Russ

Moses are no longer in the graphite neck business. They make carbon fibre speaker enclosures and violin fingerboards now. Shame. They had a graphite neck for practically everything.

I always saw Yes as basically complicated folk music, with more in common with Greensleeves and medieval madrigals than with rock, other than the instrumentation. Am I a big fan? No. Casual at best. But am I glad they exist? Definitely. And everyone likes Roundabout and Owner Of A Lonely Heart.

I don't think the graphite neck thing would have been a dealbreaker. Up until very recently, Status made replacement MM necks - the ones on the old 1980s Cutlass basses were made by Modulus, so I'm sure EBMM could have just paid Status to make some if it would have made a graphite Flea Bass possible. And wasn't it Status who made the necks for the NAMM 100 basses? I do remember hearing the stories about him wanting the whole Stingray line renamed to "Flea Basses", but I think even he isn't quite that arrogant! At the time, EBMM didn't do signature basses for anybody and they didn't want to start doing them, even though they'd been doing signature guitars for a while for Steve Lukather, Albert Lee, EVH and so on.

(dupe, sorry)

Most King Crimson fans are older, and still listen to their music on physical media (not to mention that KC only permitted their music to become available on streaming services less than two years ago). Same with Gabriel. Older demographic who still listen to CDs and vinyl, and who probably listen to Radio 4 in the car rather than music. Dream Theater have a rabid fanbase who buy physical media, and lots and lots of merch, whose age ranges from teens to sixty-somethings. Same thing with RATM. Remember when they had the Christmas no.1 a few years back? So I can't really take a statement that a band has had a large number of listens on Spotify as evidence of their "relevance" particularly seriously. Vulfpeck are a fun band. I like their live performances - they have a lot of energy and I like their staging. Joe Dart is a good bass player who deserves a signature instrument. But, if the instrument isn't very good, it makes the people who make it look bad. I don't think it was a good business decision for EBMM to work with him (or, more likely, the band's drummer who is in charge of all their business dealings). Commerford's signature Stingray is a regular Stingray with a built-in retractable ramp. Myung's Bongo is relatively close to the regular 6-string Bongo, but with passive electronics and a narrower neck (borrowed from the 5-string) with a funky dual-wood fretboard. Neither are as much of a departure from their stock instruments as Joe Dart's bass. When you start taking features away, you limit your audience. Instead of going so barebones, they could have just had a regular, natural finish MM Sterling with no scratchplate, but retaining the electronics and maybe adding active/passive switching. I dunno. The whole thing just seems hugely ill-conceived to me.

I think they're right to keep their signature basses to a minimum. Apparently a big part of the reason Flea jumped from MM to Modulus back in the day because EBMM wouldn't make him a signature bass. And he's far, far more visible than Dart, Myung, Commerford, etc. Although, if they're considering it, I'll have a Bongo 6 in red and black.

John Myung - bass player for Dream Theater (Grammy-winning prog metal band) Tim Commerford - bass player for Rage Against The Machine Probably not your genres of choice, but both massive in their fields with millions of record sales between them.

I believe he uses stock Stingrays with no modifications. Although he had that custom 3-string they made for him many moons ago (I think he lost it in a fire).

Joe Dart is a great player, but he's also kinda a "flavour of the month" player. He's to the 2020s what Stuart Zender was to the 90s, without the multi-platinum worldwide fame. His sig bass should really have been a Sterling By Musicman instrument. There are very few MM players who have the profile to do a proper MM signature bass justice. Obviously John Myung has one, Tim Commerford has one, and they should really do one for Tony Levin. Joe Dart isn't a patch on those guys in terms of visibility.

Chris Chaney has always used Aguilar every time I've seen him (once, many moons ago, with Alanis, and several times since with Jane's Addiction). Maybe he's endorsing Ashdown now? They seem to have got a few new people on board recently. Although, if that was the case, I'd be expecting him to be using one of the fancy new dual-VU ABMs rather than one that's 15-odd years old.

