fergs40

I wanted a short scale and bought a Höfner Ignition Club a few months ago - put some GHS Precision Flats on it (very fetching purple silks…) and am very pleased with the results. There’s a surprisingly pleasing variety of thumpy sounds from the two pickups, using either the volume controls or the pickup switches. As you’ll have found, the neck is quite narrow and deep, but the same profile the whole way up. Fit and finish on mine was great at the price and overall I’m very happy.

Not my first new (to me) bass, but first time I’ve done a NBD post. For some reason I’ve never owned a precision, but like many people (and posts I’ve read on here would seem to bear this out), I’ve been precision-curious for some time. I played one of these Squiers recently in our local music shop (Just Music in Berlin) and although I was impressed by the instrument itself, the snob in me couldn’t square the €500+ asking price with the name on the headstock. I know, I know… However, my interest was piqued enough to begin to look around. I read a couple of posts in that other bass forum about people getting good deals in Thomann’s Black Friday sale so I had a look and saw they had a B-stock for €322 (about £295), which felt like a decent price - ordered last Friday, turned up today. The only B-stockness I can detect is that the plastic film has been taken off the (very shiny!) pickguard, pickups and tuners (if they do that on Squiers). The worst I could say is that the silica sachet had broken so the box was full of little balls of silicon - I wondered why the package sounded like it had one of those rain shower things in it… Anyway, there’s not a mark on the bass, and it was more than reasonably playable out of the box, though I guess whoever had it previously might have adjusted it. Even the intonation was OK. I always imagined I’d get the archetypal 3TS with maple neck precision if I ever got one - this is clearly not that, but I like it! The blue is very deep and rich, with a nice subtle sparkle. The fretboard is a great colour for not being rosewood and the blocks are very nicely done. In fact, I’m impressed by the fit and finish overall. Yes, I can tell the materials aren’t as top drawer as some basses I’ve got, but it is extremely well put together - no gaps, no crackles, nothing misaligned, no shonky frets. My bass collection is quite eclectic (there’s a 4003 and a Höfner Club Ignition in there), so I’m not sure how to evaluate the playing experience, but the action is fine, the neck not too much of a handful, and I can get round on it OK. I’ve only played it through a little MarkBass 801 so far, but it sounds good to me. My plan is to put some Roto 88s on it for some authentic vintage thump - the supplied Fender rounds are great, but not what I bought this for. So, there we are - if you’re after this sort of thing this could be the one for you. And anticipating the usual question, and with the usual apology for the quality, here are a couple of snaps.

Hopefully being three weeks after the last reply won't lead to 'zombie thread' accusations - it's taken me that long to find the two (rather blurry) pics of my first bass. Anyway, my first bass was (is?) a Hondo II copy of a bass by a company well known to all of us. The first pic shows the rather 'zit burst' sunburst and also the dual outputs (no recollection of whether they both worked). You can also just about make out the two impressively-sized wood screws my friend's dad used to re-secure the tailpiece after it broke spectacularly in two just behind the saddles in the middle of a particularly energetic song - it was lucky there was no-one in the way of it as the string tension fired it at some speed through the air before the strings brought it up short... The second pic is the only one I can find of the full bass - not a bad copy all in all, though I remember it having a bolt-on neck rather than being neck-through. I lent it to a friend when I went to university in 1986 and he in turn 'lent' it to his cousin - the trail goes cold in an attic somewhere in Portrush on the north Antrim coast. If anyone has sighted it since, I'd be delighted to hear about it! Finally, as with many others here, my second bass, and first 'proper' bass, was a Westone Thunder 1A, brand new in 1986 (thank you, student grant), in red with the Magnabass pickup. Been lucky enough that I've never lost that or had to sell it, though it's been on a few adventures...