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| a Yamaha BB1000S |
Ok, waaaay back in days of yore (like 1992) I bought this awesome bass, a Yamaha BB1000S (plus a hard-shell case), for $100 from a security gendarme at this computer company where I worked. During the Geo Pigs and Ripon days this bass, passive, thru-neck, heavy-duty bridge, really stepped up my game at the time. Great tone, great sustain, easy on the fingers. Unfortunately round about 1995 someone swiped the guitar from my open garage. Betwixt the time of acquiring and losing the bass it became apparent that this was an expensive instrument and quite well could have been "hot" to begin with. So I never pursued trying to recover it by contacting police, guitar shops, etc.
The thing that captivated me as different from other bass guitars with a "PJ" pickup configuration, was that the Precision-style pickups toward the neck were reversed from the standard setup so that the top split-coil pickup was on the treble side of the strings. Somehow I felt that made the difference in tone I enjoyed.
Probably 4, 5, 6 years ago I developed an itch to play 4-string bass again. I had been jamming on a 5-string Ibanez for some years and had gifted that to Owl-man son. Getting another Yamaha was pretty much out of the question as similar vintage models like my former start around $1,000 and head up from there. Then I somewheres ran across the Fender Modern Bass 4 (MB-4).
Now, there are 2 versions of the MB-4 bass. The original is a straight Fender made in Japan at the FujiGen Gakki manufacturing company in the early 1990s. The story goes that Fender was losing instrument market-share to more modern styled instruments manufactured by Yamaha, Ibanez, and other Japanese companies that formerly made copies of US brand guitars and were branching out into their own designs.
Fender took off all the rails for FujiGen to come up with whatever they considered as a great, modern design for a new bass, which ended up as the MB-4 (and the MB-5 5-string version). A passive, PJ-style bass with a pan pot instead of pickup switch, drastic body cutaways (making the instrument super light), and doing away with the traditional Fender head stock and tuners for Gretsch knobs 2 on the top and 2 on the bottom.
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| my Fender MB-4 |
For me, though, since 2017-18 I kept looking for a good-condition Fender MB-4 with the problem being they were either too expensive or too beat up. It didn't help that around 2020 I discovered a super-pristine MB-4 (with the original case) that made my jaw drop. And also made anything less unacceptable (in particular replacement pot knobs vs the original Fender ones. Bleh!).
Fast forward to the present and I have a new work gig that is bringing in some extra dough, and that pristine MB-4 was looking better and better, a siren song for sure. But I thought, "well crap, if I get the bass I don't really want a super pristine vintage because I'm going to modify it and not keep it vintage. Not the thing to do with a limited collectable." JUST THE MOMENT AFTER I THOUGHT THIS I go on eBay and boom there is a newly-listed MB-4 in super good condition (with original Fender pot knobs) at half the price (no case though) and I jumped on it.
The bass has been everything I wanted it to be, with a melodic, overtone, almost industrial tone that I love. My modifications: I replaced the original bridge with a Fender HiMass bass bridge, added Fender Schaller-style strap locks, surrounded the control cavity with Faraday tape to limit electro-magnetic noise, put a Fender Fatfinger sustainer enhancer on the headstock, and pulled my Dog Dayz strap off my Ibanez Gibson copy (Dog Dayz are out of business and their straps are unobtanium).
I have been practicing the new setup for a few days and my first Dismalhead jam with the guitar will be this coming Saturday. My jamming future is looking bright!
