LeftyJ

Quietly (and unintentionally, really), and amicable. Our ADHD singer was juggling 4 kids (at the time, she's at 5 now) and too many hobbies and just didn't have the time and the focus. She was completely unreliable to make any appointments with - and entirely unaware and oblivious of it. Eventually it just didn't work out anymore and we had to tell her. Together we decided it was in our shared best interest if she quit the band and we found someone else to replace her. This proved to be easier said than done. We were an originals band who played poppy metal. We had one album out and had played about 20-30 gigs per year in small clubs and sometimes as opening act for bigger names in our genre. Not quite established, but we were making a bit of a name for ourselves. We were in the process of writing new material for a second album, and were looking for someone who was equally amazing as our old singer: she had great pitch, a great voice, good English pronounciation, and was able to create good and creative vocal lines on the spot in jams, with temporary nonsense-lyrics. Turned out she wasn't that easy to replace... We held auditions for weeks and had about 10 female singers try out. Only one of them was any good but she was a true pro and we couldn't offer her what she was looking for - because all of us had different day jobs and no intention of making music professionally, with the exception of our drummer who had a degree in contemporary music. So she kindly thanked us for our time and left. The others were all terrible: either absolute beginners, or just an absolute mismatch to our sound. And none were creative (or confident) enough to join in on a jam and create on the spot - which is OK, we were perfectly aware this is difficult when playing with a bunch of guys you've never met before. Then our lead guitarist left. He already had a PhD in chemistry, and would go to Oxford University for 3 years for a postdoc research project of 3 years. That's about 8 years ago now, and he never came back . He's a professor at the university of Barcelona now. Our band is inactive ever since, but it's safe to say we all quit. The 3 remaining members (rhythm guitarist, drummer and myself) still played together in a doom metal project since late 2019, but unfortunately the guitarist was booted a couple of months ago for not making enough of an effort. That was (and still is) a real bummer for me, having played together since 2009

Wow, that marley blue one is great! I much prefer this bodyshape over the T, so seeing one with two J pickups is a pleasant surprise. Great mod! My Lionel is on the heavy side, but it's a satin finish which come with an ash body. The glossy and aged ones are all alder bodies and much lighter. I didn't weigh mine, but it's definitely one of my heaviest basses.

I haven't owned or used that many amps, and rarely have GAS for another. I've been using the same EBS HD-350 and EBS Proline 4x10 for over 15 years now and I have no desire to get anything else (except maybe a Fafner). So I guess that's my contribution: #1: EBS HD350. Very flexible, it can do glassy clean hifi sounds but is very much capable of some warmth and tube-like drive too (without actually using a tube). It's plenty loud through my 4x10 at 4 Ohms, I've never been able to turn it up past 11 o' clock without fellow bandmembers or sound engineers giving me dirty looks or yelling at me. It's got a useful and functional compressor/limiter that smoothly and subtly evens out unwanted peaks, despite having only a single control knob. That said, the best live tone I've ever had was: #2: Ampeg SVT-II Pro + Ampeg SVT810. Gritty, punchy, and it needed almost no EQ'ing to sound the way I wanted it to.

I could drool at that GMR all day Almost needs a NSFW tag, it's that beautiful!

Revelation Bass VI-alike

This is my Fender Crafted in Japan JB75-US. The pic is from 2009 so this isn't even its final form () I changed: the electronics to an Audere JZ3T preamp with 3-way impedance switching, but hated it, for several reasons (1). I had a battery box routed into the back of the body for this; the electronics back to passive VVT, but with the addition of a De Gier / Vanderkley FatBoost,. It's a subtle active bass boost of up to 6 dB, accessed via a rotary switch where the jack used to be, with a regular Jazz Bass knob to camouflage it. It has an internal trim pot for setting the gain level. Works great, subtle but effective. The electronics cavity needed to be routed slightly to make room for it; the stock bridge to a Leo Quan BadAss II; the stock tuners to Hipshot HB2's and an Xtender; the strap buttons to Schaller security locks; added a pickup cover. The previous owner had already changed the white pickguard to a black one, which I like a helluva lot better, and had holes drilled for both covers but I never mounted a bridge cover because it gets in the way of my playing and I don't like the look. It's a heavy beast with a fairly deep neck profile, and oddly for a '75 RI has the bridge pickup in the regular 60s position (like most CIJ JB75's in fact, but there are exceptions). But it plays and sounds great and I love it. (1) I was always struggling to find a "neutral" tone that matched the passive sound of the bass. It just wasn't there. And the most important USP of the Audere, its impedance switch, was a totally useless feature for me because I hated the high-Z and low-Z settings and only used the normal position. Besides that, the Audere was prewired righthanded, so the pots turned in a direction that was very unnatural to me. They were PCB-mounted, so I couldn't change that. I hated it so much that I stopped playing this bass alltogether, which is a shame because it's so good! So I had it changed back to passive and it reignited my live for this bass.

