Anyone got any history on Encores?

[scalpy]

First bass was a PJ, black, that my dad bought me. Couldn’t comment on the quality at all as I knew even less than I do now about what makes a good instrument. Sold it in the car park of the Sun Valley factory if I recall. 

[Baxlin]

On 08/04/2012 at 21:17, waynepunkdude said:

I still have my s/s black Encore P bass, great little thing.

Funnily enough I played a short scale Encore bass last night!  I’d sold it about 10 years ago to a pal who is now a bandmate, and we did a few songs acoustically (apart from the bass) at the band’s Christmas party at his house.

Certainly a lot easier in a small room than my long scale EB3.  And it fits into a standard Hiscox case - probably worth more than the bass - meant for a Strat-style six string.

i also have an Encore solid guitar, which I love the action on.

[knirirr]

They used to do an unlined fretless P-bass (E83), one of which I bought in 1994 as my first bass. It was black with a white scratchplate.
I now wish that instead of selling it to provide money towards a very expensive EUB I had instead kept it and put better strings and pickups on, as well as replacing the plate.

[Planemo]

All I can say with absolute fact is that the frets on my ancient Encore are far more level than the ones on my brand new £350 headless Steinberger! Not impressed at all at having to spend another £150 on the Steiny to get it right, and the only reason I am doing it is because ergonomically I much prefer it.

I have no idea if my Encore would be considered heavy or not, but I know its made of ply and is 4.160kg or 9.17lb. Seems heavy to me!

[Fionn]

I just picked this up for £65.

Indian-made E83 from the 80’s/90’s. Fender-style headstock, block string tree, hardwood body. Great neck, with a beautiful flame through the maple. The rosewood on the fretboard is really high quality, beautiful and dark. Frets are almost perfect and the ends are smooth enough. It’s a very heavy bass. I took the neck off, and sanded the paint back in the neck pocket, finding that the body is made of a dark hardwood. Not similar to the sanded one photographed earlier, but a more even and darker brown, almost like rosewood. 

The pots, input jack, and wiring have been upgraded. I’m just deciding what else to do with it. I was thinking of sanding it back to the bare wood, doing an oil/wax finish, and putting a tort scratch plate on there. Not sure how consistently the three pieces of wood will match on the body though. It’s a lottery with these, I guess. There’s only one way to find out and, once you do, it’s too late to turn back. 

I had been thinking about changing the pups for a set of SD Quarter Pounders but, to be perfectly honest, the stock pickups sound great, so I’d probably leave them be, and just keep it as it is (but with a tort guard and vintage-style brass bridge saddles).

Hmmmm? Decisions Decisions ... 

Either way, this is every bit a P-Bass, in tone and feel. The essential vibe is totally intact. Absolutely no need to have spent any more. I love it 🙂

[Deedee]

10 minutes ago, Fionn said:

I just picked this up for £65.

Indian-made E83 from the 80’s/90’s. Fender-style headstock, block string tree, hardwood body. Great neck, with a beautiful flame through the maple. The rosewood on the fretboard is really high quality, beautiful and dark. Frets are almost perfect and the ends are smooth enough. It’s a very heavy bass. I took the neck off, and sanded the paint back in the neck pocket, finding that the body is made of a dark hardwood. Not similar to the sanded one photographed earlier, but a more even and darker brown, almost like rosewood. 

The pots, input jack, and wiring have been upgraded. I’m just deciding what else to do with it. I was thinking of sanding it back to the bare wood, doing an oil/wax finish, and putting a tort scratch plate on there. Not sure how consistently the three pieces of wood will match on the body though. It’s a lottery with these, I guess. There’s only one way to find out and, once you do, it’s too late to turn back. 

I had been thinking about changing the pups for a set of SD Quarter Pounders but, to be perfectly honest, the stock pickups sound great, so I’d probably leave them be, and just keep it as it is (but with a tort guard and vintage-style brass bridge saddles).

Hmmmm? Decisions Decisions ... 

Either way, this is every bit a P-Bass, in tone and feel. The essential vibe is totally intact. Absolutely no need to have spent any more. I love it 🙂

Nice one 👍

[Immo]

On 09/02/2019 at 18:21, Fionn said:

I just picked this up for £65.

