Russ

Revelation do a CAR P-bass (well, a PJ), the RPJ-77, they're not expensive, and they're actually rather good. https://www.revelationguitars.co.uk/guitar/rpj-77/ It's a proper CAR too, shiny and the right shade of red.

He definitely left a bit of a bad taste in our mouths with his behaviour that day. I've met quite a few "famous" musician types over the years, and most of them were very nice, normal people doing a job and glad that people liked what they do (Stu and Derrick were very much in this mould). Others were obviously living in their own little bubble and were nice enough but a bit weird, but very few were unpleasant and/or obnoxious. He was one of those few. Never really enjoyed Jamiroquai again after that, especially with their subsequent, post-Stu change in direction. The footballers were great - one of my colleagues at the studio was a huge fan of Spurs, and Jamie Redknapp in particular, to the degree that he named his son Jamie. He told that to Neil "Razor" Ruddock (one of the guys we had come down to do some mocap stuff for us) and he pulled up Redknapp's number on his mobile and called him up, and put my colleague on the phone with him. That made his year. Ruddock's a big softie really!

Interesting story... back in 1997 I was working for a video games company, and we had a motion capture studio that we would rent out to clients when we weren't using it for game stuff. One of the clients we got was Sony, who were making a Minidisc ad that was going to feature a little CG character made of Minidiscs that would morph into Jay Kay doing his funny dancing. So we had to motion-capture him doing the dance. The place was in a warehouse on a sleepy industrial estate in Croydon, and, even when we had big name people there (we did a football game where we got several Premier League players down) it was always quiet. Not on that day - the place was full of Sony people from Japan, they brought a Winnebago down for Jay Kay to use as a changing room (the Premier League footballers were perfectly happy to use the toilets) and then he shows up in a souped-up Mercedes. Stuart and Derrick were with him, and they hung out with us and were very cool, but Jay would only speak to my boss, and very much had that "I'm too important to talk to you" vibe going on. Everyone just thought, "d*ck". Still, we did the job. They made the ad, and I got a Jay Kay anecdote out of it. For what it's worth, this was the ad (or one of them, anyway - apparently they made several, but this was the only one I could find, and it doesn’t have the morphing thing):

I'd quite like to hear a whole album from these three. Berthoud holds his own here, he gets a solo, and some of the harmony parts him and Bernth are doing are fantastic. Shame Ola is kinda in the background of this one, although he did get the first solo.

I have a Behringer U-Phoria audio interface. I recently upgraded to a Universal Audio Volt and it's... a little bit better? Sound from the input into Logic is pretty much identical. Output sounds a little bit better (probably a better DAC in the Universal Audio interface). Not much in it, to be honest. I've still got the Behringer connected to one of my other computers.

Eve is no longer going, but Doug (Eve's main man) is a member of Bass Upfront on Facebook, and was saying recently that he's considering opening up, but only for custom commissions. I played some Eve basses back at the Bass Guitar Show in 2014. Lovely things. Incredibly light too.

Hasn’t Dirnt jumped ship back to Gibson? I’ve seen him pimping the new Epiphone version of the Grabber online recently. Or is he “non-exclusive”?

Hopefully they’re more like the Trace Elliot people then. I’ve heard good things about their current range of guitar amps, that they still have that wonderfully fuzzy Hiwatt sound, so hopefully someone there knows what they’re doing.

Abe Laboriel is an absolute monster, and, considering his sheer number of credits, should be far better known than he is. The man just bleeds groove, and has invented more techniques and different playing styles than practically anyone else! His son also plays drums for Paul McCartney... The only other players I can think of who just ooze groove the way he does are Bobby Vega and Richard Bona.

Depends if they bought the people along with the name, and if the new owners care about the brand and its heritage. For instance, Marshall are now owned by the Swedish company who made their headphones and Bluetooth speakers, but it’s still Marshall because all the same people work there in Milton Keynes. Trace Elliot is owned by Peavey now, and obviously none of the original Trace people work there, but the people who are making the new Trace gear are enormous Trace fanboys who are obsessed with getting the sound and feel as close to the original Trace experience as possible. Just wondering which one of these Hiwatt is closest to in that regard…?

Hiwatt seem to be the last of the old-school British amp companies to get on the small-but-powerful bass amp thing - Laney. Orange, etc have been at it for a while now. Now, if Marshall would just get back into making bass amps...

