My daughter and I went on a bit of a road trip yesterday and picked this up. It's been modified for the bridge pickup which is supposedly from a 70's Fender Jazz. I'm really digging the 32" scale length - I didn't realize these short scales had scaled down everything and I've been having a lot of fun playing it! Feels almost like playing a guitar in comparison to a full size P bass. The frets are in perfect shape and the neck is nice and true with rolled fingerboard edges that feel super comfy. It sounds really warm and fat with the P pickup alone or with a bit of J blended in. I'm not really thrilled with the J pickup tone alone so I'm going to try a Model J.
Here's a funny thing though - it has nice, old thumpy Chromes on it but the G string felt really weird and thin and sounded way louder than all the other strings. Turns out it was 0.032 gauge! I didn't even know that was a thing. The other strings are typical Chrome gauges. So I put on a long scale Chrome 0.045 G string I had kicking around - it fit fine but it's much newer and doesn't blend well with the others. Oh well - I took that as an excuse to order some TI's for it.
Other upgrades I'll be doing (in addition to the Model J and new strings):
- jazz bass knobs (it had a weird assortment of mismatched knobs on it)
- Gotoh 203B bridge I have from another project
- full shielding, fret polish, cleaning and setup
Is there a way to accurately date this bass by the serial number? From what I can tell, the 'E' prefix puts this at '84 - '87 range but it would be cool to know more precisely. And if anyone has more info on these short scale Squiers I would love to learn about them! And I'd love to see anyone's other examples as well!
Here's a funny thing though - it has nice, old thumpy Chromes on it but the G string felt really weird and thin and sounded way louder than all the other strings. Turns out it was 0.032 gauge! I didn't even know that was a thing. The other strings are typical Chrome gauges. So I put on a long scale Chrome 0.045 G string I had kicking around - it fit fine but it's much newer and doesn't blend well with the others. Oh well - I took that as an excuse to order some TI's for it.
Other upgrades I'll be doing (in addition to the Model J and new strings):
- jazz bass knobs (it had a weird assortment of mismatched knobs on it)
- Gotoh 203B bridge I have from another project
- full shielding, fret polish, cleaning and setup
Is there a way to accurately date this bass by the serial number? From what I can tell, the 'E' prefix puts this at '84 - '87 range but it would be cool to know more precisely. And if anyone has more info on these short scale Squiers I would love to learn about them! And I'd love to see anyone's other examples as well!
