I'm 58 yrs old and purchased my first bass last May (when I was 57). So not much to choose from but thought I would contribute. So the winner is......the "Musician's Gear 20-foot 1/4" Straight Instrument Cable" pos that came with the kit and failed about 4 months later.
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Most Disappointing purchase
- Thread starter Bill Murray
- Start date
My first bass was also a squire P, I don’t remember much about it at this point other than even after a set up the action was really high.
One of my students did have a squire for a bit and I was pretttyyy impressed with it. They’ve definitely come a long way.
the sterling 5 I had was also top notch, there is something about the neck of the SR5 I prefer though, it just feels right (but that’s literally compared to everything I’ve ever played).
The guilt still consumes meC'mon, man! Trying to mess up the golf game like that...
I have a Fender precision from 1979 or 80 to which I added EMGs and a J pickup in the bridge position in about 1990 or 91. It was a different time. Now back to passive.
YOU WHAT!!!
While it is commendable that you have what seems like heart-felt remorse, THIS crime, nonetheless, does demand a debt to society be paid...
Tim
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I have a few regrets:
Worst Trade I made is realized in retrospect: I traded a Yamaha BB415 for a MIM Jazz back in 2006. At the time, I felt like it was a decent trade. After owning several Jazz basses of different quality margins, even other MIM jazz basses proved better than the 2006 bass. The Yamaha was a good bass that I wish I still had.
Badass Bridges: They don't sound better, they may function a little better, but they certainly weren't worth 100 dollars. They never made that big of a difference to me.
Gotoh 201 Bridge. It experienced tail lift after a couple months and the oversized saddles never got low enough.
Pickups: If your bass sounds like crap, in my experience its probably not the pickups (if they are a traditional design that is). Tried 4 different sets in a crappy sounding MIM jazz I have. It sounds lifeless with any set.
Seymour Duncan Quarter Pounder Precision Pickups, god what a terrible pickup; overly loud, lacking in mids and aesthetically ugly.
Vintage basses: Sure some are really nice, but the prices people ask for some pieces of wood are ridiculous. You pay for the age, thats it. Especially when you realize that they aren't any better than the basses of today, with the possible exception of available woods in vintage years. I have seen some terrible looking vintage basses. Most of the vintage fenders i've tried or owned look and feel more imperfect than most modern ones. Mid to late 70s fenders are terrible, I don't mind saying so. Currently own a 71 P, its great, but I also got it for a great price. I'd rather buy a used CS in most cases.
Pedals: Oh god, so many terrible pedals out there, heres a couple I've tried; vintage DOD pedals, on bass they are crap. Terrible buffer and tone suck, not to mention the 1/8" power jack. Collectors overhype and overprice them, they are not that good. I currently own or have owned the envelope filter, phasor, milkbox, meatbox, juicebox and delay. Delay was the only good one and I like the envelope filter but its quirky.
DOD Meatbox, bought it after the Juan Alderete hype, soon realized that if I wasn't playing backline equipped stadiums, I wouldnt hear it. Sounds like a terrible octaver without the PA support.
Any Digitech pedal.
One Control Blue 360, a pedal supposed to be modelled after the Acoustic 360 Preamp. Sounds nothing like a 360. A two channel pedal that allows access to the other channel via a manual switch on the side of the unit. I never understood that. Plus the fuzz channel could never achieve unity gain, way too low with the volume maxed. No manual, tried contacting the company through email several times for help, never got a reply. cost 200$.
MXR Bass compressor. Sterile sounding and had to be replaced twice due to faulty electronics. Mine is a brick now. I liked the size and controls, but for a similar price, the Empress is way better.
Elixir Strings: I like the idea of long lasting strings. I don't like the idea of those strings sounding like 2-week old slinkys for a year. 50$ CDN a pack, no thanks. DR's are 20$ cheaper and last a long time when you have multiple basses.
I'll add this: I've never owned 'boutique' basses, because I simply don't think they can do what a precision or jazz bass can't. Once worked at a high end music store, and tried some 'amazing' instruments. 9000$ Ritter Royas, Foderas, F Bass, Ken Smith, all to be owned and eventually circulated in the used market. Ritter basses are awful, god they sound terrible and feel terrible why anyone would pay for one.... I was talking to an recording engineer once and he was telling me that boutique basses are proven or disproven in the studio. In most cases, a precision or jazz will do the job better.
