Bassassin

Apropos of nothing really, but it's interesting to me that the players you mention there - Townshend, Marr, Summers, Edge, Lifeson - are all high on my list of guitarists who have really made me sit up & listen, whether I particularly like their bands/music or not. And it's all more to do with what they bring to the songs, rather than solos. Lifeson would be in my top 3 favourite guitarists and he is an incredibly lyrical, tasteful & to my ears, original soloist - but I'm more inspired & engaged by the colour & texture he contributes to the music as a whole.

Daring colour for dear old Fender. Although they missed a trick not calling it P Green.

I've had a bunch of Indian-made Sunn Mustang Strats, never had a bass but I imagine the quality's similar. The guitars were actually very good, some cheap hardware (poor tuners & bridge blocks made of crumbly zinc alloy) being the real letdowns. Otherwise nice solid timber (not ply) bodies & quality fretwork. Later ones had a changed headstock shape & different logos and apparently aren't as good - not sure but I don't think those are Indian-made. Did a bit of reading about them & it seems the Sunn brand was UK/EU only, in other territories they were sold as 'Squier II' and command higher s/h prices than the Sunns. Late 80s/early 90s Indian-made Encores appear to be the same instruments & are quite well regarded. Pickups on this one could be DiMarzio DP127s. If so they'll have red/black/green/white wires.

Yeah. It really is who can go widdly-widdly-weeee the fastest. I think we already knew that anyway.

I've always found it interesting that people seem to assume that the reason players such as Dave Edge don't play 'proper' solos all over songs is because they can't. From my own perspective as a composer, I don't dislike traditional solos but more often than not they're little more than gap-fillers, & I prefer to do something that is (to me at least) more interesting or creative. The guitarist in my last band (who had no interest in actually contributing to songwriting) occasionally expressed frustration that our songs didn't give him more opportunities to solo - but if a song doesn't need a solo then it doesn't get a solo!

This is one of those one of those nonsensical questions to which I normally respond by pointing out it's art, not a bloody competition. Prince was without question an incredibly talented, versatile, gifted & prolific musician but my personal issue is that I don't happen to particularly like anything I've ever heard by him - which given his success over a long career is quite a lot. I'd say someone's greatness as a musician has to be proportionate to the impact they've had on music as a whole, which broadly means how they've influenced & changed the playing of those musicians who come after them. I think you'd be hard-pushed to point to a current guitar 'great' & go - that's a clear Prince influence right there. There are probably a lot more composers & songwriters directly influenced by him but that can't qualify him as 'greatest guitar player'. The whole 'best guitarist' thing always seems terribly reductive, it seldom amounts to any more than who somebody's decided is best at going widdly-widdly-weeee with a guitar. And so it is with this guy's Prince article - if you doubt he's the GREATEST EVAAR, just listen to him playing a solo, written by someone else. There are guitar players who've been the catalyst for & shaped the sound of entire genres of music - for example there's not a metal band on Earth which doesn't owe a debt, directly or indirectly, to Tony Iommi. Not sure he's on many 'greatest ever' lists - but plenty he's influenced will be.

This is some old Vintage brand metal style bass that someone's taken a tenon saw to. Poor thing, it was ugly to start with and they haven't exactly helped.

You'd definitely need to look at it in person. I guess this explains why it's £200+ less than the typical Ebay grifter price!

I'd say yes it is - it looks to be in very good, original & unmolested order & JVs (admittedly usually Ps) tend to be listed in 4 figures these days, and typically not as clean as this one. The 'Squier' word always seems to trigger a bit of sniffy indignation, even when attached to high-quality, sought-after & collectable instruments. But these will almost certainly continue to appreciate and to be base, you could make a couple of hundred from this one just by buying it & flipping it. Which is probably what someone (not me) will do. Regarding quality as an absolute, realistically you could buy a £100 Harley Benton & with a bit of fettling & inexpensive upgrading make it play as well & sound as good as a JV, or any other standard J type. But that's not the point, as far as I can tell.

All sound pretty much the same to me, listening on decent studio headphones. Maybe as much to do with the messy, heavy handed stunt-bass playing, where he's so focused on I'M SO FAAAAAAST MUM!!! that there's no opportunity to hear individual notes, never mind tone. Oh god, he's started slapping now, enough of this awful w@nk. So no, nothing there to persuade me that tone's not 99.99999% pickups, strings, electronics & technique. Ugly, showy clattering is ugly, showy clattering, whatever the material.

Would have sent you there anyway! So, what's this Aria, then?

Post a pic if you can - not familiar with an 'Image'. Good source of APII info & knowledgeable people here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/AriaProII

Don't know my low-end Squiers well enough to be sure but would any Fender/Squier with a maple board be glued-on, rather than have a one-piece neck with skunk stripe? Tuners look too nice for an Affinity-level Squier. Looks like a half-decent bitsa with a sticker to me. About £150's worth.

Interesting old 60s Kawai he's playing in the pic. Not what you'd expect.

I think it's certainly 60s MIJ, bear in mind in seller-speak everything 60s MIJ is Teisco!

Been racking my brains since this turned up, because I was sure I've seen this concept before, in guitar form. Turns out I was right: https://www.facebook.com/layerguitars/photos And if you scroll down the pics a bit, guess what's there? Only with a neck... Page seems to have last been updated in 2016, so guessing the idea didn't really take off. Cool enough art-piece, I suppose.

Yes - it's a Hondo. There was one on Reverb, in Italy. Not my idea of Hondo money, tbh! https://reverb.com/uk/item/32293146-hondo-professional-bass-hp1216-vintage-year-1981-made-in-japan-matsumoku-factory FWIW I don't think it's Matsumoku - that's a Chushin bridge used on MIJ Washburns & other Chushin-made basses, never seen one on a Matsumoku.

Happily no room for drum-dabbling any more, but now I'm unable to rein in my guitar-dabbling, keyboard-dabbling & recording-dabbling. I think I have to accept I'm just an irredeemable, inveterate dabbler. There's no hope for me, is there?

True that - Hondo tried to position itself upmarket in the early 80s, as Japanese brands like Ibanez & Aria Pro were transitioning to original designs with pro endorsements. I've read about this idea of Tokai Gakki in Hamamatsu building Hondos but there's no evidence for it - Tokai was a small concern that had to outsource its own production to the likes of Kasuga Gakki so it's doubtful they'd have taken on high-volume OEM mainstream brand production. However there are Matsumoku-stamped Hondos, & very high quality stuff came from Samick in Korea, who built the majority of the brand's output. Don't know which manufacturer this came from - but I want one:

Not without precedent though - in the early 80s Hondo - which was definitively far more in the bargain-basement low-end cheap copy arena than Ibanez ever was - started having DiMarzios fitted as standard on a lot of models. For a while used ones were a good source of bargain pickups! They also featured on cheaper (while not cheapo) instruments like Westbury & MIJ Vox. Yeah I know it's OT but I like to think I'm contributing to the thread not getting locked!

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.