ikay

One on ebay - https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/2004-Ernie-Ball-Music-Man-SUB-Bass-in-Textured-Teal-USA-made-Stingray-bass/193648065411 Price is on the high side but still great value for a US-made Musicman.

I'm very glad you didn't! 😄

+1 Musicman USA SUBS are excellent basses and incredible value. I picked one up last year and use it all the time. A Stingray in all but name, solid as a rock, plays and sounds great. You need to keep a lookout for them but they do crop up every so often on BC and pretty regularly if you scan ebay and gumtree etc. Well worth waiting for one of these if you want a quality bass on a budget.

This website is a useful reference for tonewoods - https://zinginstruments.com/guitar-tonewoods/ Alder Like basswood, alder is a lightweight type of body wood with soft and condensed pores. The grain pattern takes on a swirl, where the larger rings and sections around the outside enhance the strength of the body. The result is a guitar with a complexity of tones. It’s not too warm or too bright but lies somewhere in the middle range. However, unlike basswood, alder can retain high notes and provide space for low tones. Basswood tends to soften the high notes, on the other hand. Compared to basswood, an alder body comes with a wider scope of tones overall as well as fewer mid-notes than basswood. Ash Ash is one of the most common tonewoods for electric guitar bodies. Ash is a tonewood that comes in two main types: - hard (northern) - soft (southern), commonly called 'swamp ash' The most popular option is hard ash due to the bright tone and high sustainability. However, soft ash offers a warmer feel. Fender claims to use swamp ash in many of their guitars in the 1950s. Swamp ash tonewood comes from trees with roots below the water level in Southern swamps, so the wood is lightweight and porous. The creamy color and bold grain pattern are more visually appealing than other wood types, like alder. The scooped middle frequencies are bright and balanced, and the sound has more balance at the top. You can create a clean, transparent sound with single-coil pickups easily. However, swamp ash is more difficult to find than alder or new ash. Both types of ash tonewoods offer an open grain, which means the instrument also comes with a fair amount of preparation to make sure the grain is properly filled in the factory.

Basses that have been well used and loved, growing old gracefully ...

Looks like you've lucked out and found a lightweight one! Out of interest what does it weigh?

As a first step try entering the serial number here which should tell you the year, model and colour - https://www.music-man.com/serial-number-database

Here's the literal translation (slightly odd wording in places): To express YAMAHA’s high dimensionality bass concept. Evolution of peripheral equipment contributes to sound-range expansion and for player’s desires such as new phrasing. Total quality cope (?) with a whole body. Compilation of technical style “TRB”. Maybe 'Totally Radical Bass' isn't so far off after all.

According to the Yamaha TRB Club thread on Talkbass, TRB = Totally Radical Bass. Although others say this is a joke (which seems likely!). If anyone can read japanese maybe the text (top left) of this ad for the original 1991 TRB custom gives a clue...

These vids are for revalving a Dual terror guitar amp but might be useful -

I just took a look but unfortunately the image links bring up this error - 'The Wayback Machine has not archived that URL'

As Apothem says, it's all down to the hollow saddle which is only threaded in the lower half and has limited adjustability. Why MM decided to bring reintroduce this for the Classic and new Special is one of life's great mysteries. There was a good reason it was changed in 1989!

Here are a couple of recent sales on ebay to give you an idea of price, one bass and one guitar, both look to be in pretty good condition: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/old-vox-clubman-bass-Guitar/383612338964?hash=item595113c314:g:LfgAAOSwsQNe-z4A https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Vox-Clubman-II-Guitar/264836831118?hash=item3da981578e:g:lEIAAOSw~k5fNVGY

It looks like a 60s Vox Clubman - https://www.vintageguitarandbass.com/vox/bass/1965_Clubman.php Tuners look a bit odd, maybe they're not original?

Get out your drill...!

The first 20 secs or so of this vid (not mine) demonstrates how vol/tone varies with strings directly over or between the polepieces. Smoother and slightly less volume between the poles (hence Old Smoothie), more focused and more volume when over the poles. When he pulls the pickup across the strings at 16secs it's clearer to hear.

Whether pole alignment causes any difference depends to some degree on how close the pickup is to the strings. If the pickup is set lower, the magnetic field is weaker but more evenly spread. If the pickup is closer to the strings, the magnetic field is more concentrated and any string to string differences are magnified. Lowering the pickup can sometimes be a better solution for overall string-to-string balance issues rather than raising it.

They have changed the pole spacing on the new Stingray Specials. The pole pieces now line up with the strings. This should help rectify the G string issue as the response of an off-axis string is slightly 'thinner'.

+1 about avoiding an over-scooped EQ. The chart below of the freq response curve for a Stingray 2-band clearly shows the mid scoop with bass and treble maxed. The centre of this mid scoop falls around 200 to 800Hz which just happens to be G string territory. The G string frequency ranges from 98Hz (open) to 196Hz (octave) to 392Hz (2 octave). In practice the first harmonic is usually more dominant than the fundamental so the 'effective fundamental' freq range of the G string is double this - ie. from 196Hz (open) to 784Hz (2 octave). Slap bang in the scoop. The G string does of course generate other higher harmonics but these will sound thinner and weedier than the fundamental. Mind the scoop!

That's a lovely pair, if you don't mind me saying 😄. I had a fretless Mouse for a few years and often wondered what a fretted one would sound like. Can't find any fretted demos on youtube. Would be interesting to hear some sound clips if you can find a way of posting a short demo.

Here's a link to Fender catalogues going back to 2004 plus some earlier vintage ones. Might be a worth a look. https://guitar-compare.com/catalogs/fender-catalogs/ Reggaebass's suggestion of nail polish is a good one, I've used that for small dings before and there's a massive range of colours out there to play around with.

Have you already seen this one? https://support.fender.com/hc/en-us/articles/214034783-Instrument-Finish-Color-Chart