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worst bass you've ever owned?

Worst bass = the bass I just sold
Best bass = the bass I just bought

Rinse, repeat.

except for when it's up for sale, then it's the best bass you ever owned. :hiding:

To be fair I weighed the Rick comment heavier despite receiving an SX with a dead pickup and a broken nut. Those were easy fixes on a cheap bass. I had an old Gibson EB something or another way back in the day (SG shaped 2 pickups) that sounded like pewp and played horribly, but that model isn't really in the same league as a Rick 4001 or a Fender Jazz.

I'm also half expecting this thread to be closed, hate threads rarely thrive for long.

I think it's more than fair to judge a bass that cost you 10x the money 10x as harshly
 
my first bass was by far the worst of the three i've owned. it was a late 60s early 70s copy of a gibson eb. i don't think it even had a logo on the headstock. for the first six months, or so, i would pick up the bass, put the strap over my shoulder, take a couple of deep breaths and close my eyes before playing because i knew what was coming. the action was so high, even after a setup, playing it caused my fingers to bleed after just a few minutes. every time i played that thing i had to wipe the blood off of the fingerboard. even thinking of it now brings a shutter along my spine!
my brother was home on leave and i rode along with him to a music shop in toledo called Ron's Music. he was looking for some speakers and i wandered over to the bass isle. there on display, in all it's glory, hung a brand new 1978 natural T-40. it was like in cartoons when everything else goes dark but a spotlight was shining on that peavey. no more bloody fingerboards for me and i can still remember the new bass smell every time i opened that case.
 
Worst for me was a fretless Ric with a pretty good gouge under the A string. The price was right but the bass was horrible. Fingerboard and pickups gave it too much brightness, and the gouge was impossible to avoid. No love lost whatsoever when I got rid of that one!
 
But all those old PoS 1960s/1970s instruments are now 'vintage', which instantly turns them into golden-toned works of art!

My worst bass was exactly one of those 1970s 'vintage' works of art (or was it fart?).
No name plywood short scale junk.
Sounded bad and the hardware was garbage.
 
my first bass was by far the worst of the three i've owned. it was a late 60s early 70s copy of a gibson eb. i don't think it even had a logo on the headstock. for the first six months, or so, i would pick up the bass, put the strap over my shoulder, take a couple of deep breaths and close my eyes before playing because i knew what was coming. the action was so high, even after a setup, playing it caused my fingers to bleed after just a few minutes. every time i played that thing i had to wipe the blood off of the fingerboard. even thinking of it now brings a shutter along my spine!
my brother was home on leave and i rode along with him to a music shop in toledo called Ron's Music. he was looking for some speakers and i wandered over to the bass isle. there on display, in all it's glory, hung a brand new 1978 natural T-40. it was like in cartoons when everything else goes dark but a spotlight was shining on that peavey. no more bloody fingerboards for me and i can still remember the new bass smell every time i opened that case.

How did high action cause your fingers to bleed? That sounds terrible.
 
It was my first bass, a squier precision 5 string, two jazz style pickups, heavy as all get out, massive string spacing. It's funny when I bought that bass, I think I was 11 years old the salesman said that it was "better" because it was a 5 string and that I should get one now because ill eventually want one down the road. I thought it was hilarious for years to come until now, as I own 2 five string basses, a 6 string, and a 7 string......
 
It was my first bass, a squier precision 5 string, two jazz style pickups, heavy as all get out, massive string spacing. It's funny when I bought that bass, I think I was 11 years old the salesman said that it was "better" because it was a 5 string and that I should get one now because ill eventually want one down the road. I thought it was hilarious for years to come until now, as I own 2 five string basses, a 6 string, and a 7 string......

That's funny, that bass has been brought up a few times already, it was my first also, but only my second worst lol
 
Worst bass, as in "a dog"? My Starfire violin bass; I didn't actually buy it to play, though. It's a sacrificial lamb to teach myself how to work on them. Actually, it still sounds pretty good after all the abuse it's taken. Or, worst as in "most disappointing"? That would be my '94 Gretsch Broadkaster. There isn't anything phsically wrong with it; it just sounds crumby and cheap. I have an old Japanese Epiphone (EA-260) that makes it sound like a toy. Sure is pretty, though - if you like big orange hollowbodies.;)
 
My first bass was one that I saw in a shop on my way home from school in ninth grade. I saved my lunch money for several months. I basically would go home hungry every day from mid-September to mid-April. Then I took that lunch money in and dumped the whole $90 on the crappiest bass I've ever owned.

It was a Ventura, a copy of Hofner's Beatle bass. It was really more suited for archery than music.
 
I own it right now. The headstock is my Avatar(up ^ left < of post)
But it looks beautiful, has my name on it and was a gift from and very special singer.
So there it hangs in the studio. The list of things wrong and out of whack with it's playability are too numerous to list but I'll never utter a word of displeasure....except to my TB pals.
It is truly a "wall hanger, period"

Who is the singer?
 
A cheap SG clone.

I got it in high school from somebody in autoshop or something like that. It was a short scale (30" maybe) 4 banger with flats and a single humbucker in the neck position. The peice de resistance was the sky blue plastic pickguard that looked like it was made out of what appeared to be the semi-rigid cover of a cheap 3-ring binder?! The output jack kept falling out and the volume control was super scratchy ( I din't know how to do the basic fixes yet). It was a class act all the way.

It was a craptastic bass. Ha ha. I got if for like $40 or something like that, but I only had it for like a month before I unloaded it or sold it or whatever.
 
Mine was the first bass I bought, a 1962 Carvin bass. Really short scale (24") with guitar pickups with the 2nd and 5th polepiece screws taken out and the holes plugged with cardboard plugs. Buying strings was difficult to impossible.

But it got me by. The neck and pickups Carvin used were from Hofner. Same necks and pickups as on their guitars at the time. This was their bass from 1961 to 64. The bridge was a Bigsby. The only other bass they offered was a doubleneck bass and guitar.
 

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is was probably the summer of 76 or 77, it may have winter i can't remember.
after setup we got the action, in the middle of the neck, down to less than 1/2" and that was a big improvement from when we started.
i never gave my fingers time to heal and form callouses so i had a small band of hamburger across the fingers of my fretting hand.
it wasn't like i could jump on the net and order a new neck, a set of strings or even a cheap replacement bass. our local music shop was one of those great old places, second or third generation, that carried the usual fenders and gibsons. plus i remember a "new" musicman hanging there and a couple of aluminum necked kramers. without wheels i had to live with i had and make the best of it.
 
my first bass back in 2002 was a cort p copy. cost 129. that thing is still kicking and sounds great.

funny to see the contrasting good and bad experiences within a brand

It is funny to hear about the differences in the brand. I currently own 4 corts, 3 basses and one guitar. I've only had problems with one, and that is my '86 Cort slammer bass. What a POS, but after some hardware changes, it should play very well.

In the early 2000's , Cort made a very big change into making higher quality products. Anything before 2000 is pretty much hit or miss, IMO of course. There are still gems from time to time.