Lobster is a bit of an EBMM fanboy - he has a bunch of them. For him to be putting down an MM instrument it must be pretty bad.

Thanks for chipping in, Mike. Good to see you're still tooled up for graphite. I'll drop you a line on FB as I have something in mind, and there's no hurry! I remember a review of one of your Iceni basses with a graphite neck back in Bassist sometime in the 90s. I seem to recall an interesting neck/body join on that instrument too.

I saw the Kickstarter for those when they were first announced. They kinda lost me when they said they wouldn't be doing extended-range versions. I'd have thought many of the people who would be interested in something so decidedly non-Fender would be extended-range players, so I'd have thought they'd have done at least a 5-string.

Manson is majority owned by Matt Bellamy of Muse these days, and I'm sure his pockets are sufficiently deep. They're still making great stuff (I saw James Leach - ex-Sikth - is using their basses now), and the Wolstenholme/Status connection could make it a possibility.

I wonder if Jon offers them on anything other than the JJB range, or for necks with more than 4 strings? Last time I reached out to him about getting a quote he never got back to me.

I wonder how different they are to regular wood necks when it comes to temperature and humidity changes and so on - would just having the graphite wrap keep that in check? That, to me, is the killer app of graphite necks.

I was forgetting a couple of others - there's Emerald, out of Ireland, who mostly do graphite acoustics, but also do a nice acoustic bass, and they've done replacement necks in the past. And there's Basslab out of Germany, who make some crazy stuff (as well as some more conventional stuff). They use "composite", but it's basically carbon fibre. I remember trying one of their Soul basses, and the thing was unbelievably light. I think they're hollow.

Could have been. Might have to ask him. Weren't the Enfield ones just a graphite wrap around a regular maple neck?

Another name for the list of people who still make graphite neck basses is Geoff Gould - original founder of Modulus. He has his own G.Gould brand now, and their stuff is very nice, if very much in the Modulus mould (no pun intended): https://www.ggould.com/home.html If anything, his website looks older than Status' one.

Wow. Their upright costs $12,000! On the other end of the scale, there's these guys: https://www.enya-music.com/collections/guitar/products/x4-cutaway Surprisingly nice acoustics for not an awful lot of money.

As others have mentioned, Modulus are still around, but they're not making many instruments these days are they are severely backordered, much like Zon. Their prices have also skyrocketed. Bogart are still producing basses in Germany, and they're great, even if they are, a bit like Gus, an acquired taste in the looks department. I wonder if Mike from Zoot is still geared up for making them? His early basses (back when he used the Iceni name) all had the option of a graphite neck. Moses in the US stopped making replacement graphite necks a couple of years ago, and only make carbon fibre speaker enclosures and violin fingerboards now. They would have made you a graphite replacement neck for almost anything. There's loads of carbon fibre acoustic instruments around at the moment (mostly coming from China) so there's obviously some demand for it. I'd just rather not buy a replacement graphite neck from AliExpress!

I wasn't aware they were still offering the Hellborg bass. I wonder if it still had the crazy 36V preamp? I tried one of the old ones years ago at the Bass Centre - it was light, very small, and stupidly loud. Every amp I tried it with had the clip light flashing.

There's a 5-string headless in the classifieds too. And a Streamline. Let's hope we don't start getting into Wal money for used ones.

Thinking about it, this may well have been on the cards for a while. Take two of their most high-profile endorsers - Mark King and Alex Venturella. Both of them have been playing other brands as of late - King has gone back to his Jaydees, and apparently V-Man has a new endorsement with Jackson. They probably both knew the writing was on the wall. It'll be interesting to see where Chris Wolstenholme goes for his new basses post-Status. Maybe Manson? Apparently Matt Bellamy from Muse owns them now.

He's very deliberate in as much as he's saying that they will no longer be building the "same" range of Status basses and guitars "in Colchester". Essex used to be the epicentre of the British bass industry, with Status, Ashdown (and, before them, Trace), SimS, etc.