Indian-made E83 from the 80’s/90’s. Fender-style headstock, block string tree, hardwood body. Great neck, with a beautiful flame through the maple. The rosewood on the fretboard is really high quality, beautiful and dark. Frets are almost perfect and the ends are smooth enough. It’s a very heavy bass. I took the neck off, and sanded the paint back in the neck pocket, finding that the body is made of a dark hardwood. Not similar to the sanded one photographed earlier, but a more even and darker brown, almost like rosewood. 

The pots, input jack, and wiring have been upgraded. I’m just deciding what else to do with it. I was thinking of sanding it back to the bare wood, doing an oil/wax finish, and putting a tort scratch plate on there. Not sure how consistently the three pieces of wood will match on the body though. It’s a lottery with these, I guess. There’s only one way to find out and, once you do, it’s too late to turn back. 

I had been thinking about changing the pups for a set of SD Quarter Pounders but, to be perfectly honest, the stock pickups sound great, so I’d probably leave them be, and just keep it as it is (but with a tort guard and vintage-style brass bridge saddles).

Hmmmm? Decisions Decisions ... 

Either way, this is every bit a P-Bass, in tone and feel. The essential vibe is totally intact. Absolutely no need to have spent any more. I love it 🙂

Pretty! And well kept. Is the bridge in line with the neck? Is the pickup proper-polarized? These are the two most common issues with those.

But the pickup sounds great indeed. I compared the tone of this pickup (bought for 10 quid) with Seymour Duncan APB-2 Lightin' Rods active PU (worth ~100 quid) and while the APB-2 has more clarity and evenness and sounded a bit darker, I totally wouldn't pay 10x more for a pickup when these exist, especially when I admire kinda lo-fi sound.

Edited February 15, 2019 by Immo

[Fionn]

4 hours ago, Immo said:

Pretty! And well kept. Is the bridge in line with the neck? Is the pickup proper-polarized? These are the two most common issues with those.

Thank you!

I’ll need to re-seat the bridge, as it’s squint, sure. What do you mean by ‘proper-polarised’?

[tauzero]

On 09/02/2019 at 17:21, Fionn said:

I just picked this up for £65.

Indian-made E83 from the 80’s/90’s. Fender-style headstock, block string tree, hardwood body. Great neck, with a beautiful flame through the maple. The rosewood on the fretboard is really high quality, beautiful and dark. Frets are almost perfect and the ends are smooth enough. It’s a very heavy bass. I took the neck off, and sanded the paint back in the neck pocket, finding that the body is made of a dark hardwood. Not similar to the sanded one photographed earlier, but a more even and darker brown, almost like rosewood. 

The pots, input jack, and wiring have been upgraded. I’m just deciding what else to do with it. I was thinking of sanding it back to the bare wood, doing an oil/wax finish, and putting a tort scratch plate on there. Not sure how consistently the three pieces of wood will match on the body though. It’s a lottery with these, I guess. There’s only one way to find out and, once you do, it’s too late to turn back. 

Does the routing under the scratch plate expose enough of each of the three butcher-block parts to make an informed decision? Alternatively you could just go for it and if it would be rubbish with oil/wax, go for shabby chic. Apparently it's all the rage.

[Immo]

4 hours ago, Fionn said:

Thank you!

I’ll need to re-seat the bridge, as it’s squint, sure. What do you mean by ‘proper-polarised’?

Many Encores of that era have magnets wrongfully installed - both coils have North facing the same direction. This creates hum. It is very easy to check - just get a magnet, hold it firmly and check if one coil pulls it and other pushes it away - if so, the pickup is OK.

If both coils push/pull the magnet, the polarity is wrong. Easy fix, just use a screwdriver to gently pull one of the magnets out, flip it upside down and use a superglue to attach it back

[Fionn]

8 hours ago, tauzero said:

Does the routing under the scratch plate expose enough of each of the three butcher-block parts to make an informed decision? Alternatively you could just go for it and if it would be rubbish with oil/wax, go for shabby chic. Apparently it's all the rage.

