Are cheap bass expectations too high?

[chris_b]

I haven't played one for more than 40 years, but reports and reviews seem to indicate that most "less expensive" basses are made to a much higher standard these days. The automated building processes for the bodies, hardware and electrics ensures that no one will have to play a bass that's as bad as the cheap stuff we had to deal with in the 60's and 70's.

IMO basses at many price points are better made but another interesting development, expectations have risen. Back in the day you bought a cheap "learner" bass knowing it wasn't the best. You put up with it and learnt how to play. Then you looked around for something better. Nowadays players are far more picky about their instruments than anyone I knew back in the day. So instruments are better because the customer demands that they are.

In the 60's most of us started on a cheap bass then moved to a "proper" bass, but neck, weight, radius, electrics, pickups, strings or even BBOT bridges weren't a concern on any bass. You just grabbed your bass and played the hell out of it. Give people choices and they will develop "preferences" but these days the list of "show-stoppers" is never ending.

 

[brianrost]

I mean no disrespect to anyone who wants to buy a boutique bass. but a grand is a lot to pay for any bass, in 2000 or in 2020.

But $1000 will not buy you a brand new boutique bass like it could 40 years ago. "Standard" MIA basses these days all sell for more than $1000.

I'm curious: If you buy, for example, a $300 bass and a $900 bass both from known brands, what is the main difference for the price?

Where it is built is actually the primary reason. Imported basses tend to have imported parts. While they may look the same, the bridges, tuners, pickups and everything else you see on a Squier is sourced in Asia. All the costs of foreign manufacture are reduced starting with the labor. With some exceptions, Indonesia and China have the lowest manufacturing costs, then Korea, Japan, Europe and finally the USA.

When a mfr wants to make a $300 instrument, they will build it outside of the USA. Even most $900 instruments are built outside of the USA these days.

 

[GazzBass]

The cheap beginners basses today are amazing. You really can’t complain. I started playing in 1979. I saved what money I had for months to buy this no name piece of crap from a used store. You could drive a bus under the strings. I played it through a cheap little guitar amp I borrowed from a friend. It sounded like a dog barking into a bucket. Horrendous. Kids these days don’t know they are born. Lol

 

[Nebadon2000]

To me it seems 'inexpensive' Basses main design goal is Ascetics in relation to more expensive.

So if your looking for budget bass to look good, yes they meet expectation.

If looking for great playing, sounding, build, consistency and finish for steady gigging and recording use; not so much. In my experience

Although today's technology has made budget basses much more acceptable overall.

 

[jd56hawk]

And are we applying standards of what we got for $1200 twenty years ago to what we're paying $1200 today. (Just picking a price point for an example. $1200 in 2000 is about $1800 today)

I wouldn't say a knowledgeable buyer expects a $200 bass to play, sound or even look as good as a $1,500 bass, but most do realize you can buy one and expect it to do what you need...even without swapping pickups, tuners, etc...and the quality of a $200 bass today is definitely better than a starter/budget bass from twenty years ago.

 

[Roger W]

Where, exactly is $1200 a cheap bass?

Rockville Maryland. That’s sofa cushion money in Rockville.

 

[DanAdams]

MIA basses these days all sell for more than $1000.

yes, However I don't believe that Fender, or any other Amercian built models set any kind of industry value standards with their pricing.

 

[Plain Old Barry]

Stuff is markedly better today, and your definition of "cheap" is to high.

In the late '70's I started on a Montoya P copy that was so crappy they didn't even bother to put a brand name on the headstock. The action was high enough to slide a cassette tape under at it's best setup... There were no Squiers or MIM's, Ibanez made what were basically copies, and the closest alternatives to Fender were Music Man and Yamaha selling at the same price points. Nobody local sold Rics.

In the early 80's, I worked at a music store. Part of my job was to unpack and do a basic setup on new guitars and basses before they hung in the store. Many of the well known brands didn't come from the factory with a setup much better than my cheap Montoya, and were so poorly intonated, it affected the sound when a customer demoed the instrument and cost us sales. Fender and Gibson still sold on name, many looked down their noses at Japanese instruments.

