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G&L Club Part 7

#24,281
Ricky Rioli said:
Week 1 — First order for an SB-1 placed with Rocket Music

Week 18 — Mis-specced bass arrives with Greg, and immediately gets sent back to California

Week 30 — An apology from Memo: "First off we totally apologize for the delay, if I can only tell you how weird the neck replacement has been on your bass you would either laugh or write us off"

Week 31 — Bass again arrives with Greg, who says "The neck is gorgeous, it's about as perfectly quartersawn as you'll ever see. The rays shoot straight out of the fingerboard, perfectly perpendicular." Off it gets sent across the ocean .... and disappears from tracking the moment it lands in the UK

Week 46 — Bass, having nimbly bypassed Her Majesty's Custom and Excise, is spotted by a member of the UK BassChat forum on sale at a price that has "don't ask where this has come from" written all over it

Week 60 — After the most incredible amount of cajoling, the poor pink SB-1 arrives back home with Greg, somehow still in mint condition

Week 66 — After two days on Reverb, the Pinkcision is bought by a grateful lady in Maine

Week 71 — Second order for an SB-1 placed with Greg

Week 98 — Gold SB-1 passes through Greg's hands and carries on its eastward voyage

Week 99 —

View attachment 4739345

God Bless America :hyper:
Click to expand...

Which begs the question... was it worth the wait?!?!?

I almost don't want to ask the question, but I had to! :bag:
 
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#24,283
RocketMusic said:
Which begs the question... was it worth the wait?!?!?

I almost don't want to ask the question, but I had to! :bag:
Click to expand...

I'm not sure that I needed all 99 weeks to get my appetite sharpened, but this is definitely the right bass at the right time :D

Thanks to my shoulder telling months ago that I was not to play my BB any more, I've only had my Squier Matt Freeman; after that, the SB-1's neck is seeming so much easier. And this is almost exactly 2 lbs lighter..... Man, I love empress. Feels like a guitar :whistle:

I've got to do a little bit of adjusting the pickup heights to do to get the sound just right for me – I want a bit more bite from the top and a bit less thunder from the bottom – but I'm loving the easy fullness of the MFDs, and I'm enjoying for once having a volume knob what does something other than kick the guts out of the sound.

The 45-105 Boomers suit it (and me) fine, but I'm not sure nickel-plated rounds are ultimately what it wants. It seems to be demanding something a bit more challenging. What, I've no idea yet. Roto flats might be a fun first experiment.

Like any good metallic finish, the Pharaoh Gold Firemist is basically impossible to photograph. It's both warm and gleaming :drool: The combination with the tort is less willful than I had been expecting.

To indicate that my critical faculties aren't just taking the day off, some less ecstatic observations: firstly, could this fretboard be any drier?! secondly, these knobs and pots could feel more sturdy, no? thirdly, the plastic they make the pickup case out is not exactly the stuff they make Mont Blanc pens out of, is it? :smug:

Ooh, forgot to say: as someone who likes a nice full neck, this is as shallow a profile as I would want. I was right to decide that the Slim C of the CLF models would not be for me.
 
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#24,285
woodyng2 said:
So Freaking Fabulous!!!! :drool::drool::drool:
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20220704_180626-01.jpeg
 
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#24,287
Ian774 said:
Wait, are you saying it got stolen upon arrival in the UK, only to be sold online later by the potential thief?

And then, how did it end back to Greg? I don't get it.
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The official stance from Parcel Force was that the shipping label must have been ripped off the box, and they subsequently auctioned off the bass. Whether it was that or theft from the postal service, who knows?

Ric was on it like a dog with a bone, reporting the eBay listing to Parcel Force and hounding them to recover the bass and eventually return it to me. That took some doing and it took a long time, so many, many thanks to Ric for staying after it long after I had just written it off in my own head.

Once it got back to me, I put it up for sale, and it sold almost immediately. So a long, sordid tale that ended well enough. For me, anyway, probably not for Ric who never got to touch the bass he designed and dreamed about for so long.

