Russ

Ben is a bit of a tool junkie. He's a collector of vintage tools, and actually also runs a vintage tools website! He's got videos on his Crimson Guitars channel that consist of him just fawning over his tools.

I've got a pair - 5-string HH, fretted and fretless. Love them. What a huge, unmistakeable sound. Even if they look a bit like a bog seat. The (older) fretted one has had some neck issues over the years though. I had it heat-treated and it seems OK now, I just hope it stays that way. The newer fretless has all the new aluminium hardware and is far lighter than the old fretted one, but still has the same massive tone.

I've tried a Boden Prog. Lovely, if somewhat esoteric. I tried it out as I'm on a bit of a quest for something super-light. Weighs practically nothing, which I love - my back and neck very much appreciate that at my age! It weighs maybe 7lbs. It's small and would fit in a guitar gig bag. Neck is a strange, bevelled shape and the whole headless thing always throws me (you'll feel like the neck ends too soon). Plays like butter though, very well-dressed frets, low action and a surprisingly big sound for such a small, light instrument, with super-punchy mids and a great B string. It's also extremely crisp and will magnify any faults in your technique! Downsides? Pricey. No variations in finishes or colours. No fretless option (although fretless on a multiscale bass would be a bit weird). If they did some of the funky colour schemes they offer on their guitars I'd definitely be more interested, especially if they did one like the new Per Nilsson Singularity guitar, with the red-and-black stained ash body and the red anodised hardware. Verdict: Awesome, but definitely try before you buy.

I like the 'concept' of Hartke better than the execution. I had a 2x10" Hartke combo years ago, and I went through 3 speakers in less than a year. It sounded great but just couldn't cope if the amp was turned up above 12 o'clock - the speakers were super-fragile. Larry's a nice enough guy (met him several times at Sam Ash on 34th St in NYC, where he runs the bass department) and his ideas are good, but his execution is flawed and I'm not sure he has particularly good business sense, the current Hal Leonard debacle being the latest example.

The Ampeg SVT-7 does a pretty good job of nailing a proper valve tone. The trick is finding one that won't blow up on you.

The DBS amps were immense. You wouldn't want to move them without a handtruck and a van, but they were worth the weight. Probably the last good bass amp Marshall ever made. Given that Marshall don't make any Marshall-branded bass gear anymore (they have the Eden brand for that), if they put the DBS preamp into a big-power class D head and sold it as an Eden/Marshall DBS, with the proper black and gold livery, they'd clean up. The Bass-State, on the other hand, were cheap practice amps and almost entirely unremarkable.

You could always tell when the 'stars' were in town though based on the cars parked outside. I used to go over there on the Tube, and one day I remember seeing a big gold Rolls parked outside. Turned out the Rolls belonged to John Entwistle, and he was in there trying some stuff out. I was a bit starstruck and left him to it!

Back in 2003 I scored an endorsement with Warwick via their old UK distributor. I guess a lot of their UK-based endorsers at the time had kinda gone below the radar, so they were looking for new blood, and the band I was in at the time were starting to make a few waves. So I scored the endorsement and promptly ordered a Streamer Jazzman for silly money (well under four figures), and, when I got it, it was... meh. Horrible huge thick neck too. So I told them it probably wouldn't work out, went back to playing my Sei and flogged the Streamer on eBay for £500 more than I paid for it.

Never mind that. They've brought back the AFR. Played one back in the 90s. Lovely looking instrument, played and felt great, sounded kinda wimpy though. Maybe they've beefed it up a bit now.

Surprised John Hall hasn't had a s**t-fit about it and threatened to sue Stuart Spector. He seems happy to go after anything that even vaguely resembles a Ric and isn't built in China. Nice bass though.

It was good back when it was first on, playing 'proper' metal while Kerrang! played constant bad pop-punk on a loop. A whole channel playing what we used to only get three hours of on a Sunday night on Headbangers' Ball. They ended up basically becoming a carbon copy of Kerrang! in the end though, playing all the same drivel. And there's no need for two channels of that. No great loss. You want to watch metal videos? You have YouTube.

Yes, back when I had access to custom sets of Elites, I played 35-55-80-105-130, so very light to very heavy. I don't have easy access to custom sets anymore, so I've reverted to a standard light-gauge 5-string set. It suited how I played at the time, and I still maintain that there's no reason that the same note needs to sound the same on each string - string-to-string balance is overrated.

