The girls

Meet Bassie and Naked Bassie.
Bassie is an active, 24 fretted, Bass Collection (no actual model designation on her anywhere though). Bassie weighs less than most properly made guitars, in fact she really weighs about the same as a £75 Strat copy. This suits me because there are lots of really great ways to fuck yourself up with a bass without having to resort to compressed vertebrae (ask Hooky, he has three that are FUCKED at the top of his spine.....80% to do with the way the daft sod plays, but still partly to do with the fact the LIGHTEST bass he has, by a fuckload of a margin, is a Yamaha, and they can grow pretty heavy).
Naked Bassie (formerly just "Bassie") is a passive Aria SLB II, purchsed by me in 1993 for £150. I promptly stripped her ugly red paint, to show her gorgeous russian ply construction off to the world (and thank fuck, it WAS paint....anyone who's ever tried to strip an instrument with an expoxy coat on it will be nodding along in relief here.....for those who haven't had that pleasure, let's just say that Nitromorse, applied hot, blanketed against the skin and left for 12 hours, didn't even take the SHINE off it!!!!....if you did the same thing on a car body, it'd be half way through the metal when you came back! ).
When the BC was purchased, her frets were removed (hence her "naked"ness).
Naked Bassie weights a little more than Bassie, but is still insanely light for a bass. Currently her setup is all over the place.....I destrung and cleaned her a couple of weeks ago, and ever since have been becoming increasing convinced that half her bridge saddles had, over the last 4 years (whence Bassie arrived), been set by virtue of being poked about while the strings were on and tuned......so as soon as the strings came off, they all went back to where they were actually set for.....the result is that her intonation AND action are all well weird.......getting buzzes around the 5th trench-where-a-fret-used-to-be...on the A string which is already a bit high looking.....I see a long day's patience being needed soon.....until then I will just suffer it. She also BADLY needs me to take 3 mins to open her backplate and fix her output Jack's ring arm and retention sleeve.....been fucked for about 10 years, don't expect I'll fix it any time soon though.
The only reason the socket is so buggered, is because the rest of the bass is built like a brick shitehouse......my party piece used to be to unhook the strap, fling the bass vertically upwards, in a horizontal attitude with a fair bit of backspin, and walk off stage "under" it...being gone by the time it landed with THE most impressive noise....later when retrieved, it would be found that she was still in absolutely perfect concert tuning. One night, not enough backspin and it came down face fitst, with a really heavy reinforced plastic jack plug about 4" long sticking out......didn't like it one bit.
She has really heavy strings, which I bought for the BC, and HATED on it....reverting to lights within about 2 weeks ( ultra lights are GREAT fun.....but you can forget playing anything dubby or otherwise hefty with them)...they work quite well on the fretless though :D


Worth pointing out that the BC has NO such tricks.