Bassassin

Conveniently, I like both basses and cats. On reflection, becoming a bass player didn't actually make me any less staggeringly sexually unattractive than I already was - which, on further reflection, was hugely unsurprising. I did dabble with the idea of becoming a drummer, though:

Baffling. Never seen one of these before, not sure which is harder to understand - why someone made it, or how it's physically possible to play it. Best explained perhaps by "just because you can, it doesn't mean you should".

It's thinner-sounding but I'd say still useable, did the same thing with a push/pull pot on another P fitted with a Model P. In fairness the see-through one's so heavy it has its own gravitational field & weather systems, meaning it doesn't get played too much. That & the neck's a bit sh!t. Regarding that Ibby Blazer - don't know if I'm about to shatter any illusions - but they weren't fitted with DiMarzios as standard. A lot of people assume they were because of the hex poles & cream covers, but that was the fine art of imitation at work there. Ibanez called it a 'Super P-4', and they were probably made by Maxon. And just to keep things a bit more on-topic - I have done the OP the courtesy of watching his video. Hmm.

I can't even start to understand that. And I don't want to.

Little switch is series/parallel, pickup is indeed a PAF-stickered DiM Model P, which I liberated from an old Satellite P copy which I paid £50 for, and then sold for £100. Them were the days... Never seen tort blocks but I'm pretty sure some of those Overwater J types had black MOTO scratchplate material inlays.

This is like that "Are YOU A Boring Bass Player?" guy all over again. Looks like the OP's been a member here for 12 years - surprising then, that it hasn't clicked that we're largely a bunch of middle-aged, highly experienced, frequently pro/semi-pro musicians, many of whom will have been knocking up bitsa basses for the last three or four decades! Oh, and here's one I made earlier.

There are very good repro pickups & knobs available for vintage Arias. Looks like that's what it needs. From the pics it could be a TSB350 (bolt neck, 2-a-side headstock) or TSB500 (set neck, 4-inline headstock). Looks like depending on the year, it had either standard black speed knobs or Aria's own design, reproductions of which are made by Repro Guitar Parts. I think the pickup's an MB-III, with exposed P type poles. Not sure if Armstrong do a version of this but Rautia Guitars do one in the correct cream finish. Anything else it needs will be standard parts, not sure of pot & cap values but someone on one of the Aria FB groups will know.

£15 car boot trash, on a very good day. Doubt it's MIJ, has what looks like a mahogany neck which on instruments like this (mid 70s or later, at an educated guess) is typical of Korean manufacture, as is the wonky, half-formed headstock shape. The missing/broken tuner could be a hint at that too - Korean versions of this style (originally Gotohs) have chromed plastic keys which crack & fall off, which is likely what happened to the original. It's in an awful state, original finish stripped & badly Ronsealed, showing the cheap & nasty plywood build, random, broken components. Not even any use for firewood as plywood burns really badly. "Don't bother chucking that on the fire".

Had one of these for ages - sounds as odd as it looks! Very lovely, lightweight, playable thing, SR-ish skinny neck, which I love. Can't remember the last time I played it, but I'm still quite unreasonably attached to mine!

Well, it's '75, so lawsuit era, technically.

Oh, that's lovely! You really don't see many of these. Does highlight the mystery though of why sellers prefer to make stuff up rather than spend 10 minutes with Google. This '60s Italian-made bass' does indeed have a neckplate stamped 'Made In Japan', and also has a serial number which places it at September 1975. It's a Fujigen model 2385, identical to the equivalent Ibanez - which might have been a sensible way to sell it, you'd think!

Unfinished Sweet by Alice Cooper - featuring the great Dennis Dunaway:

It was indeed! Cheers! A bit of Googling later, pretty sure it's one of Paul's, seems to be a signature body style: Hopefully, he'll drop by to confirm.

There was actually a BC member (whose name unfortunately escapes me) who built basses a lot like this for a couple of years. He did commissions for several member here, this was maybe 10 or so years ago, if I remember he abandoned it as a business because of the pressure & time constraints of doing so alongside a day job/normal life. Can't for the life of me remember his name, and for that reason would guess he doesn't post here any more. IIRC his builds tended to be small-bodied, headless, short/medium scale & chambered to keep them light. This does look a lot like his basses in terms of design & timbers. Was interested because I had ideas about a compact, lightweight fretted/fretless double neck for the band I was in at the time. Not much help, but hopefully someone else will remember who I'm talking about!

