My first good bass was a pre-CBS, '64 Precision.That's how we all did it back in the day. What we bought and used back then were just old, used instruments, not family airlumes®. That '67 4005WB I got in '73 was my tool for gigging, and it saw everything from sleazy college dive bars (is there any other kind?) to big festival stages. I changed out some parts and drilled a few extra holes in it, over the years So what? I still made 45 times more than I paid for it when I sold it a few years ago.
I was in college as a first year music student in 1973, and my private teacher told me that I'd never get the big gigs if I continued to play my home-made solid body, which used the neck and hardware from a short-scale Harmony semi-hollow.
As a starving student, I couldn't afford a shiny new bass, so my dad picked up this 10 year old beater. It was actually pretty rare- it had the narrow A neck (like a dot-neck Jazz), and the special-order red metalflake finish. We weren't aware of that at the time; all we knew was that it played well, but it was so beat up that were able to trade it for $125 cash and a beat-up old E-V 664:
This was long before the collector market, or any notion that pre-CBS instruments would one day become collector's items. Job 1 was to strip off the polyester finish and paint it black. While I was at it, I decided to refinish the neck, and get rid of those ugly cigarette burns. Of course, the Fender decals had to go too...
A few years later, I was running into situations where dicey pedals and long cable runs were sapping my tone. I used a chisel to carve a trough under the pick guard. I cloned the circuit board from a friend's MXR micro amp, and stuck that in there along with a 9V battery. Bingo- a DIY active bass!
Around that time, I stripped the body back to bare wood, stained the body a dark brown, and slapped a black Schecter pick guard on it.
Other than paint and the active circuit, the only maintenance it ever got was a minor wiring repair and a partial re-fret. I gigged it steadily until 1984, when I switched over to five-string basses.
Income from that bass not only got me through two stints in college, but helped to finance the down payment on my first house.
Considering how little I had in it, I was quite happy to sell it for $700 a few years later. No-one had any illusions that it was a collectors item, after all it had been through.
...
