How do I price a custom bass?

[JonathanPDX]

Sounds kinda like you really want people to tell you that your $100 pawnshop bass is worth a thousand bucks.

https://www.talkbass.com/threads/victor-wooten-yin-yang-signature-faux-dera.1395895/

 

[eddododo]

A good starting point is something like 40-70% of what it cost in the first place.

if it is very new, maybe you can adjust it up a tad . It being a copy of a Fodera probably hurts more than helps, but who knows.

It’s impossible to know what someone else would consider that worth, especially without having played it and really assessed the quality.. It cost more than $2k, It gets really hard to figure out whether that ‘roughly-half’ formula would be in play.

I think the only way you can really approach. This is to figure out what you would be willing to part with it for first and foremost, see if that reflects this formula to some degree, and go from there

if nothing else, I would get an idea of what you could get for all of the components and electronics used, and then price the body somewhere in the neighborhood of a nice finished Warmoth neck and body.. I won’t argue with anybody who has more experience with this kind of sale, but my instinct is that an unknown luthier building a copy is going to be worth less to a shop than a known custom builder or an OEM..

If you were selling directly to a player, for whom putting their hands on a fabulously built base would mean something, it may work out better, but unless it’s a really cool shop, where the guy paying you would actually factor that in…

 

[Docduval]

Sounds kinda like you really want people to tell you that your $100 pawnshop bass is worth a thousand bucks.

https://www.talkbass.com/threads/victor-wooten-yin-yang-signature-faux-dera.1395895/

looks like OP got his answer.

 

[Jeff Scott]

Good sleuthing.

Sounds kinda like you really want people to tell you that your $100 pawnshop bass is worth a thousand bucks.

https://www.talkbass.com/threads/victor-wooten-yin-yang-signature-faux-dera.1395895/

 

[KenD]

Without the headstock logo the number of potential buyers is greatly limited and the bass is worth far less than you might think, no matter how good it might be.

 

[MultiScaleMale]

And what luthier would put their Hard Guitars logo on upside down? Sure Russians use Cyrillic, but it’s close enough to Latin to know if something is upside down.

 

[MultiScaleMale]

I was going under the assumption that you were the original owner and knew it was of higher quality and commissioned the build.

 

[gln1955]

The more that is uncovered about this bass' provenance, the less it's worth.

 

[dune]

I was going under the assumption that you were the original owner and knew it was of higher quality and commissioned the build.

That's how it read to me as well.

 

[SuperTheBass]

$100 * 50% = $50

 

[D to the C]

That logo is different from the ones on the instagram pages.

 

[buldog5151bass]

Changing logo isn't tough, especially since I doubt it's true inlay.

 

[Axtman]

Let me rephrase the question.

If you owned this bass and were to put it up on TalkBass Classifieds, how much would you ask for it?

 

[matti777]

I’m lost. Is it a cheap chinese copy or a real custom build?

 

[SuperTheBass]

I’m lost. Is it a cheap chinese copy or a real custom build?

Cheap Russian copy. If you look a few posts up there's a link to OP's original post from when he got the bass for $100 at a pawn shop

 

[gln1955]

It's a Russian copy of unknown quality. It somehow ended up in a pawn shop priced at $100, but who knows how that relates to it's true value. That is the problem the OP has. No potential buyer is going to fork over significant bucks without knowing if this is a decent bass or something at the level of a crappy Chinese knockoff.

 

[Axtman]

The bass is not a cheap Chinese knock-off. It was made by a professional guitar luthier. in Russian. I used to have pictures of the build in progress.

The pawnshop sold it to me cheaply because they did not know what it was. They probably thought it was a no-name cheap Chinese copy.

I don't plan on retiring on the money I make on it. Is it such a crime to want to make a little bit of profit on it?

 

[MattZilla]

Let me rephrase the question.

If you owned this bass and were to put it up on TalkBass Classifieds, how much would you ask for it?

If I owned a different HARD GUITARS 2011 and was going to sell it on CL/FBM, after doing some research I’d see that the market has capped its value at $100 and I’d list it for $200 to allow anyone who is in a perpetual Fool State to overpay a petite amount to cover what I spent in gas, strings, and elbow grease.

If I had a HG2011 and wanted to make it available to TBers to pass around like its The Mothman, I’d just list it at $100 and watch it get sold & shipped & sold & shipped & sold & shipped.

I’d really like to see that go through thirty or forty custodians all posting gig pics to a main Fauxdera club thread.

 

[MultiScaleMale]

Let me rephrase the question.

If you owned this bass and were to put it up on TalkBass Classifieds, how much would you ask for it?

Shipping would double the cost of the bass.

 

[Acoustic356]

The rule of thumb is to go to eBay or Reverb and look for instruments that are made by the luthier, filter on "Sold" to get an idea of what people have purchased them for. I usually go about 5% lower, because most people have made an offer.

I tried looking for this luthier on Reverb and eBay and haven't been able to find anything.

So, I would put this in the category of the last 3 instruments that I purchased from "unknown" luthiers - Price it between at around $1100, let people make an offer, then take the highest offer.