Basses that just sound BAD...

[_Unregistered_]

I worked in a music store in the 70's and the crap that Fender shipped in made Gibsons latter day Tobias basses seem like Foderas. Neck pockets that you could put 4 credit cards in, Bridges made of recycled tin, tunning heads that slipped constantly, an actions so high you thought maybe they were set for slide blues playing...

Like I said; bad basses. But again, as I said, a low quality instrument that hinders your ability to play it is no bargain...I'm with you 100%...but the subject of the post was:

"Basses that just sound BAD... "

While I agree that CBS made some serious turds in the 70s, and that there are indeed good and bad basses in this world...can you REALLY define a SOUND as being bad??

Maybe it's not exactly what you want, maybe not exactly what you need for a particular style of music, but perhaps no sound is truly BAD...no matter how "AWFUL" it truly is in your (or even my) opinion, as there's probably SOME musical use for it...

 

[blaire]

I had a fender japan jazz. An absolute pile of crap. The pickups had to be replaced after 2 months because they went silent on me. I only owned it for about 6 months, the thing kept breaking down. My friend also has a fender　MIJ jazz, and I dont like that one either. Very hollow sounding and not much response to touch. Im sure a nice MIA fender jazz is nice though.　

 

[Against Will]

I played a Gibson Les Paul bass, aside from weighing like a brick, it had one tone that barely never changed no matter how much I fiddled with the knobs. The best I could manage was 'crap' and 'slightly quieter crap'. I'm usually a supporter of most Gibson basses, but that one turned me off completely to any Les Paul style bass. Ugh. Traumatizing experience.

 

[Ilovepink]

I have yet to be able to coax a good tone from any short scale (30") bass.

 

[M.R. Ogle]

Come on, guys...

Don't you think every bass produces SOME kind of sound that SOMEBODY will find useful in SOME musical way?

Even the much maligned, one-tone Danelectros work beautifully in the right musical context. Jeezus... From reading this, you'd think every bass has to have the range of sound like everything from a foghorn to a glass harp to be considered anything but crap!!! The guys with the biggest lists of "hates" only show they have the most limited musical palettes, not that they're the most "discerning" players!!!!

They're all just sounds, different sounds. Every bass has ONE usable sound in it, doesn't it? If you don't LIKE something, it just means you don't have a place for it in YOUR vocabulary of music.

(Pretty funny, BigCatJC! Annd wonderfully put. I have basses that I couldn't get along with it, too. The problem was ME!!!)

Anybody heard of David Lindley? He plays only "crap" guitars. He has killer tone and better taste than 99.9% of all the guitarists out there.

Let me fill in the quote: "...blames his tools."

 

[Jazzbasslover]

Worst sounding bass I ever played was a Jackson. It looked like a scaled up version of one of their guitars that is so popular. It had a P/J combo. Sounded absolutely horrible.

 

[Against Will]

Come on, guys...

Don't you think every bass produces SOME kind of sound that SOMEBODY will find useful in SOME musical way?

Even the much maligned, one-tone Danelectros work beautifully in the right musical context. Jeezus... From reading this, you'd think every bass has to have the range of sound like everything from a foghorn to a glass harp to be considered anything but crap!!! The guys with the biggest lists of "hates" only show they have the most limited musical palettes, not that they're the most "discerning" players!!!!

They're all just sounds, different sounds. Every bass has ONE usable sound in it, doesn't it? If you don't LIKE something, it just means you don't have a place for it in YOUR vocabulary of music.

(Pretty funny, BigCatJC! Annd wonderfully put. I have basses that I couldn't get along with it, too. The problem was ME!!!)

Anybody heard of David Lindley? He plays only "crap" guitars. He has killer tone and better taste than 99.9% of all the guitarists out there.

Let me fill in the quote: "...blames his tools."

I agree with you, but I am also impatient and not willing to work with an already poorly built and heavy bass in order to coax a usable tone out of it. I like Danelectros, and Gibsons and even enjoyed playing a Kalamazoo bass for a time while I played it. In general, if it feels good, I'll play it, but if it feels like crap and sounds rather crappily, I don't deny sinking to generalizations and calling it 'just bad'.

 

[_Unregistered_]

I have yet to be able to coax a good tone from any short scale (30") bass.

String it with light gauge strings, turn up the mids, play HARD fingerstyle, and slap. I'll bet it sounds funkier than snot.

I have a Hofner shortie. I used to think it was crap. I bought it on tour when I was in Germany. Tiny thing. Looks like a toy (toy bass, toy bass). Got it more for its size than anything.

One day, we were on tour and playing the Austrian Jazz festival, if memory serves, and Miles' bassist (I think it was The Munch at the time) asked to try my bass out backstage.

I started to apologize for it in advance, as I wasn't really happy with it at the time. I wasn't playing funk on it, I was playing Bossa Nova, and I wanted a little more piano-like tone than this bass was delivering...but I suppose it was doing the one thing I really wanted it to do: it was fitting into the overhead without incident, and sparing me battles with flight crew. So anyway, he picks up my Hofner, and starts just slapping the living bejesus out of it. He looks up with a big grin, and says "bah, you just have to hit it harder - it won't bite ya" (or was it "it won't hit back"?...regardless).

I learned to stop playing it gingerly and expecting some kinda Steinberger tones from it, and instead started SPANKING it, and lo and behold; truly funky, almost piccolo bass sounds emerge from it. It's now one of my favorite basses. You can also bend notes to a positively silly extent on it.

Short scale stuff CAN sound good - played right, and in the right context. I learned that in Austria.

 

[M.R. Ogle]

Sure!
Nobody wants to struggle with an instrument, or wants to have to play around shoddy construction, sharp frets, high action, outa-whack intonation.

