LeftyBassist.com

Lefty 1988 Royal blue Guild Pilot at Bass Northwest in Seattle (also listed on Gbase) $499.

Somebody needs to jump on this bass. I have a couple of these Pilots and they are vastly underrated basses IMHO- if you're into a slim Jazz type neck and Active EMG P/J it doesn't get much better than this. First time I noticed one of these was back in the late 1980's, watching a late night Rockpalast broadcast of Mountain live in Paris, 1985... Mark Clarke was playing bass for them at the time and he was jamming a black one (see pic)-- I had no idea what bass it was, but it looked very long, and very cool, with that maple fretboard and the full face pickguard-- so it stuck in my mind... year or so later I saw a print ad for the Pilot 602 and immediately thought, "I never would have guessed that bass was a Guild!"

I'm thinking at some point we need to start a "Guild Basses" thread- After all, they were one of the GREAT american builders- and unlike that "other" great american builder whose name starts with a "G", they DID DO LEFTIES .... I'd love to see what everybody here has, in one thread. (On the other hand, I see that no one else reacted to jersey's post, so... good idea- or waste of time?)

Here's the rest of mine:

The B301 makes me want to cry. Had one when I was a kid and should never have given it up. Sweetness!

I miss my old Guild.

Dano, tell me you do not sell that? OMG, you must be kicking yourself.

Is that an non-original Guild pickup in that?


I've always wanted one of those... at one point befroe I found the lefties I had 3 right handed Guilds- a Starfire, a JSII, and a Jetstar- the Jetstar is the only righty I've kept all these years. It's probably worth a nice bit of money now....

I ended up purchasing the Pilot listed. I already own a Pilot, but I had wanted a more "conventional" finish one than the striped 80's hairband finish of mine. It's taken a while to finally find one, so I thank jerseybluesdude for the lead.

Here's my '87 Pilot. The finish and Kahler tremolo are original to the bass. A couple of years ago I had posted a question about the bass on Talkbass inquiring about Guild parts, and the original owner of the bass came forward and gave me the whole back story. he even sent me pix of him in action with the bass back in the 80's!:



In action!:



The original owner told me he would love to buy it back from me, and I told him if I ever found another Pilot I would consider it, so once the other one arrives and I've had time to look it over I'll see if I can get in touch with him again. The striped one with Kahler is way rarer than the one I'm getting, but it really isn't my style anyway and it would be cool to return the bass to it's original owner.

Here's my '80 Guild B302. The truss rod plate says, "B302F" which was designated for the fretless model, so chances are this was formerly fretless and a previous owner had it fretted. The 2 PUPs installed are obviously not original either and I've thought about replacing them with Darkstars, but where to get Darkstars these days?



And last but not least is my '68 Starfire:

Ah PJ, you got it. I inquired on it but was just sold on Friday... Guess that was you.

Quite the opposite....it's a non-Guild original pickup (Hagstrom, IIRC). The knobs were gone when I got the bass in '98, so I ordered new ones from Fender, and the thumbrest was missing, so I made one from a chunk of ebony. The guy who sold it to me kept asking me to sell it back to him; I ended up trading it back to him for his Modulus in 2000. As cool as it was, I really didn't use it much, so, while I do miss it, I vastly preferred the tone of the Modulus, and I played that bass all the time for about seven years.

I think Jackson stole the bodyshape from Guild:

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