Bassist

I've had essentially the same bass guitar since I was in the 10th grade.

Ever since Sting graced the pages of Guitar World (Back when bass guitar and bassists were lumped into the mainly guitar mag...I'm an old man, remember!) I wanted one of these sleek, black sticks.

I finally got one about a week before school started because my boss at my sweeeeet guitar shop job bought one off a drummer who'd gone through a passing bass fancy and had a lot of bonus money from being a Navy man.







You can say what you want about this being the bass guitar of the 80s, but looks aside, the thing makes perfect sense. The idea was to take the bass another step away from the lumbering bass fiddle of rock'n'roll's early years and move the concept forward a little. The Fender Precision took the jazzy, swinging slap bass fiddle and morphed it into essentially a four-string Stratocaster with a thyroid problem. The fact that the strings were the same lowest four strings of a guitar, tuned down another octave and made out of "piano wire" made it possible for guitarists to double on a fretted instrument that didn't have mice in it.


The Steinberger bass shaved the difference in neck length to that of a guitar with a head by removing the headstock and turning that end of the neck into the bridge. By putting the strap pegs on a boomerang shaped harness, centered at the instrument's gravity-zero-point, the weight is evenly distributed and it feels more like a lead guitar when you play it.