One more try.
Brandon, please consider that it aint about the bass. I got a full scholarship to one of the great schools on the planet, studied with some great musicians, played with some amazing players, played my butt off, and made a lot of music on one of the funkiest, raspiest, most hammered, cheapest no-name beater basses ever created.
Yeah, I paid for some repair work. Yeah, I had luthiers put on a bridges and fingerboards a couple of times. Yeah, seams opened up. Yeah, my bass was never worth much. These things take money to maintain, even the cheap, beat-up ones.
Again, it ain't about the bass. Playing is mostly about muscular memory and our musical minds.
I was a broke teenager and a broke young adult. No family support, no trust fund, no nothing, left home at 17, bounced around this great nation on my own. Could never get any more money together than to make my dog-a*s bass work.
And you know what? When I was in the conservatory orchestra, next to all the kids whose parents had bought them the $20-40K basses and had sent them to Julliard prep and Tanglewood summer camp, and when I was on jazz gigs later, it didn't make a rat's a*s how fancy anybody's bass was.
Some people could play, and some couldn't. It was about how much each of us had practiced, and how talented and driven we were, and who we studied with, and how hungry we were.
I get that your teacher doesn't want to play your bass. It is probably set up like h*ll, so its a drag to get around on. I get that, but the setup is changeable. The warped neck and the failing glue joint may need a thicker fingerboard, whatever. What do the luthiers want to make it right?
I respectfully submit, again, is that you should strongly consider spending the little money you have to get your bass working. Maybe it will cost you some money, okay, I get that, it may seem like a lot of money to spend on a beater bass. Its still less than a new bass, that will then eat up money, too.
Then practice and play your a*s off...I am talking 5-10 hours a day, every day, for several years. Quit worrying about your bass and spend the energy on your reading, sight singing, ochestral repertoire, jazz repertoire, intonation, bowing articulations, thumb position, piano, double stop shifting, trills, scales/arpeggios, rhythmic exercises, classical solos, string crossing exercises, etc.
In other words, I suspect that you've got bigger fish to fry. Unless you are already such a monster player that you are ready to audition and get into Curtis, or you are ready to go on the road with your favorite professional players, you probably have a few things to focus on, other than how crappy your bass is.
A groovy bass won't make any of us able to play. All I needed, at 14, was a playable instrument, as inexpensive as possible. A box, a fingerboard, and some strings that I could press down.
If you buy anything else, I mean ANYTHING else, you will still have to f*ck with it endlessly and spend money to have a luthier love it up. In double basses, there is no free lunch, that I have seen.
Man, that felt good! Even if I am pis*ing up a rope...