I bought my first P in '79, a '78 that I still have, for $420, case included, full retail at the time. According to US Inflation Calculator the $420 bass in 1979 would now cost $1498.93, exactly what an American Pro P is listed by Sweetwater ($1499). There are Squiers today that play and sound as good as that bass when it was brand new, most any MIM I've seen is built better. The '78 ended up getting 4-5 sets of aftermarket pickups, a Schaller bridge, and some fret leveling (early on, not wear related) over it's life, because it needed the upgrades.

While working at the store, Ibanez and Yamaha started turning out some great instruments at reasonable prices, several followed me home, and my P got shelved for probably 10 years. Due to Carpal Tunnel issues, I stopped playing for about 10 years and sold everything but the '78 P, and stayed in touch with music as a live sound engineer.

Fast forward to two years after surgery in both hands, and I had enough hand feeling back to play again. To celebrate, I bought a MIM PJ. I was blown away at how nicely a $700 MIM played and sounded, and I could buy a P with a J neck! I still demo a wide range of instruments when I'm in a store, including the wide range hanging in NYC stores, and am still amazed at how well many of the MIM's play vs. many of the American Fenders. I did enjoy a few Sadowskys in Brooklyn, but the examples I liked were far too expensive for me to bring to clubs.

I'm playing out again, practicing lots every day, own 7 basses, and none were as much as $1200 new...

 

[MYLOWFREQ]

"Cheap" is relative. In 2006, I bought a brand new fender Am. Std. J for over $1.200. it was expensive back then, and it's still expensive now. And I strongly think that the placebo effect is real among many bassist (especially beginners) who think they must be getting a great instrument because it is expensive and has a certain name on the headstock. While I think there's a correlation between the build quality and price, the quality of budget instruments has improved a lot that a cheap instrument doesn't mean it is built badly. I think it's good times for us. You can still pay $12.000 for a boutique instrument, but you can also get a $300 instrument that is very well built, looks, sounds and feels good.

 

[bass-icly me]

I think it is purely a board decision to put a bass in the hands of anybody that has a few bucks to spend. At least with name brand entry level basses you should have (and I have) a decent bass.

Is it going to be a bass a professional musician would use to record music to sell/play for the masses? Doubt it. It could possibly be made to be, though.

I put Fender's 60s Jazz pickups on my CV Jazz with new pots, better shielding, jack for less than 100 bucks. Did the work myself. I essntially have a new bass. No issues with bridge or tuners.....yet, I'll fix when when necessary, or, for gits and shiggles someday.

Name brand top of the line instruments are always going to be finest since professionals are their market. That being said, they still end up being modified to the players desire. Much the same as the inexpensive ones. Hmmmm.

 

[SBassman]

If we recognized special threads of the week, this thread would win.

This topic really pressed a button. Lots of people have thoughts.

 

[MultiScaleMale]

Again, I’m not saying $1200 is a cheap bass but I can’t edit the original posting for clarity. Was supposed to be two separate thoughts. I should limit a thread to one sentence, one thought.

 

[Samatza]

Entry level instruments have come a long way. I remember entry level basses with bad fretwork, lots of noise from the electronics and hard to play because you couldn't set it up as well as you should.

Now you can buy an entry level bass that is quiet and plays well. That of course is a good thing as you don't want beginners struggling with bad instruments. Years ago would not have gigged an entry level bass but today I could so that's a positive sign.

On the mid priced offerings it's probably not as noticeable and certainly in the high end of things you would expect to pay more but it's got more to do with the cost of doing business than vast improvements as the quality should already have been high. I do note that a lot of instruments now have carbon fibre rods to make the neck more stable and some electronic components have improved over time and are less troublesome for the most part, of course there are exceptions.

 

[BarfanyShart]

Again, I’m not saying $1200 is a cheap bass but I can’t edit the original posting for clarity. Was supposed to be two separate thoughts. I should limit a thread to one sentence, one thought.

