Paul S

Surely this is the answer?

Indeed it is!! Opened the box just now and have a huge smile. What a fantastic thing! If Klingons made basses they would look like this. Through my home practice set up it sounds fantastic - much more organic than the EMGs of a Hohner with a nicely distinct tone. Very tight string spacing, which I love. And not heavy at 3.4kgs. I feel like I have stolen it for that money!

In fact I just bought it. Hohner B2V soon to appear in the classified! Thanks Mike.

That has got me interested.... on my watch list! Might have a little dab at that and sell on my Hohner B2V. Thank you for the post!!

As a small aside, I swapped the pups on my passive B2V for Aguilars - made it sound a bit richer and less 'honky'. But it wasn't a cheap upgrade considering I use it solely as a small back up bass and possibly not worth it unless you use it a lot.

Bit of a story to last night's gig. My 'fledgling' Bon Jovi tribute band are still looking to do as many gigs as possible, so when the agent offered us a weird one a long way away we decided to take it. Described to us as a 'mystery celebrity' having a 50 year birthday bash for which he was hiring the Meridian Showground in Cleethorpes, big covered stage, 3 tribute acts - we were headlining etc. We are based in south Essex so it was approx 4 hours away. It was thought that there may well be lots of other celebs there and it could lead to other things, good exposure etc (yeah, I know ). We were due to start at 9:15, play 75mins then fireworks. We shared the drive in two cars, arriving in plenty of time to a windswept open space with bouncy castles, face painting, fairground rides.... it transpires that the mystery celebrity was in fact Total Fuels, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the local refinery with a family day. So not quite as advertised... the promised 'big covered stage' was just a smallish marquee that, at a push, could have housed maybe 200 of the 800 or so people that were spread over the site when we got there if the weather took a turn for the worse. And my God it did. 10 mins into the first act - a Little Mix tribute - the heavens opened and it absolutely hammered down. Some people sheltered in the 'main arena', most in the similarly-sized cream tea tent. Groups of children ran around, jumping over the soaked hay bundle seating. The occasional drunk ran through the rain, aeroplane-fashion with twinned beer cups aloft, to the beer tent for refills but soon even they got drenched and bored. Small lakes appeared on the grass, the rides packed up and left, pulled pork and burger baps remained uneaten. People left in droves, some returned with coats, others didn't bother. The Little Mix lot overran. Next band were a local pub band. They were late starting and also massively overran, playing perhaps a 70-80 minute set. However, the rain had stopped by then. They then took a staggering 25 mins of our 30 minute change over time to clear the stage - the drummer had augmented the provided kit with a whole bank of extra toms, cymbals, fan etc - each of which were then fastidiously packed away with smoothed out bubblewrap packaging into their boxes all over the stage. We set up without sound checks in record time but were still so late we were left with just a 45 minute slot before the fireworks. So an 8 hour round trip for 45 mins playing. To be fair the 100 or so stalwarts who remained to the end gave us a fantastic reception, we played well and got handsomely paid. I then slept and snored all the way home. Luckily I wasn't driving.

Sold Bas my 'project' Yamaha BB425 in the most straight forward and pleasant of deals. Great guy to deal with, good comms, very friendly. Met up to hand it over, had a natter. An absolute pleasure doing business!

This sums up my situation, except I bought my first bass at 46. First gig at 50. Now 60. It was like a small bit of me that had been missing all my life was finally in place

It finally dawned on me that the reason why I was disappointed with most of the basses I owned was that they weren't Precision basses. Once I got that set in my head Life became a lot more straightforward until I needed 5 string basses. The issue with this is I need light weight basses with narrow string spacing, which automatically discounted most production 5 string Precision-type models. After kissing a few frogs the answer was clear - get a 5 string precision made to my spec. Enter stage left my prince - a Maruszczyk Jake 5 - weighs in at 8lbs, 43mm at the nut ( this is a 5er...) and 17mm spacing at the bridge. The Delano pup is everything I hoped for and more. No more GAS!

My 34" scale Jake 5 string is just 3.6kg on the nose despite the extra bits and bobs a 5er has got. Incredible, really.