Even though they produce some unique sounds, this is where the WishBasses alienate most people. Like the big mwwwaaahhh, but you'll get splinters fighting for it!

I think we should start a thread... "Basses that SHOULD suck, but don't"

I had an old three-pickup Gibson G-3 (Grabber/Ripper thingie).
Sucked "on paper"... but really had a distinct, woody, musical sound that stuck to recording tape (pre-digital days) beautifully.

 

[Kelly Lee]

Warwick, never have found one that worked for me.
Spector, absolute UGH!
I'm not going to get into some of the low end stuff!

Ofcourse I know its my taste and my style that dictates what I think is "bad". I'm sure it didn't help that these instruments were hanging on a wall in a store were I didn't have the chance to play them on my rig with strings of my choice and setup properly.

As for several mentioning BC Rich, I love mine. How many people actually get the chance to play BCR's better stuff?

I'm surprised I haven't heard anyone mention Schecter as being "bad".

 

[Wademeister63]

I had 3 Ibanez basses starting out. EDB690, EDB 605 and BTB405. I never was satisfied with the sound I could get out of any of them. Got and old beat up G&L SB-2 and love it to death. Traded the BTB for an old beat up Guild Pilot and haven't regretted it one bit.

 

[Artisan]

Short scale basses with flatwound strings sound awful.

Take the same bass and put a good set of light gauge round wounds on it and you have a completely different instrument.

I use my little SX shortscale Jazz Bass clone for recording more often than my Lakland, Fender and G&L basses. Playing live would be a different matter entirely.

I would love to have my sixties Hofner back and load it up with roundwounds.

My Hofner was not trebly at all with flatwound strings. It had a thick bass that required one hell of a good amplifier to reproduce its sound without going muddy. Ten's wouldn't cut it. You needed either very good 15' or 18's for that heavy bass. A trebly Hofner violin bass has a problem in the tone circuitry. It happens every day.

 

[HamOnTheCob]

Yep. The cheapest Soundgears, which are passive, sound halfway decent.

I have never heard a Soundgear with a stock preamp that sounded good, with the exception of the Gary Willis model.

I had a Soundgear SR406 6-string, and it played and sounded fantastic IMO. It was probably made in about 98. I sold it in earlier in '04. The ones they make now are garbage though. I don't know what they did to that line...

Anyway, I have a recording of a song I wrote with a friend where I used the SR406 right into my computer. Anyone interested in hearing it feel free to PM me and I'll throw it up on my webspace for your downloading curiosity.

 

[BlacksHole]

I have to disagree with the no bad bass, just improper context posts above. I don't totally disagree as I understand the usefulness of some of these basses limited tones, but unless you can devise a tuning method that works for a fretted bss that cannot have it's intonation fixed, I would have to cite basses that have misplaced frets as just plain bad sounding in all contexts.

 

[thisSNsucks]

I played a Fender Sting Signature model once at GC, it mighta been defective or sumthin cause it had the most lifeless sound ive ever heard

 

[_Unregistered_]

I have to disagree with the no bad bass, just improper context posts above. I don't totally disagree as I understand the usefulness of some of these basses limited tones, but unless you can devise a tuning method that works for a fretted bss that cannot have it's intonation fixed, I would have to cite basses that have misplaced frets as just plain bad sounding in all contexts.

I think we can all agree that an instrument that is so poor in quality that it can not be properly tuned or played is worthless...but again, this is not the subject of this thread (re-read first post).

It is not a thread asking about the quality of basses, it is a thread entitled "BASSES THAT JUST SOUND BAD". Call me silly, but I read with rather good comprehension, and tend to catch such details.

I still say there are no bad bass SOUNDS. There's certainly stuff *I* don't care for, or may not have cause to use, but that doesn't make them BAD sounds, nor mean that certain sound may not have a proper home in the correct context.

 

[BlacksHole]

To my ears, a bass that is out of tune sounds bad. This does answer the original post as I described basses that sound bad to me and why they sound bad.

No amount of tone shaping can salvage the sound of a perpetually out of tune instrument. I can take muddy sounds or super bright sounds (they each have their uses), but I want as much precision as I can get in the half and whole steps as well as harmonics. I also do not like basses that are set up so poorly that you can hear two notes when hammering what you expected was a single note. Since that can be corrected by set-up, I didn't include this peeve. But to correct faulty fret placement requires more than a set-up.

 

[_Unregistered_]

To my ears, a bass that is out of tune sounds bad...

...But to correct faulty fret placement requires more than a set-up.

I own $4000.00 basses, and $100.00 basses. I've never owned nor played a bass that had its frets put in so wrong as to make it so completely out of tune, that it was rendered unplayable. Regardless, one that was THAT bad, would be considered unplayable, and thus its tone would be completely irrelevant to our discussion.

Tone. Sound. That was the discussion topic.

 

[Jim Jackson]

ibanez. mechanical, soul-less garbage. the high and the low end stuff.

 

[_Unregistered_]

ibanez. mechanical, soul-less garbage. the high and the low end stuff.

I have played good ones, I have played bad ones. I own an Ibanez bass, and it's decent. Admittedly, I did have Bob Lee, and the folks at Tobias (when they were over at the Cahuenga store) retrofit Bartolinis into it a year or two after I bought it to improve it a tad...but it wasn't bad to begin with. We are, however, talking about Ibanez from the early 80s here, though.

Cut to just about two months ago, however, and I got my kid a new guitar. An Ibanez DMM1. This thing has absolutely incredible tone, and weighs 4 lbs. Lighter than a Parker fly! Super well finished, very high quality workmanship. Set up so exactingly that it's like it was a custom shop piece...it just plays PERFECT right outta da box. GREAT F@#$% guitar. I'm soooo totally jealous. My kid has a nicer guitar than I do!

Maybe you got your hands on a few bad ones...