peteb

But I'm not in the market as I've got a few basses of a similar quality, all of which I paid about £1.5k more or less (actually £900 to £1.7k, but thereabouts)! The OP is looking for something similar for that budget, and as you say, a Japanese Sadowsky at £1.3k could be the last bass he ever has to buy. I've been gigging for many (40+) years and have been lucky enough to play with quite a few guys who make their living from playing music (or used to), some of whom have been in famous bands, or played with people who have been in very famous bands. One thing they have in common is that none of them play entry level instruments as their main gigging guitar / keyboard / whatever. I don't know any bass player at that level who plays a headless Hofner or whatever. But what do I know...

All really good choices. If I was in the market for a 4 string jazz, I would definitely buy @jay-syncro's Sadowsky!

Basses on which I would normally install a Badass Any non-recent Fender I think that they do give you a bit more sustain and I prefer the sound and feel of them, although others might prefer a BBOT. But let's face it, it's all very marginal and it makes very little difference in a mix. However, both of my 70s P basses have a badass on them, while my more recent Fender Jazz basses (both American Standards) do not!

That's a great example - relatively easy to play, but all open strings. No chance of playing it properly in any other way!

Really? To be frank, that must have sounded bloody awful! The crowd might have enjoyed it, but they will notice the difference the next time they hear a band play it properly! If you're going to be a musician, you have to be careful about trying to get away with the bare minimum a crowd will accept. That's a sure way of never getting beyond the lowest pub gigs. To be fair, you can go too far the other way and get OCD about doing everything note perfect. But it's still better to be able to play things right than trying to get away with doing it wrong.

I would suggest that the OP insists the band makes its mind up and commits to one tuning or the other, with presumably Down 1 (i.e. in Eb) being the way to go. I play in different bands that play in different tunings, so I have some basses set up in Concert (using 50 - 105 gauge strings) and others down 1 (55 - 110 strings). I do have a P bass with a slightly higher action in Concert than my other basses, so I have the option of tuning it down for certain (mainly blues) gigs.

But as you will know, playing it an octave higher doesn't sound right. A mate of mine put a Hipshot Xtender on the E string of a 5 string bass, for playing this song and stuff like Soundgarden (where loads of songs are in Drop D).

The example I was going to use was Slither, which would be near impossible to play authentically on a bass in standard tuning or a 5 string! A lot of riffs utilise open strings, especially on guitar, but also on bass.

I kinda agree with you. There are many great bass sounds and in the right context, even a 'bad' tone can work. However, some people just sound f***in awful without doing anything about it. Of course, we just dismiss them as being cr*p without saying anything and thus they never reach their full potential (even in something as trivial as sounding good while playing an electric bass). The OP asked should they buy a new bass for £1.5k or a number of cheaper instruments. My advice (and yours) was to buy the best secondhand instrument for that budget, for which they can get something really good. I speak with a fair amount of experience, but it's up to them if they listen to me or not. I think the point you're getting at is why aim for mediocrity? To be good at anything, you have to commit to it. That means putting in the hours learning to play, doing loads of gigs with lots of different bands and getting decent quality gear. There's nothing wrong with having fun playing a budget bass in your bedroom and hanging out in bass forums. But if you want to take it further then you have to have a bit more commitment, and that includes buying better quality gear to enable you to get the gigs you need (that's the easy part).

I bought a secondhand Fender Precision, about a year or so old, from a shop for £200 in December 1979 when I was 18 years old. I'm still gigging that same bass today!

But surely EVH playing the Telecaster is the same as Lewis Hamilton driving the Mondeo? But the guy playing on the Grammy winning album won't have been playing a £200 Squier Affinity, nor is it particularly likely that he would have used a £35k Fodera. However, he might well have been playing a Fender / Stingray / Lakland (or whatever) that he picked up second hand for about £1,500. Which is the point of the thread / @chris_b and my original arguments, i.e. at the £1.5k budget the OP mentioned, you can start to get a bass that is really good and of noticeably better quality of a decent cheaper bass!

C'mon, good players will always sound better than mediocre players, regardless of what bass they are playing! But they will sound even better on a decent quality bass... You could put me in a Ferrari and Lewis Hamilton in a Mondeo and he will easily beat me around a racetrack. But he would lose heavily to any other F1 driver driving the Ferrari...!