I haven't found it for sale online anywhere. Maybe it's just been announced but not released yet? They've always made good gear - the guitarist in my band has a Hiwatt head and it sounds wonderfully filthy. They're just a bit "invisible" these days.

Looks like another classic British amp manufacturer have jumped on the lightweight bass amp train - Hiwatt. https://britampco.co.uk/hiwatt/shop/details/HW-BD-770-STUDIO-BLACK.html Not sure when these came out - must have been fairly recently, but has anyone tried one? They do a more "traditional" looking version too - same amp in a more classic-looking Hiwatt head enclosure.

@MacDaddy OK, you win. More pics. This is the Spector that changed my life (just after I had a nice set of Nordstrand BigBladeMan pickups fitted): … and me and my my Sei, which I’ve now had for 21 years:

I've had a few that were important to me. One that changed the course of my life. And another one I'd like to track down and get back. My first bass was an "Axe" Precision copy that I got in 1991. It was not a good instrument. I upgraded it with some Seymour Duncan pickups (the ones that had the little white EQ switches actually built into the pickup) but, eventually realised you can't polish a turd, and sold it to the local music shop and got something better. I actually came across it again some years later, and, blimey, it was horrible. So, it was important in as much as it was my first bass, but, facing facts, it was a piece of 💩. The first really significant one is a Spector NS5-CRFM that I bought in 2005, because the act of buying that bass took my life in a totally different direction. I'd been looking for a nice Spector for a while, and I found this one online, but it was in the US and the person selling it wouldn't ship internationally. Luckily, I had a holiday to the US booked, so I thought I'd ask this girl I knew a little bit from some online interactions (who was at uni in the next town over from where I was going to stay on my trip) if I could get it delivered to her, and then pick it up while I was over. She said yes. And we've been married 18 years and have three kids who wouldn't exist if it wasn't for that bass. And I still have it - it's a family heirloom now! The one that got away was a bass I had made by Chris McIntyre, back when he was working at The Gallery in London, This would have been back in about 1996. It wasn't a proper Sei - that came later. I bought a through-neck body from Brandoni, and got Chris to basically transform it into something entirely different - different body shape, longer neck (ie, it went from having 22 frets to 26), different headstock, Kahler trem, everything. I loved that bass on a very fundamental level. Playing it got me through some very difficult times in the late 90s (suffice to say a whole lot of things fell apart in a very short space of time), and it's probably not an exaggeration to say that I might not be here today but for that bass. I foolishly sold it to the Notting Hill Music Exchange in 2001 because I needed the money. I've been looking out for it sporadically for the last 23 years. I have lots of other nice basses now (two lovely custom Maruszczyks, my wonderful Sei, a MM Bongo, the aforementioned Spector and a few others) but I'd love to get that one back again. It'd be like coming full circle. This was it:

It’s one of my all-time favourite records. It evokes a mood, and paints a far more realistic picture of Los Angeles than most other bands do - no glamour, no hyperbole, just love for a place where these people grew up. There’s some lovely bass on there, and Navarro is utterly sublime on some of the tunes - the solo on “Big Sur” is beautiful, and probably the second best thing he’s ever recorded (the first being the solo in Three Days, which was apparently all one take).

His pitch has always been pretty bad live. There's some video out there of him in Porno For Pyros doing the Woodstock '94 festival and I'm not sure he got a single note in key. When they came back for the 2010 NIN/JA tour with Nine Inch Nails, he sounded great. He'd started using IEMs and was actually singing mostly in key. He's deteriorated significantly since then though. Although what I saw of the show they did in London a couple of months back wasn't too bad. By Perry standards, anyway. Dave, Chaney and Perkins had a side project for a while called The Panic Channel back in 2006. They did one album that wasn't bad, but it was a lot more "conventional" alt-rock than what everyone was used to hearing from Jane's. It was OK, just not very interesting.

