The Last Bass Outpost

Hi All. I have a Gibson Thunderbird which i bought new a few years ago, it's a great sounding bass but is quite noisy under lights, is this common or do I maybe have a bad ground somewhere? It's all stock, I use flatwounds and always set the treble to the max on this bass. I find it to be much noisier than both Fenders and Ricks which I think is a little strange.

I've been trying to get there for a few days now and the page times out on both Internet explorer and Mozilla Firefox.
I did a really stupid thing, took off the TRC last week, forgot about it and can't find it now. It had EB-3 written on it with handwritten letters, it had two screws instead of three, one at the top and one at the middle of the bottom of the bell. I'm pretty sure the cat knocked it off the top of my amp, but have looked pretty well and still can't find it. Are these available at all in case I don't find it? It's a slot head EB-3, supposed to be a 69 by the serial number although it was sold as a 71.
I'd rather have an original of course, does anyone have any idea what an original would sell for and/or where they might be available, how about duplicates?

I've tried Labella light gauge flats on it and they are too tight and bend the neck, I just ordered some D'Addario chromes for it which I really like but they only come in one gauge for short scale basses, the tensions are listed and the highest is approx 40 lbs. on the D string. Has anyone used these on Gibson short scale basses or does anyone know some good light flatwounds for EB-3's? How about the really light Labellas? I don't really like TI's that much (very middy sounding at least to me) and they don't make a SS set anyway only medium scale AFAIK.