3below

Very cool looking bass and great wood chops

A really good summary. Does the bass sing unplugged is an important one for me. I have been heavily using my Corvette fretless on a daily basis for the last 4 months and it has really opened up in this respect in the last few weeks. No idea why this would be with a solid body bass, if you had asked me that several months ago I would have not believed it possible. Stating the obvious, really unlikely random parts can produce staggeringly good results. One of the best P basses I have ever played was put together by a teaching assistant for a special school music room. It had been hammered in the time I I knew it. Made with a Peavey neck, unknown body, BBOT bridge and a cheap Chinese pickup. It was seriously good, it had the 'sings unplugged' factor in spades. An absolute banger of a bass, as good as anything USA I own.

The bad news is that when you have healed and things are good it is all too easy to trigger it again. Last time for me was passing someone a laptop one handed at arms length, stupidity on my part.

Great review, and yes, wood is expensive now

It is fixable, it is not going to be cheap if you pay someone to do it. My guess would be that a (used) replacement neck might be cheaper. If it is any consolation I stuffed my USA G&L L1505 neck with the truss rod cracking the fretboard (not uncommon I am told). Fixed to better than new by Jon Shuker. You could ask @Andyjr1515 what his take is.

Is there a melody / vocal line? If so it might help. @Waddo Soqable @Doddy & @Baloney Balderdash have the way forward. Put a recording on here, get more bass line ideas than you can shake a stick at

75 P bass, gorgeous ash body and a sane mass ✴️. In my guitar playing era I had a rather nice 1980s ash / maple strat (the body would be custom shop stuff these days). 9lb it was not, way too heavy, so moved on for another G&L bass.

£20 to get your bass ( and any other kit over a year ) advertised to the largest UK pool of bass players. Bargain in anyone's money. I looked at the kit I used on Friday's gig: bass, pickups, straplocks, machine heads, strings, sansamp, tuner and cab. All BC purchases

First outing with new (to me) prog Jazz rock band - all originals. A good evening out with a small but appreciative audience. The usual game of keeping the blunders as well hidden as possible, which for the first time out in this line up we did well. You can just see how we contained our drummer :), the eagle eyed will spot the Barefaced cab - Dubster being used with a fretless Warwick I had forgotten the joys of loading kit into the car, have an early meal, leave home at 5, drive for an hour, setup, play 2hrs +, pack kit up, drive home and sleep..... How did I ever do this when I had to work for a living as well.

Without the schematic this seems the only way forward.

That is the sort of tech you need, I know that feeling of 'not going to let this one beat me'. I look forward to hearing what the cause of these failures finally resolves to.

I took the hard way, I had not thought of looking on YouTube, showing my age and 'old' Physicist approach.

Obviously you can't check the the valves fully with a multimeter but there are some simple checks which might be informative (or not). Between Pins 4 - 9 & 5 - 9 you should get some resistance, I have never measured one but from some googling I get figures of 20, 16 or 6 Ohms. If your meter shows 0 or continuity there is a heater problem. More likely is that the meter will show 1 (i.e. no circuit continuity) which means the heaters have faulted and then melted. This could be one cause of transformer failure. Between pins 6 -8 and 1 - 3 the data sheets suggest you should get about (Anode resistance) 62.5 kΩ I would also measure 1 - 9, 2 - 9, 3 - 9 and 6 - 9, 7 -9, 8 - 9 If you get a 0 Ohms connection there is a fault in the valve that may have taken the transformer out with it. None of the above will give definitive answers but may provide pointers to what to investigate next.

I hope this as simple as a failed fuse. They sometimes fail for no explicable reason (or underlying fault) but this in my experience is very rare.

Always liked the look of the Starcaster bass until this one.

Never got in afaik. At Leeds Crown Court (February 2012) both got suspended sentences.

At these prices soon to become like sunburst 59 Les Pauls "Gibson made around 1,500 sunburst Les Pauls between 1958 and 1960, but today, only 2,000 survive".

That puts a different perspective on the prices. Obvious now you have mentioned it

I look at professional level double basses and have the same thoughts. How on earth would you earn that back unless you become a prolific player commanding eye watering money.

Is it good for metal?