - the lollipops appeared in late 65 while I've never seen binding on a '65. I think I've even seen some early Jan 66 models still without the binding. Noel Redding's original Jazz is an example of a late '65 with the lollipops. Don't mean to be too negative though - it's obviously a very useful site.

That's almost certainly a refinish with a non-original guard. Sonic blue was phased out as a custom colour in 1972 and from around 1974-1980 Fender only produced black pickguards for P and J basses (the white ones only reappeared in 1980 for the International Color series). Of course, there's always the small chance that it really is a factory special order but without documentation to prove this it has to be considered a refinish.

If that's the case, why do old strings sound deader than new ones, both acoustically and amplified?

Its 'original' white pickguard is also clearly not original - from the neck pocket it looks like sunburst so would have been tort on there originally.

The thing is, there are more minor keys than there are major (natural minor, melodic and harmonic), and this song sounds more harmonic minor than anything with the flattened 6th (Ab) and major 7th (B) being fairly prominent throughout. So to be enharmonically correct I think it would be Ab, Bb, B. The Bb is a chromatic approach note to the B and technically an accidental here. Quite unusual for a pop song these days I may be wrong though.

As far as I know the bassline on 'I'm too Sexy' was played by the sadly recently deceased Phil Spalding, not Richard Fairbrass.

Actually, the two stamps show the same distortion in the '7','5'and 'A'. (the one above is a bass sold on Talkbass, the lower picture is the one at Charlie Chandler's). Same month too. I'm pretty sure that neck is legit.

I don't doubt that there are dodgy guitars out there but in most cases the problem is actually that they are cut and shuts, they're non original custom colours, or they're stolen (or any combination of the three). Faking an entire instrument or even neck is going to be a pretty rare occurrence. The paler padauk necks really were a thing in 1965. It's a very hard wood which could account for why it looks new. There are more examples, all from 1965 in the pictures below, including one showing a prominent unfaded neck stamp.

Apart from the replacement bridge and tuners the rest of that bass looks legit to me. The tuners are obviously new - you can tell by the thread being a lot longer than on original pre-CBS tuners. The bridge is obviously a replacement as up until around '67-68 the saddles were threaded. The bridge on this bass where the saddles aren't threaded but are adjusted with a screwdriver rather than an Allen key were used from around '68-83. The only other thing is the missing decals on the neck, but it does look genuine as it has the correct round laminate fingerboard. These are hard to fake as outside of Fender from 1962-1983, nobody really made them (I have seen a couple on lawsuit era Japanese Tokais, perhaps, and Fender brought them back for the 2013-2017 AVRI line. Musikraft will still make them too). Interestingly this bass appears to have a Padauk fingerboard, which Fender used on a handful of basses in 1965 when they stopped using Brazilian rosewood but before they switched to Indian - this could make it more attractive to buyers. Electronics look correct, the sunburst looks right for the era, and the scratchplate looks fine too.

My 1987/88 Jazz Bass Special. I got it in either late 1993 or early 1994 when I was 15/16. Around 1998 it was converted to fretless but the frets went back in a couple of years ago. The only other alteration is the Seymour Duncan Hotstack (Duff McKagan mod) jazz pickup (still have the original single coil in the case). It's missing the F cap on the tone/TBX control and the finish on the bridge has oxidised badly (it was brown/olive rather than black even when I got it, but it's more blue now) but the QC on these was great so it's still good to play after all these years.

I agree, to me it seems like in the last 15 or so years short and medium scales have never been more popular. I've not heard any bassist/musician of note say anything disparaging about them at all. Perhaps you do get some negativity from some clueless music shop workers, and there are still a load of stupid myths about instruments that have been doing the rounds for years, but short scales seem to be an essential for a lot of today's top session players to have in their arsenal.

It's worth saying that from sometime in the mid-late 2000s Fender Japan started using the correct '70s spacing on their reissues. These later basses are also a lot lighter than the '80s/90s versions, which get into boat anchor territory like the originals.

Honestly, listening to that on decent headphones, I preferred the sound straight into the soundcard with no DI box. The Reddi and the Minnow were fairly inoffensive, but apart from making the signal louder I don't think they improved anything, while the Caveman and the Bassrig seemed to suck all the high end out of your tone. Straight into the soundcard had the most dynamics to my ears. I can understand the use of these boxes when going straight into a PA without an amp, as they can make the signal less sterile, but as effects to make you sound better in front of an amp (or mixing desk if recording), IMO it's the Emperor's new clothes. I'd include the Noble in that category too. To be fair to the Bassrig, I have heard people demo it and it does sound good with some saturation/drive on it, but as a clean DI it's nothing special.

I don't know if any tabs for it exist, but to help you out I think the chords are the following: The introduction is all in F7, the verses go from F, Eb/G (you play G), to Bbsus4, to Bb. The chorus is Gm, C, D/F# (you play F#). The keyboard solo is like the chorus but it moves up to Bb (technically it should be Bbm but the bass is playing roots, the guitar is playing 5ths or power chords, and the keyboard is soloing, so there's no really strong/obvious minor quality to it) to Eb, and then, F/A. There's a kind of middle 8 which is like the verses, but you don't invert the Eb chord, and the outro is all in F again, before a chromatic figure down from F to D, setting up the chorus chord patterns again.

I've played this before. To me the home key is F - it's certainly the tonic during the verses. The chorus could be heard as being in Gm in but it's really a ii/v pattern, followed by a d in its first inversion. It's much better to interpret a song like this through more of a jazz approach to theory than the classical that most people are more used to and look at the functions of the chords rather than looking at the sharps and flats and assigning a key based on that.

I was at the Dog and Duck last night when I saw Charles Berthoud sitting in with a blues band. It was terrible - he kept playing so many notes and was slapping and tapping over everything. He was also playing a class D amplifier that had no heft. Nobody in the crowd was dancing due to the lack of groove. Eventually the band got sick of him and invited a Basschat greybeard onto the stage to sit in. From the moment he plugged his (modified) Harley Benton into his vintage '80s Trace Elliot everything changed. The power and heft of his whole notes and the tasteful use of minor pentatonic shapes (no matter whether over a major or minor tonality) had everybody up on the dancefloor grooving away. I later saw Charles outside pacing up and down nervously and chain smoking, a bit like when Clapton saw Hendrix for the first time. True story. There's a lesson for us all there I think.

Here's mine

That's actually a good point - I think a lot of producers/artists judge as much with their eyes as they do their ears. A variation on this is turning up with a nice reissue Fender and claiming it to be vintage - I doubt whether anyone could ever really tell the difference.

To be fair I think most pros would be able to predict this today, a lot less so in the late '90s when I presume this occurred. Sean Hurley famously tells a similar story about working for Robin Thicke with his 5 string Lakland, although he was given a P bass to redo it with rather than being sent home.

True, but from what I've seen of his social media he had a large collection of vintage stuff before he started working with Scott. I remember a story he told of how he was sent home from a session after turning up with a Yamaha attitude Billy Sheehan sig and being told to check out vintage gear. Strange as you would think that if he just played it on the P pickup it wouldn't sound that different to a vintage Precision, but that's another thing; I think these days a lot of producers and artists won't considering hiring someone unless their gear also looks the part (Lenny Kravitz reportedly sends 5 string players straight home at auditions). I'd hazard a guess though that a lot of his (and Scott's) recent purchases are vanity ones (Wal), as they seem to doing fairly well financially from SBL - nothing wrong with that of course - I'd certainly do that in their position.