Mediocre Polymath

Thanks. I'll drop you a pm

I've been tinkering with some 5-string headless designs lately and this could be just the thing. What's the string spacing?

Just a follow up thought on this. I don't think there's likely to be another generation after the baby boomers for whom the electric guitar – and to a lesser extent the electric bass – is such a potent cultural symbol.

I suspect we'll soon be reaching a sort of saturation point with solid-body instruments. They've been in mass production now for more than 65 years, and unlike acoustic guitars and other things, they don't tend to naturally degrade past the point of unplayability --at least not on a time scale that has made itself known yet. Each year's production adds to the stockpile of instruments that are already out there on the market, and I don't think the number of people willing to spend money on a non-beginner instrument goes up by that amount every year. The reason prices have held steady or gone up, even for non-"vintage" stuff is that the average number of instruments owned by players keeps rising. As a few people have mentioned, the generation now settling into retirement include a lot of people who collect guitars, and during the 1990s and 2000s big chains like Guitar Centre in the US actively encouraged that with marketing and finance deals. I know a few older folks in the US who own many more more instruments than me, despite never having learned to play. They bought them because they thought they were cool things (they are, in all fairness) and because they'd heard they'd increase in value. The actuarial tables are starting to look threatening for a lot of those folks, and they're probably not going to ask to be buried with their 17 identical sunburst precision basses.

A local guitar shop had one of these for sale on commission for a while. Such an awkward, misbegotten thing. The guy who ran the place tried to sell me on it, and the only thing he could think of as a pitch was "it's really rare, probably collectible". To get back to the topic at hand, I would say that something that's worth remembering is that you can use much lighter woods than maple and still have a pretty stable neck. Probably the combo of, say a multi laminated sapele neck and a super-small Bass Collection-style headstock would help with the centre of gravity issues.

I made a new year's resolution to tidy up the nest of cables, plugs and musical doodads that was filling up my attic. It took a while, but I've consolidated everything down to a few shelves next to my desk (which, I have to admit, doesn't help me keep focused on zoom meetings). I'd been working on a layout that involved a sort of patch bay unit with dozens of jack sockets front and back routed to a bunch of rotary switches, but after I got the Trace Elliot GP11 from @Skinner, I realised that it had outputs enough to do everything with the green box. I can plug an instrument into the GP11 and have it to through effects (in the FX loop) and then on to either my bass amp (with home made cab), my home made valve amp/cab, or my computer interface. Or all three at once. Now I just need to re-cover the manky tolex on the valve amp with brown faux leather to match the other components.

The "Duncan Designed" pickups were a VM series thing, as were the precision-bass-style knurled metal knobs (most Jazzes have black plastic knobs). The body wood on the natural finish ones was "soft maple" I think. Source: I played one of these as my main bass for about 8 years. They're lovely things. I made a couple of cosmetic changes to mine, but left everything else more or less stock. This is what mine looked like after I replaced the knobs, drilled through the bridge for through-body stringing and added ashtrays to make it more 70s and funky.

Wonderful, thanks for this. It's reassuring to have something that – if nothing else – I could give to a tech if something goes wrong.

Does anyone have any wiring diagrams or old service manuals for the Mk. V GP11 heads/preamps? I recently got a very fine GP11 rackmount preamp from @Skinner and while it works fine (and sounds fantastic) I'd feel a little more comfortable with this 40-year-old piece of hardware if I had details on how to fix anything that fails.

Fender are going to be in quite a pickle, that's for sure. Don't they have two factories not far apart, one on either side of the US-Mexico border?

The one that bothers me is when the songs are on Spotify, but the mix is completely different to the CD release. There are a couple of early Jason Isbell albums in particular where the Spotify mix just seems to have a few of instruments missing from the audio. Take for example the fun bit of boogie that is "Never Could Believe" off Here we Rest. Here's a YouTube link with the CD mix (that particular upload also includes the brief instrumental "Ballad of Nobeard"). The Spotify version meanwhile has a weird echoey mix and the first guitar solo is just missing, meaning there's a weird interlude where the piano player and rhythm guitarist seem to be vamping between verses. There's also "The Blue", a lovely song off his self-titled 2009 album. The original mix has a metronome that's very prominently and deliberately left in the final mix, but it's gone in the Spotify version.

I suspect it was a combination of slightly iffy port tuning and the driver being potentially a bit of a wrongun. Like I said, I'm not particularly bothered – the 6FE200 works and while I'm not a independently wealthy gentleman of leisure I can eat the cost of a busted speaker without feeling bad.

Slightly bigger box on my build, volume of about 13.5 litres, but it looks like it would work reasonably well with the 10 litre box with a ~8 cm long port tube, you'd just lose a bit of oomph from the low end. That said, I'm not anything like an expert on this sort of thing, so if you're considering making your own I'd suggest that you wait for Phil to get time to have a proper think.