There are both! Of course, you can get something playable and sounds OK these days for less. However, my point is that as @chris_b says, for £1.5k or thereabouts you start getting into a different league of basses and you can get something really good that you could gig forever. If you can't afford that, then there are perfectly reasonable cheaper options. However, £1.5k can get you a top quality secondhand bass!

I reckon that £1,500 is about the sweet spot for getting a really good secondhand bass! For that money, you are getting something that would cost around £2.5k new, which is pretty much the threshold of getting a really well made bass. If you have that much money to spend then why would you want three mediocre instruments rather than one top quality bass? You can only play one at a time, if you have one great bass and an OK spare then you're pretty much covered.

- Some do, but they are only impressed if you play something that they recognise from being used by the bass player of their favourite band - many are impressed if they see a Fender logo, but it doesn't go much beyond that - No, they don't, but... they will notice if your band doesn't sound as good as the last gig they went (of course, the bass sound is only a small part of that) - Oh yes they do, very much so - if you sound great and / or play a 'cool' bass, other musos will notice and you are a bit more likely to get called for more gigs (assuming that you can actually play) - Not to your average punter, but most musos will notice the difference and will actually care

Cheers Pete Always good to see you still playing out. Puts me in mind of Pinetop Perkins, the great American blues pianist, who died suddenly at age 99 of a heart attack, with a diary full of gigs booked for the coming year...!

I've been using a Shure GLXD for years now and it is by far the best wireless system that I have come across (and I've had loads over the years, going back to the first Nady systems i the 80s that used to pick up taxi companies in the middle of a gig)! My GLXD is one of the older ones that you can't plug a lead into, so I have a separate tuner on my board as well.

I've gotta say that i just bumped into an old drummer mate of mine at a pub gig tonight and he was saying that we ought to appreciate that we're in our late fifties / early sixties and we're both lucky enough to be still gigging regularly. Make the most of it while you still can, I'm still looking for more gigs. @petergales of this parish has just turned 79 and is still gigging and I have every intention of doing the same!

Thanks Rob. I will have a look at it when I get the chance and try to see if my very basic reading skills are up to it! I know the song, but what I play is based more on what George Porter Jr and Andy Hess played on later live versions. I didn't even know that the bass player from the Dave Matthews Band was on the original. I learnt it for a band I was depping for, then they changed the key for the girl singer, played it on one gig and promptly dropped it for some reason! I did half a dozen gigs for them and then suggested that perhaps they should find a more permanent bass player. However, I always thought that it was a great song!

If you're listening to Gov't Mule, then perhaps you could look at the excellent 'Beautifully Broken'. Great song with a nice bass part.

One of my things to play on soundchecks!

Technically, there are many far better drummers than Peart! What NP was great at was 'orchestrating' drum parts that sound impressive and to build songs / pieces of music around those parts. But he wasn't one of the top guys in terms of groove or technique, etc by any means.

But they're really not. The last time I came across one was owned by a 20 something pro musician, who is classically trained and plays in orchestras, but also does lots of freelance electric bass gigs and plays the blues circuit with a couple of his friends (all pros, ex music school ). He wanted a simple bass that is 100% reliable and would always be suitable for the gigs he does. So, he paid quite a lot for a bog standard CS P bass, which he seems to use pretty much exclusively. I've played it - it's a really nice P bass, does exactly what you would expect it to do, well built, plays nicely and looks cool in an understated way. He is really happy with it and uses it just about every bass gig he does.

The thing is that the beauty of the original Fender designs, is that their virtue was in their simplicity. These original designs produced the industry standards tones that define what we think an electric bass should sound like, but it is relatively easy to make minor improvements i.e. swapping a bridge out or changing pickups. Of course, you might prefer the original BBOT bridge design to a badass of whatever bridge you could choose, which is perfectly valid. But you can easily tweak a P bass (for example) to make what you consider to be a marginal improvement, but without changing the overall characteristic sound of the bass. Which is what lots of us did to 70s Fenders back in the 80s (see @tauzero's recent post above).

I actually look for basses that have been modded (especially semi-vintage Fenders). That way I know that the price is probably going to be a bit lower than an all original and saves me the trouble of searching for a suitable replacement bridge or pickup, etc! When I first started playing (late 70s / early 80s), we all had 70s Fenders and we all modded them in one way or another. I remember seeing an interview with Rick Wills, where he said that you could never really say that a Fender P bass was really yours, until you had taken a screwdriver to it...!