LeftyBassist.com

What was you first bass? do you still have it? what happen to it? what did you think of it?
My first bass was a early 80's Lefty Hondo Fame 830 P-Bass Copy i walked into a little mom and pop music store about 4 years ago looked all over for a lefty guitar cause i played guitar at the time didnt have any but had the hondo bass i sat down played it for a little never owned a bass befor seen the price tag said 100 talked the guy down to $75 and a free pack of ernie ball bass strings and about 3 or 4 picksfor the time i thought was an awsome bass sounded great plugged into my little 10 watt crate practice amp in my room but now that i own and played many better basses lets just say the hondo fell short in comparison but still holds a spot in my heart as my first bass and i still have it too most likely will never sell it the condition that its in now i mean it was pretty beat up to begin with but its gotten alot of battle scars along the way and not worth much at all so id rather keep it then sell it for close to nothing but anyway thats my first bass story whats yours?

My first bass was a Dean Edge lefty... I think my wife bought it off of eBay about 5 years ago (I'm still a newbie)... it has a unique flaw in that the "Dean" name at the top of the headstock was reversed (picture attached). Sure, there are better basses, and I've since bought others (got a Fender MIM J-bass that I _love_), but it's special and I dont think I'll ever let it go... being a pack rat, my kids will probably end up selling it some day..

--bm

Oh boy, have you opened up a can of worms and the potential for some embarrassing moments.

My first bass was a righty Westbury Track II, which I flipped. An MIJ Matsumoku that I bought with HS graduation money. Bought it at an infamous music store in Brooklyn after changing my mind on my initial purchase of a Gibson EBO after my friends convinced me that the Gibson was a piece of crap. (I sure wish I didn't listen to them now). My father thought the music store owner was ripping me off with the Gibson, so in typical hot headed Irish fashion threatened the guy and "convinced" him to sell me something else. I wonder if my father would have done that had he realized he was threatening the member of a very notorious mafia crime family? My friends convinced me to take up bass when nobody else wanted to, so I became the singing bassist of my first band. First gig was about 3 weeks after I took up bass, and I still have a video of that performance. It still gives me stomach butterflies watching it, as I can recall the feeling of my first gig. The bass was originally in a natural maple finish, but following the trend of the time to apply a Piet Mondrian paint job to guitars (see Adrian Belew, Eddie Van Halen, etc), I did the same to mine - using acrylic paint right over the gloss finish with no sanding, prepping, etc! Eventually, I also yanked the frets out, filled them with plastic wood, and shellaced the fretboard, making it virtually impossible to move around on it. After getting my '72 J, I traded it to Jaco's then percussionist Manny Montero for a crappy Dr. Rhythm drum machine. I did buy another one off ebay a couple of years ago, but I'd love to find my original again.

Pre-refinish:
(Trying to look like a member of the Specials. The blue sneakers keep me from making that happen.)


Post refinish:
(Also note the Oliver bass head and padded blue sparkle Kuston cabinet. Not to mention the cheesy 80's zipper shirt and cargo pants!).

Mine was a pretty generic "Austin" lefty p bass. I bought it because it was the only thing that the music shop had and they gave me a "sweet deal". In retrospect, I shoudn't have bought it.

My favorite moment with this bass was when I was at district jazz band tryouts for the first time, go to tune, and NO NOTES CAME UP. "Hm weird" thought I. I then found out that the input jack at snapped (like it had about 5 times before (and not from me but from crappy build)). I spent 2 hours trying to tape the wires back together with scotch tape, until someone at the school it was hosted at just happened to be leaving from doing repairs on amps with a solder gun. By this point I was so stressed out that I bombed the tryout (as in bottom of list ) and ended up hating life for about a month I made it the next year, with my ibanez+flatwound combo

I borrowed my high school's right-handed Hofner Beatle-Bass copy for about 6 months until I got my own bass for Christmas.

It was a black Cort P-Bass with a white guard and maple board.

Shortly after that I got a Martin "Stinger" import electric bass... it was all black, with rosewood, rear routed with no pickguard.

Just like this:


Then, the following Christmas, my parents surprised me with a mid-80's MIJ oly white Fender Jazz, which I eventually ruined changing out the p'ups, sanding off the finish, and scalloping the fingerboard.

I played that bass for years, before I got an Ibanez ATK300... which was followed by a Warmoth fretless 4... then, in order...

Stingray 4 in '96 (I still have this)
Warwick Streamer LX 5 in '97
Stingray 5 in '98
Warwick Thumb 5 NT in '99
Lakland 55-94
Lakland JoBo 5

And then it gets a little hazy, since I started buying and selling a lot in the last few years...

My first bass was a Hofner copy - sold it for a Telecaster guitar - sold it for a Hondo II, which is pictured in my avatar.
I put the "stuff" on the headstock because I wanted people to think it was a real Fender. I even used silver tape (what
did I know) on the back of the neck to emulate the skunk stripe.

I still have "Molly," though she has been dramatically altered. I cut the bass up because I liked a certain Guild shape.
The bass would go on to be sold to three or four of my friends until I got her back in the late '90's. She's been painted
black, camo, red... and I'm in the process of putting her back together. I also have my second real bass - a 1986 or so
Ibanez RB Roadstar, which I'm also putting back together. However, I don't know what happened to the neck...