Funny, my immediate reaction to the thread was."nah, me neither" but that's not strictly true. Most slap you hear these days does tend to be the frenetic clattering & boinkety-boinking of the Youtube bedroom obsessives - but I have to remind myself that was pretty much me in 1985. I spent months making my thumb bleed trying to work out what Mark King, Nick Beggs etc were doing, and got to the point I could ham my way through Mr Pink well enough to impress people who'd never actually listened to it. I've always played in rock/metal/prog bands so my attempts to shoehorn in a bit (at times a lot, to be fair) of sloppily executed clunking & pinging were misguided, at best. In the fullness of time (and possibly a smattering of musical maturity) I got bored & wandered off. Like a few others here I'm partial to a bit of RATM, FNM, RHCP, have seen & been suitably jawdropped by Vic Wooten (spent an hour or ten trying to get my head around his double thumbing techique) and still own a copy of A Physical Presence - but slap is 99.9% off my musical radar & I don't expect I'll need to revisit it as a playing technique or a compositional element at any time soon.

Hilariously bad stickered-up £80 tat copy, sprayed with Halfords grey rattlecan primer then belt-sanded. Second-best laugh of the day!

It's probably more Cygnus X-1 than Don't You Want Me Baby, but I've been having a lot of fun with this: https://www.kvraudio.com/product/taurus_by_smart_electronix Can't have too many free synths.

Korean, probably Cort, I'd say late 80s/early 90s. Quite an interesting take on a Jazz, does need a good clean up but I would guess worth £120 - £150-ish.

I did struggle to find a DAW I got on with since migrating from hardware multitrackers 4 or 5 years ago. Reaper was my first choice, but I found it impenetrable & unintuitive, and the manuals garbled. Then tried Studio One - mine too, came as a free bung with some hardware. Seemed more accessible but my supposedly fully functional free copy started regularly deciding my evaluation period had expired. And so did my interest in the software. Tried Tracktion (forerunner of Waveform) after that - liked it a lot at first, very accessible, easy to get up & running - but the more involved I got, the less sense the workflow made. I found the lack of a distinct mixer view incredibly fiddly, with everything crammed into the end of the track window, and when rendering a stereo file, for reasons I couldn't fathom all MIDI instruments went fractionally out-of-time. Particularly obvious & frustrating with drums. So - I've gone full circle & come back to Reaper - and I love it. This time I decided to largely ignore the impenetrable documentation and avail myself of the many YouTube tutorials available, just to grasp the basic principles and get up & running. I'm still only scratching the surface but so far I think it's a great piece of software, very flexible and definitely fits my way of working. It's stupidly inexpensive considering how powerful it is - and comes with what's effectively a permanent evaluation period, if you begrudge the developers their measly $60.

Fair point. Worth another quid if he'd at least run it under the tap.

Call that busy? Can't see the sound guy's dog anywhere!

Haven't bothered looking at this thread since Thursday. Guess that means I'm a bored bass player.

These older guitars were what's called 'strip mahogany' - in other words plywood - in an attempt to make cheap necks more warp-resistant. However in the early 80s Chushin Gakki launched a high spec guitar called 'Bambu' which was made with a through-body bamboo neck. Will post some pics & stuff when I'm not on my phone. Edit: Here's a convenient link to a Chushin Bambu that went through Ebay a couple of weeks ago: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Maya-Bambu-Guitar-Chushin-Gakki-factory-/174658482254 And the manufacturer's blurb about them. Not too high-res, so you may want your specs:

It's interesting - but a bit expensive for the poor condition. Looks like it's been neglected for a lot of years - would like some reassurance that the hex screws aren't seized, and I'm not impressed by how chewed-out a couple of the intonation screws look. Might drop a tenner on it but 20-odd quid's too much.

I could go check the pickups on my '84 (ish) Mori, as I still have it - but it wouldn't help much, it's one of those little guitar things, not a bass! I'm really only guessing that the 8 prefix means '80s, it's quite likely it doesn't. Considering that many of these instruments are straight Fender & Gibson copies, you'd normally expect MIJ examples to have stopped manufacture by 1979, as most established manufacturers - including Moridaira - were moving to original designs towards the end of the decade. If it wasn't for the numbers possibly suggesting otherwise, I'd put serialised Moridaira copy instruments between '76 & '79. It's simply the fact that most of these serials start with 8 (something the MIJ community's really only just noticed!) that makes me wonder if there's a pattern to them. Previously I sort of assumed they were either random (like early Matsumoku serials seem to be) or sequential producton numbers.