Welcome, fellow lefty and Warwick fan! Lovely Streamer you have there! I have two Streamers, a 4-string LX and a 5-string LX5. The 4-string has the same colour as yours, but in high gloss lacquer.

I tried an Audere JZ3T in my Jazz Bass once (it was the 4-knob version with active 3-band, passive tone and 3-way impedance switch, but they sell them in 3-knob config too) and it was nice, but I got lost in all the tonal options. The impedance switch is cool but to me it didn't really offer anything usefull beside the middle (neutral) position. The low-Z setting gave a very deep, dubby low end and less high end. The high-Z setting was thin and almost a bit out-of-phase in character and was completely useless for me and my bands. In my Ellio Martina I have an Aguilar OBP-3 in a 3-knob configuration (volume/pan stacked with active/passive push-pull, mid/treble stacked with mid frequency select push-pull, and bass) but I don't like the center frequencies they chose for the EQ. The bass frequency is too low to my taste, the treble control is too high, and the mid control somehow only has a noticable effect when it's almost entirely up. May be a problem with the MEC pots it's coupled to in my bass, I don't know. Probably not the recommendations you were hoping for Other preamps I have experience with were stock electronics of various brands (Carvin, Ibanez, Cort, Status) so not much help there. I have yet to try the Darkglass, but the idea of two mid controls and no upper treble sounds very appealing to me, and very functional.

Your bridge appears to be an ABM Mueller 3705 in aluminium. Your best bet would be to send them an email or give them a call. Make sure to check the spacing first, these bridges come in either 17 mm or 19 mm spacing and the saddle inserts might differ in width between the two.

Was that the Kiesel Osiris copy?

It's not for the Roadster RS900 in your profile pic is it? That's not a Roadstar II but a Roadster from the first series. They use what I believe to be Gotoh GB-1's with a custom heart-shaped knob instead of a clover. The normal GB-1's are still readily available from Gotoh.

Ooooh, finally a lefty version of that Mustang-like shortscale PJ! It still only has a master volume and master tone, but the switch is a great add! I'd love dual volume. But FFS, why only black for us? I would sooo choose the Shell Pink one if I could!

Came here to say exactly this

Wow, I wouldn't have guessed the Cutlass necks to be made by Modulus. The Alembic and Musicman necks were constructed very differently to Modulus necks, with their woven graphite monocoques rather than the patchwork necks Modulus used on their own basses. Today I learned!

Quite the rare Warwick there! That's an "Infinette", a semi-hollow Corvette / Streamer hybrid that predates the Infinity but ultimately inspired it. Very unusual and very cool!

I was going to argue musical instruments were exempted from CITES rules a few years ago - but then I googled it and found out the B-word meant the UK dropped out of that exemption

This right here. You can actually see it in your last pic if you look closely: the upper line is where the bottom of your string sits, and the bottom line is where the nut slot appears to sits

Hugo Prinsen Geerligs of The Gathering. They were my gateway into modern metal back in 1997, when I first discovered them, and through their development into more atmospheric and progressive styles they also dragged me along into different styles outside my comfort zone - almost straight away, when they released their double album "How to measure a planet?" in 1998, which was nothing like its precursors. I've been following them ever since.

Please tell me you covered Willie Nelson's "On the road again" On the road again I just can't wait to get on the road again But one Al Krow is making music with his friends And I can't be arsed to swerve around again

Or no pickguard, like an actual L1000 (how is your 5-string neck labelled L1000, and not 1005?)

The current S-locks are vastly different to the old Schaller Security Locks though! The strap button and screw are one single piece, made on a lathe. They no longer have a Phillips screw head but require an Allen key. The locks themselves now accommodate thicker straps, and use a large thumbwheel instead of a washer and a nut. The thumbwheel locks in place with a little lockscrew which works great. I'm quite happy with them on my basses and guitars. The strap buttons come in three different sizes now, but size M is standard (and indeed slightly thicker than most normal strap button screws, on purpose). The S is both shorter and thinner, and the L is both longer and thicker.

Those earliest ovangkol necks really weren't Warwicks finest hour. Both my Streamer LX's are from roughly the same era and aren't perfect either (but no twist, thankfully). They play fine, but my 4-string LX can't be set up extremely low because of a small microbend at the 3rd fret and my 5-string is the most sensitive to changes in humidity out of all my instruments. This appears beyond what a fret level can solve. I think you'd need to remove the lower frets (or possibly all), plane the fingerboard, reset the nut and refret. That doesn't come cheap.

Not half bad! I'm intrigued.

This sums it up pretty well for me too. I buy used most of the time, only rarely have I bought a new bass. The last one was a German-made Esh Stinger that had been hanging in a store for years and I paid €800 for it NOS in 2014-ish - and without that massive discount I wouldn't have bought it. Most of my instruments came from private sellers. My most expensive bass was probably my 4-string Status S2 Classic that had to come from Israel and I had to pay customs fees and 21% VAT when it arrived. All in all it came in at around €1700 I think, which is still good considering they were around €4000 new in the end.