I wouldn’t call it a revolving door. For the vast majority of their time together, it’s been Avery or Chaney. And Stephen Perkins has been their only drummer. There’s been five bass players who’ve performed live with Jane’s - in addition to Avery and Chaney, there was Duff McKagan (who was in the band for six whole months!), Martyn LeNoble (from Porno For Pyros) who finished off the 2010 NIN/JA tour when Avery quit, and Flea (during the 1997 “relapse” tour). Their last album (The Great Escape Artist, 2011) featured Chaney and Dave Sitek on bass. Supposedly Duff wrote some bass parts for it, but never recorded them. Would have been interesting to hear that.

Farrell might not be on junk any more, but he’s a certified p!sshead. I’ve seen Jane’s a bunch of times, and he always comes out with a big bottle of wine, that’s usually all gone by the third or fourth song. You can tell - he’s in key for the first few tunes, then it gets wobblier and wobblier as the night goes on. His excuse of not being able to hear himself is ⚽🔒🔒. He wears IEMs and could have had the person doing the sound turn him up. He’s just frustrated that his vocal chops aren’t nearly what they once were, and was taking it out on Navarro. Apparently they’ve only cancelled one more show in the wake of this - what are they going to do? They have another 14 dates to do. I’m guessing Dave’s going to quit and drop off the tour, they’ll bring in Josh Klinghoffer or Troy Van Leeuwen to finish the tour (they covered for Navarro while he was out with long COVID), then, after the tour, Jane’s will go back on the shelf. Hoping Navarro and Avery get together once the dust has settled and write another Deconstruction album (fantastic but little-known project they did together right after Jane’s split up the first time).

Cheers Chris, thanks for clearing that up. Didn’t know he made his own.

Earthbound AD (my current band - female-fronted, slightly proggy metal) - quite proud of this album, it turned out really well and I got to do some nice bass stuff: Evyltyde - female-fronted “classic” metal. Was in the band for about a year in 2015-2016. I didn’t play on any of this stuff though! 5th Man Down - band I was in about 20-odd years ago. Signed, toured, did Bloodstock, etc. I think the material still stands up!

Got to meet Ian a few months back. He was doing a clinic thingy, mostly concentrating on getting interesting sounds out of his Helix. Genuinely nice guy, proper bass nerd too. I met Scott back in the dim and distant past, well before he was doing SBL, and he was nice enough. Not seen him since though, so I’ve no idea what he’s like now.

Likewise really. The music was pretty good, but I’d had my fill of rap-metal at that point. Once LP cut down on the rapping stuff, they improved massively. I was quite partial to Senser and One Minute Silence back in the day though… they knew how to put on a good show. I was at the infamous One Minute Silence gig at the Garage where they encouraged the audience to trash the place, and trash it they did… 😮 Let’s face it, the Judgment Night soundtrack and Body Count’s first album were the pinnacle of rap-metal. And those came out in the early 90s.

That's not a million miles away from what Alan at ACG did - he offers his own multicoil pickups and filter preamp combo that definitely get you in the Wal ballpark, tone-wise, but his body shapes are more contemporary. Maruszczyk will do you any of their range with the Turner pickups and the Lusithand or Underhill preamp, anything from a traditional P to an exotic-wood single-cutaway beast, and get you most of the way there. Once Turner starts offering 6-string pickups, that's what I'll be doing. I've already got my 6-string Frog specced out! And, of course, those pickups and circuits are available to anyone who wants to order them, so your luthier of choice can build you whatever you want with them, or you could retrofit them into anything you've got. But some people must have the whole package - the electronics, and the look. Wal has that distinctive look that only British luthiers in the '70s and '80s had - think Shergold, Burns, Shaftesbury, even the older Overwater models. Doesn't matter that they weighed a ton, often balanced badly, and any number of other issues that more modern designs have addressed.

In this case, I kinda understand it, since new Wals start at nearly £8,000 and have a six-year waiting list. There's no cheaper import versions, and used ones are rare and just as expensive. If someone is making a bass that gets you 95% of the way there in terms of tone and looks, then I think it's probably a good thing, if you want to get that Justin Chancellor / Mick Karn / Geddy Lee / Nick Beggs / Percy Jones look and tone. Paul Herman isn't hurting for business right now, hence the waiting list. The real Wal guys, who won't accept anything that doesn't have the logo and wasn't made in Weybridge or Cobham, will still spend the big money and wait years. The guy who makes the Octave basses is only doing 4-string Mk2 copies right now anyway. So anyone who wants more strings, or wants a Mk1 or Mk3 shape, are out of luck.