Wanna hear about how I became a bassist?
I started playing fiddle when I was eight years old, and just picked up other instruments along the way. When I was in college, I joined the university jazz band, not really sure what instrument I would be playing. The director asked me, "Can you play a bass?" and I answered, "Not yet." So he handed me one and told me to learn to play it. "Cool," I thought. "I guess I'm a bassist now. But I should probably get my own bass at some point."
Two days later, while walking around the campus, I saw another student dragging an old, beat-up bass down the sidewalk. He said he'd found it cleaning out some warehouse on a service project, and intended to toss it off a building or something. I asked how much money it would take to convince him to not do that (not that I had much money; I was a college student), and he graciously gave me the bass. "Sweet," I thought. "That was fast. Thanks, God."
The bass was in pretty sad shape. It was shaped approximately like a J-bass, but just different enough where you could tell it wasn't a copy of anything in particular. The only words anywhere on the instrument were stamped on the neck plate: "Made in Japan". No brand name, no model number, no serial number, nothing. The body was covered in gunk of unknown origin, and the pickup covers were corroded, as if somebody had spilled battery acid on it. It had no strings and only three tuners.
This was still very early in the development of my instrument repair skills. I'm ashamed now of what I did back then. I ordered a new set of tuners from eBay, but they were too big to fit in the existing holes. So I went down to the machine shop and tried to use a drill press to enlarge the holes. In the process, I ended up splitting the headstock, so I mixed up some epoxy, filled the crack with as much of the goo as I could, and bound it up with twine to hold it together while it cured. It was a terrible, ugly repair job, but it held together. Once I got tuners and strings on the thing, it worked fine.
To this day, that's the only bass I've owned. I call it the Zombie Bass, because I brought it back to life. I'll get some pictures and post them on my profile later.
I started playing fiddle when I was eight years old, and just picked up other instruments along the way. When I was in college, I joined the university jazz band, not really sure what instrument I would be playing. The director asked me, "Can you play a bass?" and I answered, "Not yet." So he handed me one and told me to learn to play it. "Cool," I thought. "I guess I'm a bassist now. But I should probably get my own bass at some point."
Two days later, while walking around the campus, I saw another student dragging an old, beat-up bass down the sidewalk. He said he'd found it cleaning out some warehouse on a service project, and intended to toss it off a building or something. I asked how much money it would take to convince him to not do that (not that I had much money; I was a college student), and he graciously gave me the bass. "Sweet," I thought. "That was fast. Thanks, God."
The bass was in pretty sad shape. It was shaped approximately like a J-bass, but just different enough where you could tell it wasn't a copy of anything in particular. The only words anywhere on the instrument were stamped on the neck plate: "Made in Japan". No brand name, no model number, no serial number, nothing. The body was covered in gunk of unknown origin, and the pickup covers were corroded, as if somebody had spilled battery acid on it. It had no strings and only three tuners.
This was still very early in the development of my instrument repair skills. I'm ashamed now of what I did back then. I ordered a new set of tuners from eBay, but they were too big to fit in the existing holes. So I went down to the machine shop and tried to use a drill press to enlarge the holes. In the process, I ended up splitting the headstock, so I mixed up some epoxy, filled the crack with as much of the goo as I could, and bound it up with twine to hold it together while it cured. It was a terrible, ugly repair job, but it held together. Once I got tuners and strings on the thing, it worked fine.
To this day, that's the only bass I've owned. I call it the Zombie Bass, because I brought it back to life. I'll get some pictures and post them on my profile later.