Aye, I’d be able to get a good impression of the middle and bottom pieces, but only a tiny bit of the top one. I’d do that first if it came to it, sure.

For now though, I’ve decided to leave it black. It’s shabby enough like that 😀

 

[Fionn]

5 hours ago, Immo said:

Many Encores of that era have magnets wrongfully installed - both coils have North facing the same direction. This creates hum. It is very easy to check - just get a magnet, hold it firmly and check if one coil pulls it and other pushes it away - if so, the pickup is OK.

Ahhh! I get you. Thanks for the tip.

Everything seems that be in order there 🙂

[Gbone]

Here's the history of my Encore Bass ('cos I'm sure that's really what Truckstop wanted to learn about when starting up this thread 😀)

Found it in a skip outside St. Peter's Prep School in York in ~2002.  Covered all over in stickers, one of which said "St Peter's School 1998 Musical Instrument Day" - so I'm guessing it pre-dates 1998.  3 broken tuning pegs.  One string remained attached.  Tone control knob missing.  Someone had written "I hate music" on it with Tipp-Ex - and various other bits of graffiti.  I retrieved it form the skip and carried it back to the States.

It stayed in a closet for 17 years.

Couple of weekends ago I finally pulled it out of the closet and cleaned it all up.  Got all those stickers off with a sponge and water.  Managed to get the graffiti off with denatured alcohol.  The body polished up nice enough after that (and despite some of the discussion in this thread above, I'm pretty sure it's not plywood).  I polished up all the frets and oiled the rosewood fingerboard - came out nice.  New strings, tuning pegs, and control knobs courtesy of Amazon.  New pots - it had these tiny 500K pots, but the fender spec I found online for the P-Bass show them as having 250Ks, so I set it up exactly like a P-Bass (didn't upgrade the pickups though - for now at least).

So it lives on.  If anyone knows anyone who attended St. Peter's Prep School in York around the early 2000s who used to have a red Encore bass - please let him know it survived the skip, and emigrated to the US where it is happy and well!

[Deedee]

33 minutes ago, Gbone said:

Here's the history of my Encore Bass ('cos I'm sure that's really what Truckstop wanted to learn about when starting up this thread 😀)

Found it in a skip outside St. Peter's Prep School in York in ~2002.  Covered all over in stickers, one of which said "St Peter's School 1998 Musical Instrument Day" - so I'm guessing it pre-dates 1998.  3 broken tuning pegs.  One string remained attached.  Tone control knob missing.  Someone had written "I hate music" on it with Tipp-Ex - and various other bits of graffiti.  I retrieved it form the skip and carried it back to the States.

It stayed in a closet for 17 years.

Couple of weekends ago I finally pulled it out of the closet and cleaned it all up.  Got all those stickers off with a sponge and water.  Managed to get the graffiti off with denatured alcohol.  The body polished up nice enough after that (and despite some of the discussion in this thread above, I'm pretty sure it's not plywood).  I polished up all the frets and oiled the rosewood fingerboard - came out nice.  New strings, tuning pegs, and control knobs courtesy of Amazon.  New pots - it had these tiny 500K pots, but the fender spec I found online for the P-Bass show them as having 250Ks, so I set it up exactly like a P-Bass (didn't upgrade the pickups though - for now at least).

So it lives on.  If anyone knows anyone who attended St. Peter's Prep School in York around the early 2000s who used to have a red Encore bass - please let him know it survived the skip, and emigrated to the US where it is happy and well!

 

Brilliant story 👍

[mcnach]

On 26/02/2019 at 19:37, Gbone said:

Here's the history of my Encore Bass ('cos I'm sure that's really what Truckstop wanted to learn about when starting up this thread 😀)

Found it in a skip outside St. Peter's Prep School in York in ~2002.  Covered all over in stickers, one of which said "St Peter's School 1998 Musical Instrument Day" - so I'm guessing it pre-dates 1998.  3 broken tuning pegs.  One string remained attached.  Tone control knob missing.  Someone had written "I hate music" on it with Tipp-Ex - and various other bits of graffiti.  I retrieved it form the skip and carried it back to the States.