Been back and forth from LHR to EWR more times than I care to remember, and had a bass/basses with me on at least half of those occasions. Never been checked once, on either end. That doesn't mean you won't, but, in my experience, the likelihood is minimal. Maybe stuff a shabby-looking old gig bag in your case to bring it back in.

I used to see Brian May and Anita Dobson with annoying regularity on Kingston high street back in the mid-90s. He was hard to miss and you could hear him coming because of his clogs.

Yep. Part modern exotic wood singlecut, part rock'n'roll Thunderbird. All awesome.

I met Stu and Derrick (drummer) back in the late 90s, when I was helping out on the technical side of a Sony commercial Jay Kay was shooting. Lovely blokes. Got some nice bass kudos going with Stu, talking about Jaco and Larry Graham. But JK was a knob. I knew it from the second he roared into the place, in his souped-up AMG Merc. The Sony guys brought him a Winnebago to use as a changing room (everyone else we'd had there, including Premiership footballers, were happy to change in the bogs), he'd only talk to my boss, not us other peons and generally came across as an arrogant, overly-entitled man-child.

For me, Revelations are the best instruments available at the lower end of the market. Better than Squier, etc. They've done their homework, come up with cool designs, found a good factory to work with in China, and have the benefit of Entwistle's many, many years of experience. I remember loving the old Hohner Revelations back in the day, and I'm very glad they've made a comeback. My RBJ-67 5-string Jazz is a phenomenal instrument. Doesn't hurt that I only paid £300 for it.

Speaking of picks, how about a very bored-looking Mark King playing with a pick, with Midge Ure?

That's always the issue with Ibanez. They look great, play very well, have comfortable necks, aren't too heavy and... have bad electronics. Those Bartolini Mk1 pickups they put in everything are dreadful. The higher end ones that come with Nordstrands or Aguilars always sound 100% better. The best Ibby I ever played was a cheap-ish SR505 with a set of Delanos and an OBP-3 installed. The thing sounded massive, chunky with a Warwick-esque woody bite, nothing like the middly, twangy tone you hear from stock 505s.

Anyone got much experience with the Nexus SL? Looks like a good head with a ton of power. I haven't really connected with the Mesa Subway D-800 I bought a while back and this looks like a good, more substantial alternative.

Oh no. I had a Larkin many moons ago. It was a lovely instrument, weighed a ton but sounded huge. I actually looked up his website not too long ago to see what he'd been up to. RIP Chris.

It wasn't a black SSD-era Spector, was it, with the SSD pickups and SimS aqua blue LEDs? If so, that's my old bass... miss that one. It had growl in spades. To contribute to the thread, here's my son modelling my LED'd up Sei:

I've had a few regrets - first one was a pseudo-Sei, made from a Brandoni body, and fitted with a Bartolini MME pickup and a Kahler trem. That bass probably saved my life during some pretty low times back in the late 90s/early 00s. I foolishly sold it to Notting Hill Music Exchange about 16 years ago. The second one was another Sei - a 5-string fretless with Wal pickups and electronics. Sold it to a guy in Japan (who I think is a BC member) in 2005. I'm sure he loves it, but I miss it badly. The thing was amazing. Now I'm actually a proper grown-up with money, I'd buy either of them back in a heartbeat.

Probably about 90% fingerstyle, 10% pick these days. Once I shed that 'bass snob' attitude to using a pick, I threw myself into it and got quite good with one in the end. There's an articulation and tone to the notes that you get with a pick you can't get any other way, and it's worth knowing how to use one just for those moments. I have been working on an alternate technique for some of the pick stuff I play though, as there's a few songs I play where I would play part of the song pickstyle, and the rest fingerstyle, and I didn't want to keep reaching into my pocket for the pick. I keep my thumbnails long, then I play the downbeats with the thumbnail, then the rest with fingers (ie, thumb-2-3-4, repeat). It's a twangier and less complicated version (ie, less fingers involved) of the Matt Garrison technique that I've adapted for my own purposes, basically.

I think there's far more women being sexualised in music than men. Bieber is the musical equivalent of a very itchy venereal disease, but, to give the boy a little credit, he did things the modern way by promoting himself via the channels he had available before he was ever signed. MySpace has a lot to answer for in this regard.