Worst Trade I made is realized in retrospect: I traded a Yamaha BB415 for a MIM Jazz back in 2006. At the time, I felt like it was a decent trade. After owning several Jazz basses of different quality margins, even other MIM jazz basses proved better than the 2006 bass. The Yamaha was a good bass that I wish I still had.
Badass Bridges: They don't sound better, they may function a little better, but they certainly weren't worth 100 dollars. They never made that big of a difference to me.
Gotoh 201 Bridge. It experienced tail lift after a couple months and the oversized saddles never got low enough.
Pickups: If your bass sounds like crap, in my experience its probably not the pickups (if they are a traditional design that is). Tried 4 different sets in a crappy sounding MIM jazz I have. It sounds lifeless with any set.
Seymour Duncan Quarter Pounder Precision Pickups, god what a terrible pickup; overly loud, lacking in mids and aesthetically ugly.
Vintage basses: Sure some are really nice, but the prices people ask for some pieces of wood are ridiculous. You pay for the age, thats it. Especially when you realize that they aren't any better than the basses of today, with the possible exception of available woods in vintage years. I have seen some terrible looking vintage basses. Most of the vintage fenders i've tried or owned look and feel more imperfect than most modern ones. Mid to late 70s fenders are terrible, I don't mind saying so. Currently own a 71 P, its great, but I also got it for a great price. I'd rather buy a used CS in most cases.
Pedals: Oh god, so many terrible pedals out there, heres a couple I've tried; vintage DOD pedals, on bass they are crap. Terrible buffer and tone suck, not to mention the 1/8" power jack. Collectors overhype and overprice them, they are not that good. I currently own or have owned the envelope filter, phasor, milkbox, meatbox, juicebox and delay. Delay was the only good one and I like the envelope filter but its quirky.
DOD Meatbox, bought it after the Juan Alderete hype, soon realized that if I wasn't playing backline equipped stadiums, I wouldnt hear it. Sounds like a terrible octaver without the PA support.
Any Digitech pedal.
One Control Blue 360, a pedal supposed to be modelled after the Acoustic 360 Preamp. Sounds nothing like a 360. A two channel pedal that allows access to the other channel via a manual switch on the side of the unit. I never understood that. Plus the fuzz channel could never achieve unity gain, way too low with the volume maxed. No manual, tried contacting the company through email several times for help, never got a reply. cost 200$.
MXR Bass compressor. Sterile sounding and had to be replaced twice due to faulty electronics. Mine is a brick now. I liked the size and controls, but for a similar price, the Empress is way better.
Elixir Strings: I like the idea of long lasting strings. I don't like the idea of those strings sounding like 2-week old slinkys for a year. 50$ CDN a pack, no thanks. DR's are 20$ cheaper and last a long time when you have multiple basses.
I'll add this: I've never owned 'boutique' basses, because I simply don't think they can do what a precision or jazz bass can't. Once worked at a high end music store, and tried some 'amazing' instruments. 9000$ Ritter Royas, Foderas, F Bass, Ken Smith, all to be owned and eventually circulated in the used market. Ritter basses are awful, god they sound terrible and feel terrible why anyone would pay for one.... I was talking to an recording engineer once and he was telling me that boutique basses are proven or disproven in the studio. In most cases, a precision or jazz will do the job better.
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So many great points in here. I never understood the vintage instrument thing , if it was just sitting a case in a climate controlled environment since the 60s you could justify the price but most of the time they’re banged up and/or have been repaired.
I can’t even recall all the pedals I’ve gone through haha I know I’m not a fan of anything Electro Harmonix makes. They always hiss and don’t always work, I’ve owned multiple Big Muffs and every single one stopped working mid-gig.
Hahah I didn’t realize anyone actually played Ritters... I assumed they were for art/bass collector’s.
Id have to agree that if you owned a P and J you’d never need anything else, but doesn’t mean that you won’t or shouldn’t haha. Love my Stingrays.
I can answer that for you as I just recently bought a '65 Jazz L Series, L Series meaning that it's effectively a pre-CBS Fender without the accompanying price - although it wasn't cheap.
