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Need info on Cort bass

S

shatterd

Feb 24, 2008
204
1
#1
I stopped in on a little ole music store out in the stix.....dusty little shop it was. Most of the inventory in there was old stock that had been sitting in there forever. It smelled like an attic in there. There were no other customers in there but me.

Anyway, he had a few basses over in the corner that caught my eye.

These were Cort basses..... two 6 stringers. They had the word 'Artisan' series on them. One of them had the word 'custom' on the fretboard. On the pickups was the word 'MightyMite'

I could tell they had been sitting in the shop for several years.

Obviously no one in this small town cared for a 6 string bass....so they never sold.

I was surprised by the quality!!! A solid piece of wood! Nice string action! They didn't look at all like cheap basses. Yea I was impressed. Plugged them in to an Eden NA120 combo he had in there and they sounded as good as they looked.

I had always thought of Cort as a low end guitar maker. I didn't know much about their basses.

There was a price tag on each of them. I think the original price was something like a gran, but it was marked thru and another lower price was written on there....something like 600 bucks. I think he just wanted to get rid of them. He told me to make him an offer....as if to suggest he'd take a few hundred bucks...maybe 4 or 5 hundred??

Anyone know anything about these and what should I pay if I go back in there??
 
#2
Cort makes some fantastic underrated basses, I play a gb74 its a great bass.

If I remember right they make the skyline series for lakland and the g & l tributes, also quite a few ibanez basses, as well as many more (I could be a little off), they do the same with guitars.

ALOT of the guitars and basses people buy are corts with someone elses sticker on them.

nice stuff IMO, great value for the money, the negative is the resale value isnt there on them but if you plan to keep them you cant go wrong for what you pay.

hjeres the cort artian page with the different models

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#3
Cort makes quite a few quality instruments for the money that bear the Cort name. And, Cort is also one of the leading producers of quality instruments for other manufacturers. The number of instruments they produce in a year is amazing (a CNN report mentioned them churning out 600,000 instruments a year back in 2004). If you search around enough in these forums, you'll find Cort threads that list some of the manufacturer's Cort is actually building mid-level instruments for: Fender, Ibanez, Conklin, Elrick, Paul Reed Smith, to name a few. If you see a good quality instrument that says it's made in Korea, there's a pretty strong chance it was built by Cort. Another sign of Cort's commitment to building quality instruments is that, I'm fairly certain, all their own branded guitars carry a limited lifetime warranty.

As for the prices on the ones you saw, I saw two posts for the Artisan A6, at Harmony Central, where they paid in the $750-$775 range. So, it seems that even $600 is a good deal.

http://reviews.harmony-central.com/reviews/Electric+Bass/product/Cort/A6+Artisan/10/1
 
#4
Cort makes the Fender's four and five string 24-fretters. Electronics are variations of Seymour Duncan's inboard pre-amp while the pups are Basslines. Good bang for the buck. I have one of them Fenders and I'm quite satisfied. Had I found it's Cort equivalent I would have bought that in a heartbeat. In what neck of the woods did you find that shop? Not every music store carries Cort axes, and from what I've seen most of the ones that do are small, mom-and-pop type outlets.

Check out their website.
 
#7
Here's a few photos of 2 Cort basses I wish I still had. Sold them both to fund my MIA Fender Deluxe Jazz 5 string. I love my MIA, but I do miss both of these still sometimes. :crying:

Cort GB-75 (Natural finish) & Cort Artisan A5 (Dark finish)

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#10
mike_v_s said:
If your G&L was made in Korea, it was made by Cort.

Mike
Click to expand...

They also make the Ocean/Laguna line of basses found in GC's. A GC employee told me that the Cort line never did sell very well in GC's, so the Ocean line is a re-badged Cort to distract the name haters. You'll notice the striking resemblance to the Artisan series (minus the dark wood top). Except the bodies on the Ocean basses don't have the nice, smooth rounded edges like the Artisan series. Same electronics though. I had this one for about a week, but the hard edges on the body were cutting into my forearm after long playing sessions - I also found the brown Artisan A5 pictured above for a hundred dollars less...SO - the Cort/Ocean bass went back to GC for return.

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