gringopig's guitars
Is it normal to hanker after a bass?
I'll bet there are various categories of thought about this.
There will be those guitar players who play in bands and have to play loads of things: a wee bit of keyboard now and again, sitting in for the drummer who was arrested for drink driving on the way to the gig, an accordion because - you never know and of course: bass.
There will be those guitar players also who have picked up a bass once or twice and become anxious to put it down again quite quickly after trying to play sweep arpeggios at the cramped bits near the body.
Of course, there are bassists; calloused of finger and gorilla like in terms of finger strength, who could knock you out with the hard bit on the back of their thumb and worship Steve Harris, Jaco Pastorius and Bootsy Collins. They seem happy with this role and face it, if it wasn't for bassists, guitar players would sound silly.
So this:
It's a 1969 Fender Mustang bass in competition orange. Exactly like the one Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones used between 1969 and 1970 on tour.
This beauty was on the GuitarGuitar website and I had it shipped to Edinburgh. I now am the custodian of this for a short time as it is intended for a friend who may or may not be Bill Wyman himself. It's not actually Wyman's, as that sold for $384,000 recently at auction but it's the same model, finish and year.
It's pretty awesome and I am quite jealous now of my friend. It has of course got me wanting a bass.
The Fender Mustang bass is a short scale instrument of scale length 30". The Precision bass is 34" as is the Jazz bass, the two most recognisable instruments in the Fender range and they are quite a handful for a guitar player, so a short scale instrument might be cool.
The bass has now been purchased and a Fender Rumble 40 bought too so I can tinker until my pal wants it shipped to him. He is looking for an original Mustang case in salt and pepper. So get in touch if you have one and want to sell!
Of course, I did a demo video you can see at the bottom of the page but you need big speakers for that low end thumpy thumpy sound. I have found a bass of my own now and ordered a replacement set of clip-on hardened fingers which can snap on!
Stay tuned but here are some glamour shots of the instrument...
For a demo, I am using my new Fender Rumble 40 amp and I go through the various settings on it. Remember to listen on a system with some decent speakers to get the full bass effect!
Of course, now I have the bass bug. So Peter at Guitarhunter in Denmark always has stuff that's great and quite hard to find. Given that the whole world seems to have gone nuts and no Fender products are available at all it seems, it's still great that rare vintage series re-issues are out there!
Check the bass out here
An American Vintage 74 Jazz Bass. Minty with chrome hardware, blocks and binding - I want to go back to the 1970's. Away from all the bedwetters, lick-spittle petty tyrants, mask addicts, doom mongers and freaks who 'believe' in science, work-from-home jim-jam all day long types and all the rest of this Tik-Tok Klown world we live in now.
Get me out of here back to the '70s!