PJ - those pictures are fantastic!!! It looks like we are about the same age. The top photo says a lot about trying to get high school bands in shape: one guy is really taking the image seriously, with the whole Specials thing going on, and the other guy looks like he just came in from mowing the lawn. No interest in the image. Was the bottom photo taken in college? It does look like a school project with the trumpet player and all. Also, I LOVE the Adrian Belew/Mondrian paint job. I realize it's considered dated now, but I think that design is timeless and actually looks better with age: like the styles in Hard Day's Night. Sure, it's dated, but they still look fantastic.

Back to the topic at hand. My first bass was a heavily modified early 70s Hofner Beatle bass that was purchased for $395 with my combined birthday and Christmas money from Guitar Trader in Red Bank, NJ in 1982. I had only been playing guitar for a year and never bass but I just fell for that Beatles charisma so much that I decided to learn it. Some one had ripped out the original control panel and replaced it with a conventional volume/tone/pickup toggle. I have no photos nearby to scan sadly. Even more sad was that I only kept it a year. The hollow-body tone of the Hofner was the complete opposite of what was stylish in those high-tech 80s records I was listening to so I sold it to We Buy Guitars on 48th St. Biggest mistake of my gear-owning life because not only was it cool looking, but that actually became the sound that I ended up loving most as an adult so it would have been well-used. Amazingly, I saw another lefty using it on stage in a band called The Secret Service almost 20 years after I got rid of it so at least it has a happy ending for the instrument if not myself.

My first bass was a righty dark-brown stained hollow-body Hofner-shaped Aria with a scroll headstock. It had two tonal settings. Mud and muddier! Of course at the time I knew nothing about strings and didn't realize for a few months the mud was due to the nylon strings it came equipped with. But as fate would have it, switching to roundwounds didn't help it much. got that bass when I was about 13 or 14 years old.

What followed next was a righty Hagstrom. Don't know the model, but it was a heck of a lot better build than the Aria. It was kinda Mosrite shaped, and I'd call it a 2 1/2 tone sunburst. The pups were modeled like a 2 HB EBO. This was the first bass I did mods to. I put in 2 new OEM Gibson EBO pups - which were danged hard to find in Montreal in 1972!

Then I finally got my first 'pro' bass, a used (but just barely) righty '74 Maple-Glo Rick which was my main axe for several years. Followed by a righty '63 Gibson Thunderbird V (had to trade in the Ric for that one, a real bummer in hindsight) a few years later. Followed by my first true lefty pro bass, a 1980 Fender Fullerton maple neck Pbass (had a huge C neck and it felf like I was using a Louisville Slugger). Followed by an early 80's Ibanez Roadstar II, which I liked a lot better than the P in terms of playability.

At that point I emigrated to the USA, got bitten by the boo-teek bug when I started going to guitar shows and have been in the poor-house ever since!

PunkRockBassist, thanks for giving me the opportunity to walk down memory lane. Hope i didn't bore you all with the history.

wow this is awsome

Dead on accurate description of my life back then. Getting everyone in the band to be on the same page regarding an image continues to be the bane of my musical existence. Incidentally, the guitarist is Paul Poulos, who did go on to become quite a good musician. I was in a bunch of bands with him back then. I've lost touch with him for reasons I won't go into, but some of you metal fans may know him from bands like Pist-On or Lordz of Brooklyn. Supposedly has also worked with Anthrax, The Misfits, Sugar Ray, Korn, Type O Negative, Life of Agony, and Clutch, according to his website.

That second shot was taken at an outdoor gig at Brooklyn College. I was a freshman at the time. The band was called, "Circle of Five," and we were a ska band with a female trumpeter and also a sax player (out of the frame).

Ah memories.

P.S. it's funny how many people have stated that a Hofner or Hofner-type bass was their first.

that strap you had on you bass in that pic was the same strap that came on my hondo

Reminds me of a Gibson Corvus. Which, in turn, reminds me of a bottle opener

It's got to be the lefty thing with Paul. Even with me, in hindsight, it was subconscious because I had never really thought of playing bass until I saw that Hofner.

This was mine, an old Japanese Condor Jazz Bass copy from the late 70s or early 80s:



I only played guitar at the time (about 10 years ago), and wasn't sure if playing the bass was for me, so I got an old cheap bass first to fool around on. Turned out I liked it a lot, even better then playing guitar, so I later got a Yamaha TRB5II and sold the Condor because I thought it would only sit there in its stand and gather dust. I felt sorry for selling it, both for sentimental reasons and because I thought it was actually a very good Jazz Bass, and got an identical one. I didn't like it one bit though, either because with little experience in playing bass I had misjudged my first one or because this second one really was a piece of s***. Either way, I sold it again within a week and never looked back. I still feel sorry for selling my first bass though...

In my case it was the best $40 bass i could afford that didn't have the knobs getting in the way, and had excellent balance when flipped over.

That's funny - I always confuse the Guild with the Gibson - that's the guitar shape I was going after.

pete

What a bizarre place for a thumbrest!

I guess I never realized you were a ska guy. Well, at least the ceiling in the top photo had the Two-Tone Records checkerboard to match your outfit!

Did you see The Specials when they toured last year? It was a dream come true for me: something I NEVER thought I would see. I was screaming like a teenage girl at Justin Bieber during, "Do The Dog", their set-opener.

That's how I got it. The screwhole of the bridge cover was used to mount the thumbrest, using only one screw. I didn't use it because I thought it was placed too far away from the strings, but I never took the trouble to remove it either

a rogue p/j combo that i smashed after 6 months, during a jam with some friends three E strings broke in 4 hours, after the 3rd time i went into a rage and smashed it to pieces....it was in the middle of "my generation" i was 14 and dumb but whatever it was a terrible bass.