Recent content by Zenbassie

That does seem hard to believe....

I would be interested to see a pic of the bass with the Thundertrons. I would have preferred to use pickups with conventional polepieces, but couldn't find any TV Jones ones that lined up with the wide string spacing.

My old tech (now retired) said that Fender had sent him the service manual back in the 1970s, but he'd never seen an actual amp until I took him mine about a decade ago.

It needed three "big and heavy" cabs to work in the 1970s, but any four ohm cabs will do, and three Neo cabs aren't that heavy (I use three Schroeders). That said, I don't use it much, because I don't really need that much power.

I still use my Electric Blue for "coffee shop" level gigs, and jams with acoustic guitarists. I am often complimented on the tone it produces.

I found that a jumbo ABG worked with a nylon string guitar, but that was about it.

I have gigged with an old-style (made in Korea, Bisonic pickup) Starfire I for many years, and if this one comes close to that, then it should be well worth the price. Still, I do think that the Bisonic pickup is part of the equation, and my gigging bass does have the Curtis Novak variant.

The Elfin Hollowbody Bass looks nice, and is relevant to this thread! I recommend you buy one of those!

From the look of the pictures on Taylor's website, the Koa version comes without a pickguard.

I haven't played any of those, because they mostly didn't come out until after my "acoustic bass buying phase" was over. I take your point about them being easier to play than a "full size" ABG, although I imagine that none of them are "loud" acoustically.

Oops. For some reason, a couple of quotes got missed in the above. Still, you can figure out which bits I am replying to.

I mostly didn't use amplification. I (naively) thought and acoustic bass could be played acoustically. I should say I was never in an "acoustic bass phase" as such. I bought a few over a period of time, but I didn't really gig with them. I never said that. If you want something that...

My point has always been that the "I need an ABG so I can play around a campfire" crew are pretty much destined for disappointment (and they are, from my observation at least, a big percentage of first time buyers). There is a another thread right there.

"Common" is another word that I don't recall mentioning. Nobody would buy an expensive instrument to sound like an ABG. Most ABGs don't actually sound that good. I do accept that in the hands of a great player, most instruments can sound good (even an ABG). There's that word "normal". I...

Let's agree to disagree on that, and wonder where the word "traditional" crept in (I never said you could get those tones on a P-bass). To the extent that I have a "complaint" about ABGs, it is that they aren't very loud, and anything they can do can be done by an appropriately set up and...