It stayed in a closet for 17 years.

Couple of weekends ago I finally pulled it out of the closet and cleaned it all up.  Got all those stickers off with a sponge and water.  Managed to get the graffiti off with denatured alcohol.  The body polished up nice enough after that (and despite some of the discussion in this thread above, I'm pretty sure it's not plywood).  I polished up all the frets and oiled the rosewood fingerboard - came out nice.  New strings, tuning pegs, and control knobs courtesy of Amazon.  New pots - it had these tiny 500K pots, but the fender spec I found online for the P-Bass show them as having 250Ks, so I set it up exactly like a P-Bass (didn't upgrade the pickups though - for now at least).

So it lives on.  If anyone knows anyone who attended St. Peter's Prep School in York around the early 2000s who used to have a red Encore bass - please let him know it survived the skip, and emigrated to the US where it is happy and well!

 

Pretty sure it's plywood, and the heavy weight is consistent with it, but you can check it easily. Regardless... it's beautiful and if it sounds good who cares? My favourite Jazz is a plywood body Squier from 1994. I preferred it to three 75RI Fenders and a RW Fender, which were all sold on, but the Squier remains... 

[Planemo]

Decided to add Fieblings to my Encore fretboard today, came out just how I wanted so quite chuffed. Whilst it was all apart, added some 3M carbon to the face of the headstock to match the pick guard and finished off with some new flatwounds which I have never experienced before. Sounds really nice! Makes it a mellow alternative and a different playing experience to my Steiny. Encore is deffo a keeper for me.

I know the appearance wont be for everyone but its unique to me!

[Fionn]

Very nice @Planemo! 

 

[Gbone]

On 28/02/2019 at 14:51, mcnach said:

 

Pretty sure it's plywood, and the heavy weight is consistent with it, but you can check it easily. Regardless... it's beautiful and if it sounds good who cares? My favourite Jazz is a plywood body Squier from 1994. I preferred it to three 75RI Fenders and a RW Fender, which were all sold on, but the Squier remains... 

Thanks mcnach - Yes it came out nice enough.  And I completely agree that it doesn't matter if the end result is a nice guitar.  I do think that the body of this one is hardwood of some kind though.  I had to do a fair bit of sanding in the cavity to make room for the new pots, which were physically much larger in diameter than the originals.  Not sure if you can fully appreciate from the res of this picture, but the grain in there is smooth and flowing throughout.  Same story around the sides of the pickup cavity - had to sand in there to clean it (god knows what had been spilled in there, but I sure as Hell wanted it permanently removed!)  Looking at the cross section I saw a natural pattern.   If it was plywood I would have expected to see that very regular parallel pattern of the layers you see in plywood cross section.  I guess some of these guitars must have had plywood bodies, but this one seems too have been cut from some kind of hardwood.

If I ever do a Pete Townsend on it and prove myself wrong, I promise I'll post the evidence!

 

Edited March 3, 2019 by Gbone

[Gbone]

On 01/03/2019 at 11:02, Planemo said:

Decided to add Fieblings to my Encore fretboard today, came out just how I wanted so quite chuffed. Whilst it was all apart, added some 3M carbon to the face of the headstock to match the pick guard and finished off with some new flatwounds which I have never experienced before. Sounds really nice! Makes it a mellow alternative and a different playing experience to my Steiny. Encore is deffo a keeper for me.

I know the appearance wont be for everyone but its unique to me!

That is cool!  Makes me want to 3M carbon coat everything I own!

[mcnach]

9 hours ago, Gbone said:

Thanks mcnach - Yes it came out nice enough.  And I completely agree that it doesn't matter if the end result is a nice guitar.  I do think that the body of this one is hardwood of some kind though.  I had to do a fair bit of sanding in the cavity to make room for the new pots, which were physically much larger in diameter than the originals.  Not sure if you can fully appreciate from the res of this picture, but the grain in there is smooth and flowing throughout.  Same story around the sides of the pickup cavity - had to sand in there to clean it (god knows what had been spilled in there, but I sure as Hell wanted it permanently removed!)  Looking at the cross section I saw a natural pattern.   If it was plywood I would have expected to see that very regular parallel pattern of the layers you see in plywood cross section.  I guess some of these guitars must have had plywood bodies, but this one seems too have been cut from some kind of hardwood.

