My Bass History

It all started in 1983 (or was it 1982?) with a trip to Monkey Business in Romford. The original plan was to buy a Tokai Precision Bass copy but a Fender Mustang Bass caught my eye. It was in natural finish and the previous owner had added a set of DiMarzio pickups. I didn't look at anything else and left the shop with the Fender and a Roland 15W amp.

The Mustang served me well for a couple of years, but I decided that I needed a full scale neck. Back to Monkey Business, looking for a Precision Bass again. It was a used black Jazz Bass though which came home and the Mustang was traded in. I now wish I could have kept it.

In 1987, Hohner released the B2A and I had to have one. It's still probably my favourite bass. Never goes out of tune, looks great, and weighs far less than any of the Fenders/Squiers.

Sometime around 1987 I bought a Kay Precision Bass from my friend Rich. He'd gigged it the once and before going on stage had dropped it, cracking part of the headstock. Undeterred, I paid him £40 for it, then took all the frets off and got a strip of some exotic wood from a woodwork teacher who lived nearby to stick over the fretboard. It wasn't a total success and it soon ended up at the local tip.

Not long afterwards, I got the chance to buy an unlined Hohner B2A FL (fretless). I never really got on with it though as getting the intonation right was harder than it needed to be. Had I realised at the time that the dot markers on the side were the actual positions of the frets and not the middle points of the frets as on regular basses, I might have got used to it. 

Wind forward a few years and the Hohners were both stolen in a burglary. The thieves left the Jazz Bass behind so clearly didn't know much about the value of basses.

After a break in playing of a few years, in the late 2000's I decided to get back into it again and bought another B2A, restrung the Jazz Bass with some gold strings (the ones which John Entwistle used) and bought several more Boss effects pedals.

Things died down again until I read about Rocksmith. I'd been playing RockBand with my wife and eldest stepson for a while and always wished that something similar using real instruments was available. Now it was.

After buying the original Rocksmith, I was appalled at how bad my playing was. After a few months of playing for an hour in the weekend mornings, I was getting back into it and beginning to trouble the High Score leagues on Rocksmith Buddy.

I bought a black Squier Affinity P Bass in 2013 to use as a mule for upgrading various parts. In hindsight I should have spend a little more and bought a VM Precision Bass because the machineheads on the Affinity are a smaller diameter than standard machineheads, so upgrading is impossible unless the holes in the headstock are drilled out.

The Affinity has had a Babicz bridge added, new pickguard, fretmarker stickers, and will one day have a new wiring loom, pickups and copper tape shielding added.

More to come...