This gold bass was shipped via UPS. We didn't want to give the postal services another chance to bung things up.
 
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#24,288
RocketMusic said:
So a long, sordid tale that ended well enough. For me, anyway, probably not for Ric who never got to touch the bass he designed and dreamed about for so long
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The last couple of years have been such an experience. If the Pinkcision had arrived when it was supposed to have, in December 2020, it would have been simply my beautiful wonderful bass. But when it was delayed I bought the BB, which changed me, and when reappeared online I bought the Squier P, which changed me, too. In July 2022, the gold SB-1 is exactly the right bass for me, just as the pink one was exactly the right one in late 2020.

After all the cajoling, I was quite sick of thinking about the pink bass too. It was not an edifying episode, and I'm just really happy that it immediately appealed to someone else, someone who was in a position to enjoy its cheeky innocent character.

So the bass I dreamt up is in a happy appreciative home, and I have the right bass for me: this story has ended very well.

And soon-ish I'll have the LB-100 to upgrade that Squier :bassist: — what a coda!
 
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#24,290
Not finding the word "quartersawn" on the printed spec sheet gave me a fright - I leapt up and started peering at the neck nervously. Yes, it is quartersawn:

20220704_203806.jpg


And they've missed out the word "Indian" before "Rosewood", to differentiate it from Caribbean Rosewood, as they call Chechen. That's $159 of upgrades not acknowledged on the paperwork. Oh G&L, what a strange company you are....
 
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#24,292
ped said:
Happy you've got your bass finally. I'd love to compare it to mine some day. Do they still do bi cut necks or does it have a skunk stripe?
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It would have neither.
I believe they discontinued the bi-cut necks around '06, with the introduction of the non-compression truss rod.
The new TR would be laid in a flat route, with the fretboard placed over it.
 
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#24,293
Ricky Rioli said:
Not finding the word "quartersawn" on the printed spec sheet gave me a fright - I leapt up and started peering at the neck nervously. Yes, it is quartersawn:

View attachment 4739523

And they've missed out the word "Indian" before "Rosewood", to differentiate it from Caribbean Rosewood, as they call Chechen. That's $159 of upgrades not acknowledged on the paperwork. Oh G&L, what a strange company you are....
Click to expand...

they will probably print you an corrected build sheet if you ask
 
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#24,298
Ricky Rioli said:
Not finding the word "quartersawn" on the printed spec sheet gave me a fright - I leapt up and started peering at the neck nervously. Yes, it is quartersawn:

View attachment 4739523

And they've missed out the word "Indian" before "Rosewood", to differentiate it from Caribbean Rosewood, as they call Chechen. That's $159 of upgrades not acknowledged on the paperwork. Oh G&L, what a strange company you are....
Click to expand...

The Rosewood nomenclature is correct, that's how they put it on paper. Back in the day, Indian RW was the only RW they offered so "Rosewood" would suffice. These days they put down either "Rosewood" or "Caribbean Rosewood", so we're all good in the hood on that front.

The quartersawn oversight is indeed a typo. I'll have them correct the spec sheet and mail it to me, and then I'll drop it in the case with the LB-100 whenever that gets done.

See? This is why you should always order more than one bass at a time. :)
 
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#24,299
RocketMusic said:
The Rosewood nomenclature is correct, that's how they put it on paper. Back in the day, Indian RW was the only RW they offered so "Rosewood" would suffice. These days they put down either "Rosewood" or "Caribbean Rosewood", so we're all good in the hood on that front.

The quartersawn oversight is indeed a typo. I'll have them correct the spec sheet and mail it to me, and then I'll drop it in the case with the LB-100 whenever that gets done.

See? This is why you should always order more than one bass at a time. :)
Click to expand...

you're not helping. I had an idea for a jb5 the other day… but I need to make sure I can pay you for my kiloton 5 first!
 
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