Bassassin

Ooh, you rotten tease!

That's pretty poor for a brand-new £1100 bass & to suggest 'minor imperfections' (that look a lot like damage to me) are somehow to be expected is taking the p!ss. I recently bought a cheapo (£140) guitar from cheapo guitar purveyors Gear4Music, which arrived with the box looking like it'd been kicked here rather than driven in a van. The guitar had survived pretty well but had a bash on the bottom end of the body & minor lacquer cracks around the neck pocket & end of the headstock. They straight away offered me an exchange, or a £30 discount - which I was happy to accept as it's minor cosmetic damage & I bought the guitar to mod & mess with anyway. I might be willing to acept similar 'minor imperfections' on a high-end bass if they knocked, say, £100 off the price.

That's a thing of beauty - I do love a through-neck BB. I don't really do Ps but I'd be all over that - I'd probably just lick it or something.

Me! Me! Me, Sir!!! Well - nearly. There's a guitar version of this which has a built-in synth module & I almost bought one, until pragmatism talked me out of it & into a far more functional & versatile Fishman MIDI pickup. I still feel a bit cheated - I do like an unconventional instrument, & sort of wish the bass version had some silly gimmick to justify buying one!

If anyone ever needs an exemplar for the maxim 'just because you can, it doesn't mean you should' - just send them a link to this! That said - it's a wonderful example of utterly scatterbrained bodgegeneering, and the video's hilarious! Can't help thinking if they'd sat & thought about it for five minutes they could have forseen a lot of the (really obvious) problems & eliminated at least three prototypes! Wouldn't have been as much fun to watch though.

I'm incredibly shallow and first-impression aesthetics are very important to me. With the exception of the U7 (which is quite pretty) I've seldom seen such an impressive collection of vileness, ugliness & just plain wrongness gathered together in the one place. Me and my bank balance are quite relieved about that.

Nah, not diggin' it.

I always thought that Venom - widely held to be the band that kicked off an entire plethora of extreme metal sub-genres - sounded like a sh!t Motorhead knock-off with added Satan. That doesn't mean that I didn't quite like them.

I'd give the WD40 variant a go, but I've had the same can of Servisol for probably 20 years, and at this rate it'll outlive me.

That's really odd. Like someone's modded the backplates of the original open-gear Schallers so they could fit a set of sealed Schaller M4s. Really cannot imagine why you'd do that! Anyway, shame the neck's büggered on this, you'd think if the seller wanted to get anything like what they're asking, they'd invest a few € and get a luthier to sort it.

We had a thread about these a couple of years ago. Original link's dead but it looks as though they were £500 originally. https://www.basschat.co.uk/topic/454902-soloking-bass/ Anderton's flogging them off at half original rrp, presumably.

I did manage to pick one up a couple of years ago - it's a bit more black than I'd prefer, but has been refinished at some point - so maybe it's pink under the paint! I'm a bit of an MIJ guitars nerd so I'm interested in your source for info about Riverhead guitars - as I understand it, Riverhead was a sub-brand of Headway/Deviser, (still a going concern) & only exported briefly, making them rare outside of Japan. Like a lot of MIJ instruments it's unclear if the brand owner was a manufacturer, or if they were (like many) outsourced to a large-scale, mostly OEM manufacturer like Chushin Gakki or Kasuga Gakki. I'm always a bit sceptical when I read things like 'the factory burned down' as a reason for scarcity. I've heard this sort of thing a number of times - apparently Matsumoku shut because it burned down (it didn't, it was closed by its owners, Singer Sewing Machines); and Maya apparently had its factory destroyed in the Hanshin Earthquake - except Maya was only ever a brand, owned by Rokkomann & made by Chushin Gakki & Yamaki before production moved to Korea. A lot of these fanciful stories turn up in Ebay sales pitches, & I'm inclined to think that's where a lot of the mythology surrounding 70s & 80s MIJ guitars originates! That said, all of this stuff can be massively complex & contradictory (I feel I know less now than I did 25 or so years ago, when I first got seriously interested!) so any new sources of verified info is always good. Anyway, I think if you're going for the Full Set, you'll also want an RSB900, Riverhead's bog-standard Steinberger copy: And their none-more-80s RMB. Although if one comes up, you'll be fighting me for it!

I have a Strat - quite a decent guitar for the £30 I paid for it at the local car boot! Fenix has quite an interesting backstory - Young Chang in Korea took over manufacture of Squiers in the late 80s, and (sneakily) started flogging variations of the same guitars under their own Fenix brand. They lost the Fender deal as a result but continued making Fenix Fender copies with several different headstock shapes, as well as a range of other copies & original designs. They're generally very well-regarded guitars & there's even a bit of a fan community. I've never had a Fenix bass but do have some ongoing GAS for their early 90s shortscale. Never see 'em though.

Thunders are great basses but there are loads of them still around. This is way too expensive for a modified, well-worn example, on Ebay they still regularly sell for £200 / €230 or less. If you're not dead-set on an old Japanese bass you'll get a good new/nearly new fretless for the money they want for this.

Agreed - give it a good scrub but otherwise leave it as is - a tribute to its original owner & a piece of history.

Not worth £400? Seller seems more interested in showing some scabby old hang tag & a £5 Ebay fanboy neckplate than the actual bass. I'm sure they've got nothing to hide, though. Edit - pretty sure that's the first AI-generated sales pitch I've ever read.

That's the one. I've had those pics for about 3 years & I can't say I'm surprised it's still for sale! Mine was £150!

Off the top of my head (and I will think of more): Don't like single P pickups. Don't like 2 pickups & 3-way selector - & hate it when there's only a single volume, so pickups can't be blended. Don't like singlecuts. Don't like neck-divey symmetrical doublecuts. Don't like w@nky high-end custom basses when they're just some poxy fake-reliced Fender knockoff. Don't like fat baseball-bat necks. Don't like dreary please-don't-notice-me finishes. To be continued...

Never owned or played one, but I quite liked the look of these. Admittedly, probably because of the erm, unusual design influence.

That Revstar's gorgeous. And green. And stripy. Dunno what you should do but I want one.

Pretty sure there's no 5er, certainly never seen one. Found pics of this online, I assume it was a Japanese-market thing. I have a slightly scruffy one in need of a refin & I sort of hope this is what it looks like under the paint. It probably doesn't & I doubt I'd have the guts to find out!

£400? Optimists, eh?

Kinda cool, but as ever Japan did it better.

Yep, classic banana-neck. String tension pulls the neck forward, the big neck p/u route being a natural weak point, the adhesive holding the wings to the centre starts to fail, making it weaker, and the whole thing bows so much you could shoot an arrow with the result.

Sleep Token sig model? No way they won't want to monetise that!