Bassassin

I don't tend to be drawn to the happy-clappy, saccharine nonsense of most love songs. For some reason it's the existential angst & misery of loves lost, spurned or unrequited which seems to resonate with me. What an old goth pal of mine used to call 'slash-wrists music'.

I somehow never managed to nab a single Deko, despite checking regularly. Really wanted one of their T-Bird clones for £40, before they changed the body shape.

That's £200 more than it's worth. £30's probably OK for that old set of Schaller M4s.

Nasty late 70s Korean-made cheapo, would probably originally have been branded Satellite. Horrible plywood rubbish - I picked one up from Crack Converters for £25 a few years back. In fairness to them they had it up for £50 but happily gave me a 50% discount because one pickup wasn't working. This is still £142 with an hour left to go so fortunately it's not fooling many people. Will be bleakly amusing if it leaps up to £500 in the last 30 seconds.

Found a pic of the 2-pickup version body - the filled-in route is the right place for the neck pickup but the rest of the routing's totally different. Even if it started being routed for 2 pickups, you'd wonder why they'd bother filling it, considering a pickguard was going to cover it. Looks like veneered mahogany to me, solid rather than butcher-block.

I want a blue one. Shop in Thailand selling them, can't find any shipping info on the English version of the site but 9600 Baht = £220. https://www.musicplant.co.th/en/product/82298-80664/sqoesebs990

Strange one, that. Wonder if the routing template got put on the wrong place initially?

Just had a look at these on GG and if I was in the market for a passive J, I'd be down there tomorrow morning. https://www.guitarguitar.co.uk/product/230811411491027--sqoe-sjb800-sunrise-fade £189? Get in the bin, Harley Benton. Unfortunately no sign of that headless, though.

Probably did. My mum would have the radio on a lot so I was exposed to whatever was chart material at the time (mid 60s/70s) & she also was a bit of a classical music fan. I hated the light opera she sometimes listened to but the more bombastic orchestral stuff made a connection. I'm quite fond of a bit of bombast as well as a memorable hook, and I doubt that's a complete coincidence.

There's a short & not particularly in-depth 'making of' thing about the song here: Seems it's McCartney playing the slide guitar.

Good detective work! It's also a close relative of the Mats-made Epiphone ET280 - basically the same thing with a 4-inline headstock & single pickup. It's possible if you can get the paint off the original finish underneath will be restorable. I've had good results with a healthy dose of T-cut & elbow grease on similarly Dulux-ed basses & guitars - once you get the paint off, the original poly tends to be pretty bomb-proof.

Maybe. But if I told them I might have to kill them. You know how it is.

I know many things.

Just had a listen - not a Beatles fan (although my Mum was) & it's OK. Sound like a Lennon tune, nothing particularly cringeworthy about it, it's 4 mins so doesn't outstay its welcome. The tech used in its creation sounds interesting. If nothing else, it's better than the recent new thing by the Stones. Won't listen to either again though.

Not knockoffs as such - probably design licensing considering the apparent relationships between Japanese & Korean manufacturers - this is an MIK version from the mid 70s to (probably) early 80s, different pickups make these easy to spot: There's also a variant with a 2x2 headstock, MIJ, seen branded as Dynatone & Zenta, not sure who made these, possibly Guya. Although these do raise the question of ripoffs... These weren't anything to do with Teisco (too late) and weren't sold branded Kay. Interestingly they also turn up in a 1975 Aria catalogue, alongside a couple of Sakai-made Kalamazoo KG/KB copies. https://vintagejapanguitars.com/aria-1975-catalogue/

This is interesting! It's early/mid 70s & probably made by Sakai Mokko. Originally one of those Burns-inspired things & would've looked a lot like this: These turn up (like loads of old MIJ stuff) with a bewildering number of names & variations, but there are Sakai-branded examples which 99% confirms the manufacturer. I expect (if you do refin it) you'll probably find the screwholes for the top horn scratchplate & quite likely the old finish under the red. Looks like a cool project - for me the worst bit is the fretboard varnish which might take care to remove without damaging the binding. Frets don't look too badly worn & should tidy up OK. Do the pickups work? Not sure about these (never been hands-on with this type) but if they don't, it might be possible to re-use the chrome covers over replacements to keep the look. I'd expect the original bridge (if you have it) will be a pretty crude 2-saddle job, so if you intend to us a more conventional replacement, check the string spacing/neck width. Not too sure about these basses but a lot of the earlier original-ish MIJ stuff has pretty narrow spacing. Anyway, looking forward to seeing how this progresses!

My profoundest apologies and best wishes for a swift recovery! I perhaps should have mentioned that the visual experience requires no additional chemical enhancement... Dunno what your band done, Mush - but we been an' done a new vid, ain't we?

