Forgive me tb-ers, it has been many, many days since my last post and as i type I am loosing my Bass Humor & Gig Stories virginity...
So I had a gig Sunday night (last night for people here in sunny Australia) and during a soundcheck - which was roughly an hour before playing I was adjusting my preamp settings (not holding the neck of my bass as per usual) when it suddenly fell from around my neck.
Now being a lover of my gear, I promptly stuck my foot out to catch the bass and cushion it's landing. This was by the way my warwick thumb 6er (not the lightest bass known to mankind). Although not light and despite it's upper horn being rather short it's actually really incredibly well weighted and fell straight down so that the first thing to land (smack bang on my right foots big toe) was the lower horn with the full weight of the bass (mine's a bolt on[ovangkol], making it lighter than the bubinga neck throughs by about a third thank goodness) although my particular one is heavier than normal at slightly over 6kgs or 13.5 pounds. not happy
...i gets stranger!
Of course the first thing i did was attend to the bass... a small scratch that can be repaired with a bit of light sanding and some minor refinishing, no biggie (hooray for dense woods). Then I wanted to see how a bass with strap-locks managed to come loose. On this bass I've been using the dunlop strap-locks which are countersunk so they sit flush with the body. I've had them since i bought the bass roughly a year ago. It turns out the head of the screw which held the countersunk attachment mechanism into the bass had it's head completely sheared off and so with a cold night (metal contracts when cold) the mechanism was able to slide out and drop the bass. Again, not happy
Now i'm sure this isn't a normal problem and have nothing against the strap-locks. It was obviously a dud screw that dunlop got in with thousands of good screws (...ok stop laughing about good screws
)
So, like a trooper I did some field maintenance,played out the gig and packed up and went home. I woke up and it was still sore and had expanded dramatically with lots of pretty bruising so i thought i'd go get it looked at by someone who understands these things slightly better than me. After a long wait in a GP's I got an Xray and found out i'd broken one of the bones in my toe, compound fractured another in that toe and done some nerve damage (which just means next time it shouldn't be as painful)
The doctor asked how i did it, i explained i was a bass player and that I'd dropped my bass on my foot. He'd played bass growing up and looked at me sorta like this:
and said... "what bass did that?!" - "My Thumb 6er" I replied somewhat sheepishly, "Ahh, you mean a tree stump..."
I'm sending my bass to get retouched this week (i managed to remove the remainder of the screw without damaging the bass) and have a couple of days of forced crutches (if you laughed at the screws bit, stop laughing at forced crutches too
) until they can establish how much nerve/tissue damage i've done. When they finish with the xrays i'll post some pics... the toe itself isn't overly impressive externally but i might chuck some up of that too if the bruising goes a particularly pleasing hue...
So this is me saying: if you don't trust your strap-locks, wear shoes that aren't slip on on fabric ones no matter how trendy your girlfriend says they are.