Yeah why are you so hung up on telling us how much money you have that $1,200 is nothing to you? ;-)

Weird topic to post about, "Anyone who can't spend $1,200 on a toy is a peasant." Why title it that? ;-)

I'm joking, it's just hilarious that you keep having to clarify your OP.

 

[MultiScaleMale]

Yeah why are you so hung up on telling us how much money you have that $1,200 is nothing to you? ;-)

Weird topic to post about, "Anyone who can't spend $1,200 on a toy is a peasant." Why title it that? ;-)

I'm joking, it's just hilarious that you keep having to clarify your OP.

Yeah, wish the edit period was a little longer than what it currently is. Oh well........

Screw it. Eventually $1200 will be a cheap bass when the archivists dig through these threads in the future. I will be vindicated!!! Heh.

 

[zubrycky]

A $1200 bass costs a fortune here in Brazil...

 

[Slevage]

As technology advances, quality goes up and price / cost goes down. My first 4 function calculator cost ~$60 (?) 45 years ago.

Riis

You need to factor in labor.
Electronic gadgets are in a class of their own. I recently had a double bass built by Upton Bass. Though they used power tools that old time luthiers didn’t have, much of the build required hours valued at current economic expectations.

 

[Koshchei]

And are we applying standards of what we got for $1200 twenty years ago to what we're paying $1200 today. (Just picking a price point for an example. $1200 in 2000 is about $1800 today)

Much moreso, and I think that the internet echo-chamber is very much the culprit for this.

The camera enthusiast (as separate and distinct from actual photographers) community were probably first out of the gate on this, where lenses were judged by people who'd pixel-peep using insane zoom levels and then use that as a basis for comparing relative sharpness, as if sharpness is the only metric that matters optically. In fairly short order, it became impossible to find good information through the clutter of rich snappers comparing sharpness with one another and poo-pooing anything that failed to meet their rigorous standards for how adjacent pixels should look at 1600% zoom. Forget artistic merit, composition, or skillful use of dodge/burn in postproduction - for them the picture had become a way to benchmark the equipment, not vice-versa.

Meanwhile, in the instrument world, this is starting to avalanche as well, with cries of "RETURN IT!" and "DEMAND 50% OFF!" over poor setups or tiny cosmetic imperfections, with no regard for how the instrument sounds or plays when properly set up. While I'm no lover of GC, it's apparent why they're in such dire financial straits - OCD collectors feeding their obsessiveness with the internet echo chamber, and demanding levels of cosmetic perfection that are impossible to achieve consistently with a non-uniform substrate like wood. I also see the same inversion developing where the music is taking a backseat to online demos that use "music" to benchmark the equipment. As with cameras, the tool is eclipsing the purpose that it was created for.

The only course correction that I can suggest to the aspiring bassist is that if you have similar gear to Chris Squire and still can't play Roundabout, you might want to invest in lessons, rather than a limited edition instrument that precisely matches every detail of Chris's Rickenbacker, and that you'll be afraid to take out of the house.

 

[MultiScaleMale]

A $1200 bass costs a fortune here in Brazil...

We were setting up a data center in Brazil and for every server we brought into country it was something like an 80 percent duty. We soon ditched the idea.

 

[Zooberwerx]

You need to factor in labor.
Electronic gadgets are in a class of their own. I recently had a double bass built by Upton Bass. Though they used power tools that old time luthiers didn’t have, much of the build required hours valued at current economic expectations.

I think it's safe to assume that state-of-the-art hardware requires fewer skilled hours and that is a component of cost-containment. Yes, electronics are in a class-of-their-own as are handmade violins, violas, and double basses...we've wandered a bit from "cheap bass expectations". Irrespective of product type or line, @ClusterFlux 's comment applies: "Automation, computer-aided design, CNC milling, better supply chains, cheaper transport, offshoring production, even cheap credit has all contributed to that."

Riis