Show Your " Biggest Waste" piece of crap bass you regretted immediately.

[Dasgre0g]

Here was mine. Epiphone Nikki Sixx Blackbird. Needed a backup for some gigs and only had a couple hundred bucks to spend. It sounded, but Nikki Sixx's "essence" flowed through it vicariously. I even added a pickup selector to break the monotony. I just wasn't wearing enough hair spray or doing enough coke to be inspired.

 

[Figjam]

Not a piece of crap, but I didnt vibe with it. US Masters ep4. Super high quality build, but the body was too tiny for me, and the neck shape not my cup of tea. NOT A PIECE OF CRAP. Just not for me Resold it within 24 hours of getting it.


Years ago I bought a Spector Q5 that I never liked. Not a great bass but not terrible. Maybe a high fret or two. Just didnt feel right.

 

[two fingers]

My biggest "regret" purchase was actually a fantastic, well-constructed bass. I bought a Mike Lull 35" silver 5 string P/J with black guard and Sadowsky pre in it. It was super light and gorgeous.

I hated it. It didn't fit my hands at all. And no matter what I did it didn't react to my paying at all. Every note sounded the same no matter how I plucked it. I could use my fingers, pick, side of my thumb, hit hard, lay back, whatever. It all sounded the same. That bass had ONE SOUND and I couldn't change it no matter how hard I tried. I beat my head against a wall trying to bond with that bass. No dice. I probably owned that bass for a shorter amount of time than any other piece of gear I have owned.

 

[UNICORN BASS]

Again, not a piece of crap. I picked up a Dean Q5 in blue quilt maple that had been "worked on". Once i got it in playing form it looked great and felt great but i just couldn't get behind the dark sound, even after i made a brass nut and replaced the missing truss rod cover. So to trade it had to go, great bass, just not for me.

 

[mojomike001]

Tossup:
Hofner Shorty. Got it for travel purposes. Never enjoyed playing it. Sold
Ibanez mid-range 5-string. Looked and felt great. Tone sucked no matter what I did. Returned to Guitar Center.

 

[LadyLoveStingRay5]

MTD Kingston Andrew Gouche.
Found out real fast 35 scale wide necked 5 string modern sounding basses are not for me.
Same for MusicMan Stingray . Love the way they sound in the hands of the great 2 band Ray players. I just found them to be not a good fit for me. Very uncomfortable in weight, neck & body size, and pickup placement.

Great basses in someone else’s hands.

Honorable mention to my electric blue cort curbow that had such a horrible chemical smell it gave me headaches.

 

[petrus61]

This bass:

As if the broken latches on the HSC I paid an up charge for wasn’t enough, it showed up with dead electronics and several weird finish flaws. Once I had it in my hands it was immediately apparent that I had just paid too much money for something that was supposed to be “as good or better than even the US Fenders”. Lakland was awesome and took care of the issues, but the bass just never felt right. It felt and sounded like a facsimile of what I had grown accustomed to with Fender. It was the first time I bought something based solely on the hype and positive feedback on TB, and it was also the last. Lesson learned. Try before I buy.

EDIT: for the record, this is a stock photo. The one I got was not purchased at Bass Club Chicago.

 

[Iridescentone]

Quite a few duds for me. Some were POS and some were pretty nice basses that just sounded lousy. A couple stand-outs....

In the POS catagory:

> Dano Hodad, poorly made junk with very limited sonic variety despite having 3 lipstick pickups.
> Schecter Baron H (semi-hollow). Dull sounding bass with atrocious neck dive.

In the pretty nice bass catagory:

> Modulus Genesis Jazz, with optional Villex pickups and their passive mids control. Surprisingly dull sounding bass with no presence whatsoever. None.
> Spector Czech-built Zebop with EMGHZ pickups and the abominable Tone Pump preamp. A beautifully built bass with a gorgeous zebra top, but devoid of anything resembling a pleasing tone.

Still, one man's dud is another's great bass, and one example doesn't mean another one would sound the same.

As always, apply a grain of "subjectivity salt" here.

 

[Yorick]

My old Ric 4003s..

 

[Axstar]

Either:

Tuscany 'Bird' bass. Utter junk. Rickenbacker-shaped junk. A bad joke of a bass with no redeeming features.

or:

Burns Marquee bass. Utter junk. Burns Marquee-shaped junk. A bad joke of a bass with no redeeming features.



In both cases I bought retro-shaped trash. The worst of Chinese fart-'em-out engineering. The Burns had loud A and D strings, and weak E and G strings. The pickups are simply a bar magnet with the coil wrapped round it, set in paraffin wax. The magnet isn't long enough to sense the outer strings. It looks cool, but it was terribly designed and executed.

My 'Bird' bass was white. Both the Marquee and the 'Bird' had the same white finish. Thin, fragile and prone to any sort of dent. The Bird bass had long ripples in the finish, dust trapped in the clear coat (if it had one) and knots telgraphing up through the finish. The neck pickup was weak and prone to ugly transient peaks, whereas the bridge pickup was rudely hot and mids-focused. The nut was made of cheese and the bridge was a cheap clone of Schaller's roller bridge, but without rolling saddles. I ended up stripping the finish back to "Mapleglo" only to discover the body was made out of stale bread. The softest, ugliest wood I've ever seen. The sunburst one I posted above is veneered. Under the white paint mine was a mess of mismatched pallet wood and tonnes of filler and epoxy.

