The Last Bass Outpost

I've got a JAX T4...for comparison purposes here's a shot of one of my Thunderbirds riding the Lull (the basses were lined up at the nut):

What did the babies look like?

Speaking of babies (uh oh), I've seen a picture of John Entwistle and his son (Christopher?), both playing T-birds, though the kids is way smaller. Was that a Gibson one off, a Peter Cook creation, and was it even playable? Did John get it as a piccolo bass, or was it a gift for his son?

No, blindingly ugly!!!  (Uwe)

Get out!   

WW2 aircraft I can do!

Pond - Rock Collection (live)



Quite a mundane punk ballad, but with a really filthy bass tone.

I know nothing about Pond other than that they spanned a weird musical chasm between US hardcore, post-punk and (proto) emo music. So niche that my buddy who is into hardcore (American Football et al) hadn't even heard of them. Their album "The Practice of Joy Before Death' has some suitably chunky bass tones.

Fair shout, every forum has a different vibe. 

If y'all real nice I'll tell you how I got banned from Talkbass. 

Apart from Heesey, some select Wishbone Ash live cuts, Nirvana (eek) and isolated bass tracks from Who's Next and Quadraphenia, where can I hear some nice old Thunderbird basses in the wild?

I have to watch what I say round here. 

Slap is a valid technique; Peg by Steely Dan wouldn't be the same without it. Slapping seems to be the go-to technique for a lot of Youtube videos and, for me, it doesn't really tell me a lot about how a bass sounds. To give the example before (possibly the Bluesman vintage dude), there is a bald fellow on Youtube that demoes a bunch of '70s Rickenbacker 4001 basses. He A/Bs them in some videos. He talks about the nuances of the tone, but he has a really spiky, peaky slap thing going on the whole time. Or he tries to play finger style as fast as possible. Nothing else, and you can hear the acoustic sound of the Rick over whatever amp he's using. It seems like a wasted opportunity to hear some cool old Ricks.

I don't yet own a Tokai Thunderbird so I don't have the pickups in front of me to study. I've pulled apart about a dozen cheap soapbars at this point in time, and often 'epoxy potting' is nothing of the sort! I suppose I could bury the coils of the Tokai pickups in something like Envirotex Lite, within the chrome covers sold on Ebay? That way madness lies. I would also have to check that there are other aftermarket pickups that fit the Tokai routes.

I purchased an Epi T-bird body off of Ebay last year which is slowly turning into a Thunderbird II Fenderbird with an original WRHB as the engine. The previous owner routed it (with a flathead screwdriver and dremel sanding wheels) for some aftermarket chrome T-bird pickups and it looked like the pickup routes needed a fair bit of widening to accommodate vintage repro pickups.