Ruined by stickers

[Lowner]

I was at a guitar store and they had this beautiful yamaha BB model in natural finish. It was in the used music section and on the body of the bass and on its head stock there were circles where there were once stickers. It was just so noticable that it was the first thing I noticed about this bass. I have a P-bass that had a sticker on the back and I removed it and it left a mark behind. But it was on the back so no one really knows it was there. But this bass had the glossy coating gone all the way down to the wood. why do people feel the need to put stickers on their basses when they mar the bass if they are on there too long or not removed properly? I would rather have a paint chip on my bass than a mark from some sticker.

[lomer]

some people just like the look of **** like that man, think punk rock.... personally I think it's sacrilege to sticker even cases but each to their own.....

[Against Will]

For a lot of people, stickers are like shirts:you look at a bassists' stickers like you look at his shirt. It advertises his tastes to onlookers, and offers some suggestions of bands to check out if one hasn't heard of them. Also, it generally lowers the resale value of the bass,making it less susceptible to theft. Or the bass is cheap enough to merit stickering.

I had stickers on my old squier. I took them of recently, and only one left a mark.

[5stringDNA]

i despise stickers on basses, but I have fun sticking them on my cases. I don't see why anyone would care about stickers on a case- it's just a protective black box and looks pretty boring. Now if I had a nice tweed case or something then I wouldn't sticker it. Stickers don't stick to tolex very well anyway though, so they fall off regularly, haha.

[Lowner]

Thing is this bass was awesome. I played it for a while and I love just Yamaha basses. I would have probably bought it if it were not for the sticker marks.

[Lazylion]

Originally Posted by 5stringDNA

Stickers don't stick to tolex very well anyway though, so they fall off regularly, haha.

I glue mine back on.

When my oldest son (who's bigger than me now) was just a wee ankle-biter, he loved to peel the stickers off daddy's cases. No use to tell a 1-year-old "don't do that". We lived in a mobile home, storage space was limited. It got to where I would take a case with a blank side, and put kids' stickers on, just so he could peel them off.

[The Golden Boy]

Stickers are OK on cases and racks- otherwise they all look alike.

There was a reason I put stickers on my power supply in my rack, I just can't remember it now.

[CrazyArcher]

I only put stickers on my case, which is cheap, and where it's easy to remove them. Putting a sticker on the bass? Kinda childish, at the very least IMO...

[Akami]

I've got a red sparkly heart on my JEM that some girl put there after dancing all around the stage all night. She'd had it on her cheek (face cheek) and now her heart is mine!

My girlfriend wants to buy a cheap bass and cover it with purikura stickers of us. They're the pictures you get done in the photo booths in Japan.

I argued against it, but it's her bass and her money.

She ain't getting any stickers anywhere near the Sterling or her Jazz though!

[wolfs]

I find it hard to believe that there isn't a solvent that could break down that sticker residue on the Yamaha that you mention. I totally could be wrong about that, but it seems like there should be something out there to take care of that... you could always ask the friendly people at Ace

[astronauts_suck]

Mineral spirits would do the trick.....

[Bard2dbone]

A lot of years ago, call it 1986 or so, I bought a Hondo Revival series Flying V guitar. The revivals were very different from Hondos' usual crap. They were actually generally made of good wood, and even (for the most part) featured decent workmanship.

So anyway, while I was in the Navy I wanted a guitar to jam on, but didn't want to risk a good guitar to the things that can happen to one on an aircraft carrier or in a barracks. So I bought the Hondo V.

I modified it continually, tweaking things till I had it the best it could be. I re-wound the pickups myself. Ironically, I made a mistake on the bridge pickup so one coil was way overwound, but it sounded so much better. It was a much better guitar than the name on the headstock would lead you to expect by the time I was done with it.

It was even beautiful. It had a flame maple top over mahogany body, with an ebony fretboard over mahogany neck. The finish was a deep brown sunburst.

The reason I'm telling you about this guitar that I sold after I got out of the Navy? That would be because the teenager to whom I sold it put several dozen stickers all over it immediately. He covered the entire body with stickers. He even put them on the fretboard wherever there was a position marker. You couldn't tell the color of the guitar without looking at the back of the neck.

It was like raising a horse lovingly and pampering it for its whole life, selling it to someone else andd seeing him get on to ride...with spurs and whip.

It was really sad.

[The Golden Boy]

Originally Posted by wolfs

I find it hard to believe that there isn't a solvent that could break down that sticker residue on the Yamaha that you mention. I totally could be wrong about that, but it seems like there should be something out there to take care of that... you could always ask the friendly people at Ace

Although most instruments are done with a poly finish these days, there's a chance that the adhesive actually reacted with the finish.

[KeithBMI]

Flea popped a sticker on his '60s shell pink Jazz Bass worth more than $35,000.

(Current Issue of BassPlayer.)

[The Golden Boy]

Whatever Flea does to it- it'd generally be worth more because he owned it.