If I ever do a Pete Townsend on it and prove myself wrong, I promise I'll post the evidence!

 

 

I hope you don't! (do a Pete Townsend)

It does look like solid wood indeed... the ones I had seen before were all plywood, and heavy. Nice one!

[Paul S]

Zombie thread.  On a complete impulse I bought what was listed as an Encore bass, made in Korea in 1978.  It is black, double cut-away with a split humbucker a la Precision, short scale.  Body is fairly thin, made of ply, black finish.  Headstock inlay looks nice, I'd guess mother-of-toilet seat, same as the fret marker dots.  Looks exactly like this, in fact (but not mine):

 

When it arrived I was pleasantly surprised as it seems solidly put together and the neck isn't half bad.  And featherlite at around 3kg.  There are a number of issues with the electrics but it was my intention to do an electrics transplant anyway which would give me a cheap back-up for my Gibson LP Jnr DC but with a slightly Fender flavour, perhaps. 

Anyway, does anyone know anything about these particular models?  Made in Korea in 1978 seems randomly specific and rather old - is that likely?  Not that it matters, just curious.

[Deedee]

2 minutes ago, Paul S said:

Zombie thread.  On a complete impulse I bought what was listed as an Encore bass, made in Korea in 1978.  It is black, double cut-away with a split humbucker a la Precision, short scale.  Body is fairly thin, made of ply, black finish.  Headstock inlay looks nice, I'd guess mother-of-toilet seat, same as the fret marker dots.  Looks exactly like this, in fact (but not mine):

 

When it arrived I was pleasantly surprised as it seems solidly put together and the neck isn't half bad.  And featherlite at around 3kg.  There are a number of issues with the electrics but it was my intention to do an electrics transplant anyway which would give me a cheap back-up for my Gibson LP Jnr DC but with a slightly Fender flavour, perhaps. 

Anyway, does anyone know anything about these particular models?  Made in Korea in 1978 seems randomly specific and rather old - is that likely?  Not that it matters, just curious.

That looks very much like one an old mate of mine had. He bought it new from a catalogue in the late 80's.

Edited October 19, 2019 by Deedee

[Deedee]

Just to add to the above, it used to play very well as I recall. It got passed around a lot among us as it was (for a time) the only bass any of us had!

They were quite distinctive at the time being short scale with the 2 aside headstock. A bit of a departure from the Encore P bass copies that most people bought. 

[Paul S]

Just put the finishing touches on this and I am pretty chuffed with it!  Gotta love a short scale double cutaway!  Changed the electrics and hardware, now sports Entwistle pup, Ki0gon loom, Wilkinson bridge (had to shim the neck to use the full saddle adjustment) and tuners.  Dyed the neck black.  TI flats.  Weighs 3kg on the nose.  Plays and sounds like a bass that cost a damned site more than £175 it cost me in total (excl strings)   Teeny bit neck heavy, rests just above horizontal but nothing like the Epiphone EB0 I had.  Got a bit of a bark to it, which is nice.  The main thing was I enjoyed doing it  

 

Edited November 1, 2019 by Paul S

[Deedee]

1 hour ago, Paul S said:

Just put the finishing touches on this and I am pretty chuffed with it!  Gotta love a short scale double cutaway!  Changed the electrics and hardware, now sports Entwistle pup, Ki0gon loom, Wilkinson bridge (had to shim the neck to use the full saddle adjustment) and tuners.  Dyed the neck black.  TI flats.  Weighs 3kg on the nose.  Plays and sounds like a bass that cost a damned site more than £175 it cost me in total (excl strings)   Teeny bit neck heavy, rests just above horizontal but nothing like the Epiphone EB0 I had.  Got a bit of a bark to it, which is nice.  The main thing was I enjoyed doing it  

 

Nice work, that looks great. 👍

There’s something hugely satisfying about breathing new life into old kit.