Bumping this thread because my band done another video! This is a little different to the previous one, visually and musically. The song's around 7 1/2 minutes long (it's prog, what ya gonna do?) and in two distinct sections, the first 3 minutes or so instrumental. My aim was to create (by manipulating free-to-use clips, mostly) the sort of visuals I'd want if we were able to perform this with back-projections/video screens onstage. Part two (the proper song bit) is a lyric video with visuals appropriate to mood/words (well, as far as I can tell - I only pluck the strings & press the buttons!) with a bit of green-screened performance. Recording-wise this is a bit of an oddity - we started this 3 or 4 years ago when we moved from using an old standalone digital multitracker to a PC based setup. For some reason I'd been using Tracktion as a DAW, but had terrible latency issues that I couldn't sort, which ultimately resulted in this song being shelved. Having moved to Reaper & doubled my RAM (whereupon latency problems magically vanished!) we carried on with other stuff & this got pretty much forgotten. I remembered it & dug it out a few months back & we decided it was worth salvaging, and that involved importing everything one track at a time into Reaper & then creating a tempo track (there are one or two time signature & tempo changes!) to get the MIDI drum parts working. All the instrument audio had to be lined up & that's when the consequences of the latency became apparent! Anyway, it was all salvageable (if you don't listen too closely!), a few bits added in to extend part of the instrumental section, and new vocals recorded. As I recall, I played my CSL (1980, MIJ) Jazz with DiMarzio Model Js, plus Yamaha SG1500 & Squier Strat. There's also a brief cameo from my Sire V7 fretless - which may or may not qualify as a bass solo... Anyway, if you enjoy bombastic self-indulgence, pretentiousness & melodrama you might like this, and if you don't - have a watch/listen anyway!

Elton was among the first artists I got into when I started listening to music properly as a kid in the 70s. Although I couldn't count Dee as a direct influence, it was clear (as soon as I became aware of such things) the level of musicianship within the band was stellar and Dee's playing impeccable. Also I had no idea he was from Gillin'am in Kent, just like me! Fellow Medway Tahns scum!

Well - I listened to 4 tracks (which was pretty much the time it took to read through the thread) and it's OK, I quite like it for this sort of thing. Some stellar playing, as one might expect, but like most instrumental fusion it makes me think: bland, over-fiddly prog with the edges buffed off, & someone blooping down a saxophone instead of a vocalist to give it context. It sounds composed, rather than improvised, & that's a good thing as far as I'm concerned - although it'd take repeated listens (that it isn't going to get) for me to start to properly appreciate how it's structured. There were a few passages where I thought - if I'd had that idea I'm sure I could do something epic with it. But I never have those sorts of ideas.

Not enough to change the design (if you can call it that!) the way the body has! I may have mentioned my antipathy for that slapped-on afterthought before - the only bit of the 4001/3 design John Hall didn't bother to trademark!

Imagine going to such lengths to make your Rickenbacker not look like a Rickenbacker - and then going "oh, sod it" & slapping the original ugly afterthought scratchplate back on it completely unmodified, not even bothering to trim it so it doesn't hang off the bottom edge of your svelte new Pointybacker.

Better late than never... Early/mid-70s Matsumoku-made starter-ish thing. Weird pickups, thin (but solid mahogany) body, generally OK unless it has a corkscrew neck, like the one of these I have, sitting around in bits! Fantom was a Japanese home-market brand - probably not that many of 'em in Hull. Wouldn't pay £300 for it.

I think this is a 70s/80s Japanese copy that someone's trying to fob off as genuine. To make it look more 'authentic' they've tried to make the pickup routing look rough & gone over the wiring channel with a forstner bit - notice how it's dead straight rather than the slight curve of the routing on genuine 4001s. The hardware (apart from the tuners) back up the theory - the chrome saddles & round tailpiece holes (real ones are more square) indicate it's a copy bridge, & the bridge pickup looks like the unit found in MIJ Shaftesbury 4001 fakers - the corners of the bobbin are much more squared-off than the genuine unit & the poles have rounded heads, not the hex heads of a modern Rick Hi-Gain or the squared-off slugs the pretendy horseshoe reissues have. The neck unit (which I assume is a toaster) has a single magnet rather than 6 individual poles a genuine toaster should have. Several Japanese brands had specific McCartney replicas - amongst others Greco, Kasuga/Heerby & Fernandes sold them in their home market in the 80s/90s (and probably later) and all of those would have had a single truss rod. A tenner says the one on this bass will be metric rather than the imperial size you'd imagine Rickenbacker would insist on!