It doesn't play better per se than a modern boutique bass, for example. I mean, these boutiques and even the modern Fenders are like the sports car with all the engineering and computerized traction control, or are like the comfortable Cadillac. You don't have to lean into it too much to get a sound out of it, so your fingers get lazy. My callouses on my index and middle fingers are completely different than before.
These vintage basses reward if you lean into it and beat the sh!t out of it with your fingers. That's one of the major differences. But, by far the biggest difference is the pickups. There's nothing quite like the hand-wound-by-Southern-California-and-Mexican-housewives-working-only-six-months-of-the-year pickups. It's uncanny. And the mojo is real. And I realize that that's a cliched term when talking about vintage Fenders. But it's real. I love my Sadowsky's and I love my '77 P Bass. But there's nothing quite like the growl and the touch-of-distortion-when-you-lean-your-fingers-into-it pickups. You are simply never getting that tone anywhere else. I really think we as a society lost something when we started mass producing pickups.
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You, sir, have won the Internet today and most certainly made my day with this statement. Thank you...
You, sir, have won the Internet today and most certainly made my day with this statement. Thank you...
Aw shucks, thank you, although I think you won it by having that Camus quote in your signature.
Not too many people pick up on the Camus quote so...
...again.And having owned a '64 L Jazz in CAR for over a decade in another lifetime I can see where you're coming from...
The Markbass MoMark 500w, discontinued shortly after my initial purchase for what are in hindsight obvious reasons. I mean.. it sounded okay.. it worked for a few years without issues.. but when I started getting noises out of it, like crackling pots and maybe a grounding issue.. the modules weren't built to allow access to components at all. I couldn't even spray some contact cleaner on the noisy pots. Best I could do was spray some air in a can in there. . I chalk it up to inexperience and the fact that there were maybe a total of 3-5 amp heads local to me that I could try new in store when I was shopping for my first gig worthy amp. Pretty much soured me on anything Markbass in the future, despite knowing so many people love their Little Marks and everything else.
It was honestly a blessing in disguise when it stopped being reliable. I knew what I didn't want in the future, and it opened the door for trying out a Mesa Subway WD-800, which based on what I can see from the construction, will hopefully still be working decades down the road. A year after that purchase and I have zero regrets. Sweet amp.
It was honestly a blessing in disguise when it stopped being reliable. I knew what I didn't want in the future, and it opened the door for trying out a Mesa Subway WD-800, which based on what I can see from the construction, will hopefully still be working decades down the road. A year after that purchase and I have zero regrets. Sweet amp.
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Well, heres one experience i have with vintage pickups. Buddy of mine had a late 60s jazz. It was a good sounding bass that had that mojo. Its true, the vintage pickups have a particular sound. Eventually, the bass started to produce overtones. I told him the pickups needed to be potted. So he got them done. The overtones were gone, but i noticed that the bass sounded more focused and closer to the modern jazz sound than i had expected. So age on the pickups is also a factor.
I was really saying that vintage basses arent much different than the models fender currently offers. There are more visible imperfections in vintage basses than newer production cnc cut basses. The construction hasn't really changed. One could argue about wood, but whatever. Tons of pickup makers offering what they claim to be true to vintage. So its not impossible to get pretty close for a fraction of the cost. I also don't find it hard to beat the "sh!t" out of my modern basses, they can take it.
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Not. a bass related purchase, but a digital piano. Did a ton of research and whittled it down to a Kawai MP7SE. People on forums were raving about them, and unfortunately I had to buy sight unseen, as they didn't import into my country...Murhpys' Law lol. Anyway, got it at a great price, looked classy, but...the pianos kinda sucked. Sold it a few months later, and carried on 6 years with my old 'board, then bought a Yamaha...have been happy ever since. I will never buy another on people's reccomendations...no matter what they say lol.
Not too many people pick up on the Camus quote so...
And having owned a '64 L Jazz in CAR for over a decade in another lifetime I can see where you're coming from...
Agadoo Doo Doo
Satre fell out with Camus
Agadoo Doo Doo
Sorry to hear of your negative Modulus experience. I purchased one in 1998 and it's still my go to bass. A little narrow on the string spacing and heavy, but that's minor compared to the tone, articulation and butter like smoothness.
You must not have been paying attention when Obi Wan Kenobi told you, "These are not the basses you're looking for."
