My main P-bass is an American Ultra-II which I find to be mostly wonderful. But I rehearse in lots of tight spaces where my basses bump into things a lot, so I needed a cheap rehearsal bass.
My first attempt was a '90s fixer-upper Squier Affinity P. What a piece of junk. Even after the fixing and the upping it remained junk. The pickups were like antennas. With some tuning I'm sure I could listen to the radio while playing. Even when it wasn't humming tunes, the pickups sounded like junk. The tuners were a joke -- the bass needed frequent re-tuning. The fretwork was atrocious (or maybe the neck was warped), I had to do a ton of leveling to get any acceptable buzz-free action. I got rid of it, it wasn't worth the effort.
My second attempt was a 2020's Indonesia-made Squier Affinity PJ. What a difference! The tuners are rock-solid. The fretwork is good, the neck isn't warped. The P pickup sounds great! No hum, no noise at all, and it actually sounds really great. It's just a proper P-bass.
A few nits: (1) P-pickup output level is waaay too high. I lowered the pickups quite a bit and even then I can't tame the output all that much. Which is a little bit of a problem because I don't like changing my gain stages when I change basses. (2) J-pickup is trash. Its output is so low that any sort of PJ blending just doesn't work.
One major problem is that when I put on my Fender 9050s (tension is quite high) I had to tighten the truss rod almost all the way to counteract. After a couple of days I took those strings off for fear of damaging the neck. I don't think this neck was built to handle this level of tension. I'm back on rounds for now, but LaBella LTFs may be the only flats that work with this bass.
TL;DR: Older Affinitys suck. Newer Indonesia Affinitys rock (with some caveats).
My first attempt was a '90s fixer-upper Squier Affinity P. What a piece of junk. Even after the fixing and the upping it remained junk. The pickups were like antennas. With some tuning I'm sure I could listen to the radio while playing. Even when it wasn't humming tunes, the pickups sounded like junk. The tuners were a joke -- the bass needed frequent re-tuning. The fretwork was atrocious (or maybe the neck was warped), I had to do a ton of leveling to get any acceptable buzz-free action. I got rid of it, it wasn't worth the effort.
My second attempt was a 2020's Indonesia-made Squier Affinity PJ. What a difference! The tuners are rock-solid. The fretwork is good, the neck isn't warped. The P pickup sounds great! No hum, no noise at all, and it actually sounds really great. It's just a proper P-bass.
A few nits: (1) P-pickup output level is waaay too high. I lowered the pickups quite a bit and even then I can't tame the output all that much. Which is a little bit of a problem because I don't like changing my gain stages when I change basses. (2) J-pickup is trash. Its output is so low that any sort of PJ blending just doesn't work.
One major problem is that when I put on my Fender 9050s (tension is quite high) I had to tighten the truss rod almost all the way to counteract. After a couple of days I took those strings off for fear of damaging the neck. I don't think this neck was built to handle this level of tension. I'm back on rounds for now, but LaBella LTFs may be the only flats that work with this bass.
TL;DR: Older Affinitys suck. Newer Indonesia Affinitys rock (with some caveats).
).
