Hmm... good question.
I dabbled with bass as a kid and took a wrong turn somewhere and became a drummer. After forty some years I was in a pawnshop buying a snare drum when a Jackson JS 40 caught my eye. I ended up buying it for next to nothing and taking it home. I found that I could play pretty much the same simple stuff that I could as a kid.
My sweetie and I were in the middle of both retiring, selling our home and moving to a new city. The bass got packed away and forgotten for a couple of years.
In January of 2011 I stumbled upon a youtube video with a simple bass pattern. I went into the attic and found the Jackson and started getting serious about actually becoming a real bassist.
The Jackson was okay, but I started to get curious about what kind of bass would suit me better. It was about this time that I found Talk Bass and learned the joy of bass gas. My next bass was a Peavey Fury. MAN, this was a whole bunch easier to play. I later figured out that it had been professionally setup before I bought it.
Then I bought a Peavey Dyna, it had a really different feel from either the Fury or the Jackson. A niece in California became interested in playing so at Christmas 2011 we shipped her the Jackson.
Up to this I was just trying to find out what kind of bass fit me, and buying fairly inexpensive basses had filled that need. I had decided that I really liked P basses. I decided to sell the Dyna and save my coin up and buy a nice used P -bass. I announced my intentions to my sweetie one night and she asked me how much a new "good" bass would cost. (Visions of a new American Standard Precision danced in my head.) I said around $1,200 to $1,300. She thought that we could surely afford that and told me to start looking for "the one". In this year my playing had come along and I was starting to feel like a "real" bassist and no longer a drummer pretending to play bass.
So I started looking for a new American Standard Precision. I went to my friendly neighborhood mom and pop Fender shop and they didn't have a single American Fender bass. I went to another local guitar shop that deals in Fenders. They only had one American P, and it had a rosewood neck. I was leaning toward something with a maple neck. I ended up stopping in a Guitar Center. They had a bunch of Am Stds, but in the middle of the wall was a blonde 60th Anniversary P. Oooooo. I played it and really liked it. Then I noticed the sunburst 60th Anniversary P, it played even better. I put money down on it and picked it up a week later.
At this point I should have sold the Fury, had one bass and lived happily ever after. Nah...
I stumbled upon a Schecter C-4 XXX on craigslist cheap, really cheap. I bought it, it was a fun bass. A bassist whom I played drums beside for years announced that since he wasn't playing out anymore he was selling some of his basses. He gave me a killer deal on his Telecaster bass. That week I was selling some drums and ended up working out a trade for a 2011 American Standard Jazz bass. A P-bass, a J-bass and a Tele bass, I couldn't possibly want anything else.
Yeah, okay... I was on ebay and came across a Tele Star bass identical to the one I had when I was a kid in the 70's. It only ended up costing 8 times what it did new. (This was officially my dumbest bass purchase ever.) By the way, I still had never gotten around to selling the Fury. It lives on the second floor, and I would grab it as something to work stuff out in front of the computer or for late night practice unplugged when I couldn't sleep. In the fall I came upon a deal on a Fender MIJ Precision. Now I use it for second floor practice. Last December, two years into my bassist odyssey I came across a chance to trade a drumset that I wasn't using for a 1995 EBMM Stingray. (Which I'm still playing a lot.)
I never intended on owning eight basses, but I don't regret it. Four of mine are not cheap instruments. The three American Fenders and one Musicman really do everything that I could every want a bass to do.
The other four were all bought so cheap that, well I couldn't help myself. The MIJ Precision and the Fury do really serve a purpose for me as upstairs practice basses. (Admittedly, I only need one.) The 70's Tele Star is an awful bass and is just a reminder of my lost youth. The Schecter is just a lot of fun and a conversation piece for sure with it's stripper inlays on the neck.
So, I think that eight is enough.
I do have a confession though.
I also own seven drumsets, twenty-five snare drums and over eighty cymbals.
But I have a good reason for all of them too! (At least in my mind...)