 

[jamzcl]

Schecter C-4 Stripper bass (not my photo). Thought it would have been funny for my rock band 10 years ago and hated everything about the feel and tone.

Bought it as a B-stock and it was all scratched up too. Returned it the next week and luckily got all my money back.

 

[bassbully]

Here was mine. Epiphone Nikki Sixx Blackbird. Needed a backup for some gigs and only had a couple hundred bucks to spend. It sounded, but Nikki Sixx's "essence" flowed through it vicariously. I even added a pickup selector to break the monotony. I just wasn't wearing enough hair spray or doing enough coke to be inspired. View attachment 2877556

You mean it makes sound? Hard to belive he even played on most of their records.


For me it was a stunning Carvin 5 string that was trans blue finish over a flamed maple top and matching headstock. I got a steal on it but sounded very thin comapred to my passive MIM jazz 5. Also the neck was made of willow wood since it bowed if you looked at it.

 

[Paulabass]

Hofner Beatle bass. Every single thing about it screamed POS!
It was so uneven it was unusable- E, can't be heard. F, way too loud. F#, quiet. G, uncontrollable feedback. G#, quiet etc. ect.
It had p/u's that made 60's Teiscos sound like Bartolinis.
Fretwork done by drug addled lab monkey.
After 3 months the neck joint started giving up, and the bass was folding in the middle.
The wood was advertised as 'piano' maple. It was piano crate.

 

[deeptubes]

Bought this online because it is interesting looking. Tone is anemic. Balance is horrible - hangs funny and has body dive.
That's why it is now an awesome floor lamp!

 

[DWBass]

For me it was a Godin Freeway Leaftop or something like that. A passive P/J. Worst sounding and feeling bass ever. I immediately packed it up and set up a return to MF.

Horrible bass.

 

[ZenGuitarist]

SBMM S.U.B. Ray4.

It had the crappy preamp where the volume control was essentially useless. I think I played it for all of 5 minutes before sticking it into one of my guitar racks in my studio. A couple of months later I donated it to a charity as a silent auction item. It fetched a good price for them.

 

[Bob_Ross]

My biggest waste piece of crap bass I regretted immediately didn't last long enough for me to take a picture. I flipped it within less than 24 hours. I might have taken a small loss, but it was worth it to get that POS out of my sight. Horrible bass, just awful. Not sure what possessed me to even leave the store with it. Temporarily blinded by New Bass-itis, I guess.

I had it for such a short period of time that I can't even recall what brand it was! It was either a Hohner or a Hofner [edit: or maybe it was a Hondo?] but I'm just not certain.

It had a lined fretless fingerboard (as far as I can tell it was original factory equipment) but the lines hadn't been sanded flush to the fingerboard (!) so it worked (and sounded) like a fretted bass with the world's tiniest crappiest frets. Rather than "mwaahh" it just went "mwDOINK"

But even worse: The fret slots had been cut incorrectly, so the intonation was off!!! And because those fretlines weren't flush with the fingerboard, you couldn't fudge it and simply play in tune by ear like you could on a well-made fretless fingerboard. So it had crap tone, no sustain, and played out of tune. The trifecta.

Like I said, owned it for less than a day. Couldn't get rid of it fast enough.

 

[Kmonk]

I don't have a picture but my worst bass was a Carvin LB75. It was very dead sounding. No punch, no clarity, no fullness. I sold it less than a week after I bought. The only good thing was that I only paid $250 for it and sold it for $750.

 

[40Hz]

A Yamaha fretless I owned briefly back in the 80s. Beautiful little metallic red number with a super slim neck that I couldn’t get the right intonation on. I tried different strings, bridges, setup after setup, tried reseating the neck, neck shims, new tuning machines, you name it. I could not get consistently good intonation on it no matter what I tried. Caused a minor crisis for me because I though I’d lost the knack for fretless.

Fortunately, a buddy handed me his fretless PB and said “try mine instead” - and all was again right with my world.

Dumped that Yamaha the following day.

 

[Joe Nerve]

A Yamaha fretless I owned briefly back in the 80s. Beautiful little metallic red number with a super slim neck that I couldn’t get the right intonation. I tried different strings, bridges, setup after setup, tried reseating the neck, neck shims, new tuning machines, you name it. I could not get consistently good intonation on it no matter what I tried. Caused a minor crisis for me because I though I’d lost the knack for fretless.

Fortunately, a buddy handed me his fretless PB and said “try mine instead” - and all was again right with my world.

Dumped that Yamaha the following day.

HaHa.... had the same bass, and forgot all about it. Had I remembered, that's the bass I'd have put in this thread. Thanks.

Mine was more of a hot pink metallic though. With a single P pickup. Did not vibe with that bass a single bit.