The New Year tends to be a time for fresh starts and clear outs (happy new year by the way!). It is for me, time to thin the bass stable and find a new home for one or two basses. I’m very blessed to own more than one bass – I know that not everyone has or does. I have my main two basses (a fretted and a fretless), but there is a little orbit of others that changes and gives me the chance to try out other basses and get to know them.

The most recent departure is the custom Moses job featured in the “graphite bass” post. So, buying and selling basses has been part of life over the last decade. Here are some tips when selling your bass…

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Season’s greetings to you and to fellow bassists around the world. I hope that you are managing to get some recuperation in around this time of year. I’m having a little bit of a rest before we launch into the new year. We have a great competition coming up, with some really nice prizes, and some great interviews lined up as well.

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Sometimes you want a bass that is totally unique to you, and the only way to get it is to build it yourself. This labour of love was created by John Garncarz:

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After I wrote about using in-ear headphones for  Monitoring Your Bass, Daniel East of Future Sonics got in touch with me. A Future Sonics user had pointed him at my post, and Dan suggested that I audition their Atrio professional earphones. I’ll write up the complete “amp-free” set up in the next post (completing the Bass Amp Set Ups posts), but first let’s talk about what I found when I tried out the Atrio in-ear monitors. [More…]

I received word today that solo bassist Trentin Lee Manning was killed in a tragic car accident yesterday. Earlier this year Bass Musician Magazine had singled him out as “quickly becoming one of the leading young American bassists“. It is a sad loss of one so talented and so young. His unique and touching music lives on, listen here:

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Poor Steve Lawson isn’t a very happy man right now, from his blog: “British Airways wrecked my bass :(“. The baggage handlers at one of the airports on his tour did a serious mischief to his much loved Modulus bass (I hope they can help Steve out for his US tour):

Here’s a Video of the damage [warning, this video contains scenes which might be distressing to bass owners who travel]: [More…]