LeftyBassist.com

Hello fellow lefty bassists!

I'm very happy to have discovered this website. Let me ask you all a question: how do you shop for basses? I have been playing bass for 20 years, but from 1993-2009 my only bass was a 5-string Carvin. It's a great instrument, but I've been interested in expanding my palette. Early last year, a friend custom built me a hollow-body fretless, which you can see (if you like) here:

My fretless

Anyhow, now I really have the itch to get a nice fretted 4-string, and I'm really flummoxed about how to do this responsibly. The sensible advice everyone gives about buying an instrument is to try it out, but when they're all built for righties, how do you do this? How do you folks feel comfortable dropping the money on your instruments, when you can't play them properly beforehand?

Thanks!

Well, as you have been around for 20 years you must have heard a lot of different bass sounds. This should already make it a bit more easy.

What I did when I bought my Fender from Ishibashi is just listen to as much of it on youtube to get warmed up so to speak In my case I just had the Fender feaver so I didnt really care if it was either a bit heavy or required me to adapt my playing-style... I was always used to playing a bass with soapbar PU's which supported my thumb. With the jazz it has sharper edges on the PU, but I got used to that.

Secondly, there are very knowledgeable people on this board that can tell you everything about different basses and their sounds.. There are some topics here that display some players' extravagant collections, and I'm sure that they are very willing to fill you in if there is a bass that you think you might be interested in!