AndyTravis

None in June although I’m meddling...

I’ve not sold a bass in a month. I know, I know. Pre-tty Im-pressive...

If I had one of them there amps I’d have a rummage around for you. I’m sure Lee or Mark could advise x

Can you not take that panel off and reach from there? Havent got a CTM300 handy, so I’m not sure what’s be in your way...

I’m sure @Ashdown Engineering could advise? if not ask @walshy as he has shares in the company these days 😉

Wilkinson’s have humongous base plates. And I wasn’t bowled over by them - certainly more Squier than Fender quality

By about 2013 we stopped selling Marshall for a while, the range got way too confused

They will have said “don’t advertise this item for less than £399” or whatever. The manner in which they enforce this is to magically become “out of stock” of items to dealers who go against this advice. There was also a period where certain big brands...ahem...said you weren’t allowed to advertise items online if you hadn’t recently bought stock. We’d regularly get calls “how much are you selling this for? Would you do a deal” - We had a flat response of “come in store and we’ll talk”. Which in itself made us look like bad clowns - but also meant we couldn’t be “caught out”. This would’ve been around 2012.

All used gear was once new 😉😂

Gak’s pricing was part of the reason the other retailers complained and unofficial MAP pricing was introduced. There won’t be many other retailers interested in helping them out of this hole.

Used to cost us about £800 a day to run our shop.

Just bought a pickguard from Mark. Arrived in a box big enough for an amp 😂 Absolutely made up with it. Cheers Andy

Ah Rosetti. Now that was a wild organisation. We bought Les Paul standards for about £1160 ex vat one week, £1045 another...we’d jump on low cost prices, and a week later “buy 5 (at £1160) get one free” - absolutely mental. So some places had paid £1160, some had paid £1045, some had paid £967. All for the same guitar. They’d also have back orders in for Rickenbacker stuff, 2 years or so. They’d send them to us “by accident” and say “ah keep it, we’ll knock you 10% off trade” so we’d end up with a random 4003 bass some poor bugger elsewhere had paid for 6 months previous and they remained in the queue. As a point - when Gibson took over their own distribution, all of this nonsense stopped. It was replaced by another brand of nonsense - £50k a month buy in.

No. Really wasn’t. Id say about 2012 was the beginning of the end for bricks and mortar guitar shops. I left in April 2014, I’d done 12 years. oh well. Would love to give a specialist shop a go. But, without a lottery win...no chance. Q: ”what’s the best way to make a small fortune in Musical Instrument retail?” A: “Start with a big one”.

Yamaha - there was a point where whenever we sold one of the immensely popular YDP-141 digital pianos, we lost £20. And that wasn’t even us cutting prices. The one thing which always annoyed was that Many big suppliers used to offer retrospective discounts into the mix, so if we shifted x-hundred units of their product we’d get a kickback. Some companies factored that into their pricing, some didn’t. It’s an absolute shedload of worms...

There’s the funny old thing with Guitar/Music shops. The retailers complain about the discount merchants - so their big accounts try to resolve it. The discount merchants are in a race to make the least margin. Usually from a web store rather than shop front. The customers want top notch service and an opportunity to try before they buy...but don’t want to pay what they perceive to be over the odds. It’s a lose/lose situation for everyone. When in the trade, my colleagues and I used to tear our hair out over it. We used to have people come in and try things, ask if we’d match a price which was £4 profit on an £800 sale...was very disheartening. They’d purchase the same instrument online, and come to us when there was a problem - and then be dissatisfied with the fact that as a Fender/Gibson/Epiphone dealership, we wouldn’t sort the problems they were experiencing as warranty repair. Also that we wouldn’t resolve an issue with a Fender bought from Thomann in Germany by sending it to Fender GBI to fix...for free. The list goes on, I’m not sure that price fixing or MAP pricing is the pure evil it’s made out to be. But I’ve seen both sides.

I did a restring and tweak for a guy once, he asked for E/A to be strung through body and d/g through bridge - think it was a fender. He said it sounded best like that. it was a nice enough bass. When he came to collect...I don’t know what difference it made as he played it like he was trying to snap the bass in half. Then again, I owned a Lull 5 and the B was string through body, and the e-g were top load. So there must be something in it if Mr Lull said so...

People Help the people - Cherry ghost. I always to be about not knowing how others are suffering, an anthem for kindness or empathy.

There is a specific EMG “Steinberger” set. But I reckon you’re about £180/£200 in by the time you’ve special ordered some. I had a B2a and loved it, but they can be quite Midd-y.

The earliest Taiwan ones had the Japan surrounds etc. it was an 1986/7 “transitional model” I had an 88 white one, with the ramped pickups and it sounded brighter/less warm. the 90/91 bb1100s had slimmer bodies

Yeah - we used to use string swing (jhs) for poly finishes and Hercules for all Gibson, Ric and CS/Vintage reissue Fender in the shop.

Well...it ain’t no natural miller no more (spot Walshy’s gold leftovers)

Cozy