I guess my beater basses has always been my main basses too (well that is my first bass ever, an Aria Pro II Laser Electric Classic bass, that was my main for the first 10 years or so of me playing bass, and which I still own, and then this current one, the Jerry Jones Long Horn bass, which I was stupid enough to sell at some point, to my later big regret, that was my main for a couple of years in between those two, wasn't really a beater).
And for the last past 10 years, since late April 2011 when I received it with the mail service from Thomann, it has been my
Ibanez GSRM20 Mikro Bass, born in China December 2010, from before Ibanez moved their production to the Cort factory in Indonesia.
But it had as good as perfect fretwork from factory, at least good enough that I can get my prefered just about 1,9mm (or might be 1,8mm, all I know really is that it is slightly bellow 2mm) action at 12th fret low E string side and about 1,5mm or so high G string side.
It also holds tuning exceptionally well, and got the most stable neck I ever had on any of my basses or guitars.
It has a fair deal of scars:
- First one it got from back when it's one-strap stock gigbag, that I used back then, slipped off my shoulder and hit the concrete sidewalk on my way to band rehearsal while it was only a few years old, though all that happened to it was a big chunk of it's extremely thick poly finish chipping off the side of the body from down by the upper side bridge end.
- Second scar intentional, from when I got the bright idea of engraving a sort of faux "broken glass "star"" into it's body under the pickups with a hammer and a flat screwdriver, with the cracks later painted, first with marble effect paint, and then with clear glitter nail polish, to kind of emulate the broken glass (and it actually sort of works, though I need to fill some more clear glitter nail polish down in the cracks).
- And the most recent, and most severe, one when I decided it would be a good idea to attempt to
drill an additional pickup cavity for a far neck position pickup without removing the neck first, but miserably failed, resulting both in a big ugly hole in the body and a small piece of the fretboard chipping off, gluing the piece back I could find (another piece lost forever), luckily not affecting the actual frets or playability around the chip, and filling the hole in the body out with filler mass, but in usual haphazard hack style not doing a paticular good job at it, and then painting it over with black paint and a clear coat of varnish, to approximately match the finish of the bass.
Plays amazing though, and after I swapped out the stock pickups it sounds great too.
The one bass I ever owned that that I have bonded with the most for some reason (despite actually having owned a couple of 1000$+ basses in the past: a Rickenbacker 4003, a Jerry Jones Longhorn, and a Dan Armstrong Plexi Bass, and the only one of those that I really liked was the Jerry Jones, though, as I said, unfortunately was stupid enough to sell (the other 2 were fairly quickly exiled to just sitting in a corner without any playtime, until the Rickenbacker eventually got stolen and the Dan Armstrong sold again)), absolutely love this little beasty bastard.
I even gave it a name, which I otherwise usually don't,
"Dud Bottomfeeder".
Here it is, mahogany body, maple neck, rosewood fretboard with 22 medium frets, and a DiMarzio Model P P pickup wired directly to the output jack socket, the J pickup, from the previously installed EMG Geezer Butler P/J pickup set, still sitting there, but disconnected and lowered considerably, with scars and various more or less impulsive haphazardly added visual mods
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