Bassassin

Bass looks like it's set/through-neck, I would speculate the original bridge has been recessed to enable lowering the string height to make it playable. I wouldn't have any concerns about making the route larger, and possibly deeper, if you want to fit a different, possibly heavy-duty bridge. Although from what I can see of the frets/fretboard profile, you may have your work cut out for you if you intend to make this useable...

Not unheard-of though: And they resisted the temptation of sticking standard J pups in the SBV reissues - best description for this is Jazz on steroids, full, dark, punchy tone even compared to the 70s DiMarzio Model Js in my no. 1 Jazz. This is one of my favourite recording basses. SB75s do come up very occasionally & I've always had a bit of GAS for them - great-looking basses and by all accounts, typical excellent Yammy quality.

Still here, then...

Looks like Hohner had 3 distinct ranges - Professional, Arbor & Rockwood. Rockwood & Arbor do seem interhangeable so oner may have superceded the other. Professional was indeed the Steinberger licensed stuff & high-spec copies. A mate has a Hohner Pro Telecaster and it's gorgeous. Zooming in on your rear-view pic, it's very neatly done but I don't think it looks factory. So yes, I think it's a very sensible mod.

As it happens, it's about 3 miles up the road from me. Maybe I should buy it, then immediately flog it on here, just to make a point. And, of course, to help keep the BC Marketplace fresh & prevent it from deteriorating into a stale procession of the same old basses being passed back & forth between members. Because that would be a shame.

Yes, I stand by everything I've said. They're absolutely not Japanese. Anyone who claims they are either does not know what they are talking about or is being wilfully disingenuous in order to gouge a profit.

Seems illogical to me, Captain - first of all, you mod types don't delete posts about 'normal' basses on Ebay, despite not being what the Ebay folder's for, so steering 'business' their way would, on that evidence, appear to be acceptable. Secondly - it would seem to me to be much more counterproductive to do anything that discourages BCers from buying basses wherever they may turn up. Why? Because when they sell them on, which they inevitably will - they'll sell them right here, that's why.

Yes, your bass could be as old as the one on Ebay, in fact given that the body/hardware are near-identical, you can be confident it's pretty much exactly the same age. You have to take into account that the Ebay seller is making stuff up in order to flog his bodged/unplayable bitsa to some unsuspecting mug for far more than the unmatched parts are worth. Your bass remains exactly what I said it was - a Korean-made 80s-ish Jazz variant - and very nice it is too! Will look great after a bit of tlc. The Ebay bass, on the other hand, has had its 21-fret neck replaced with a 20-fret, so there's no way it'll intonate properly without moving the bridge to compensate for the lost fret. Look how far the saddles are cranked back: That aside, it's very odd that the body isn't drilled for string-through, as this type of bridge is string-through only. I can only assume the ball ends are hooked in the base plate holes. Can't imagine why it was made like that. As far as ID for your bass is concerned, it's surprisingly common to find instruments with no serial numbers or other means of ID. I will have a dig around & see if I can find any info about yours, - maybe examples of the same bass sold under different brands will be worth looking for. I should add - have a read through this thread, and look at the listings linked there. Should give you an idea of why I'm quite confident what your bass is.

There is a rule, introduced fairly recently, and I have no idea why. The rules for this section say it's for silly/funny/rubbish stuff, exclusively on Ebay & nowhere else: As I say, no idea why links to other sites aren't permitted and no explanation's ever been given. Or possibly requested either, for that matter. I'd be afraid to ask - but it's probably something to do with Br*x*t.

My first bass was like this: Short-scale Jazz-ish thing branded Grant. I remember it being awful, although now I appreciate a lot of perfectly good instruments were dismissed as garbage because they were so badly set-up out of the box, & stuck in the hands of clueless kids who couldn't tune up, never mind set truss rods, action & intonation. However I do clearly remember the bridge positioning being so off that the G string was almost hanging off the fretboard above the 12th fret. What happened to it? I murdered it,basically - painted it white, ripped the frets out, painted it black, somehow split the body, took the covers off the pickups... Last I knew of it, it was in the loft of an ex's house. That was maybe 30 years ago, it's probably still there, for all I know.

Main reason was that I was buying, doing a bit of restoration & selling to earn a crust. This was back when stuff like this still occasionally came up on Ebay, poorly listed at silly-cheap prices. Also much as I like a P, I end up owning them & never playing them. I always find it easier to get tones I can use out of a Jazz, or something with a P/J setup. Maybe I should have kept it just to stick on the wall!

I probably should have added: TL; DR version for the hard of attention span/giving a sh!t - it's complicated, nobody knows, but it's definitely not what Matey on Ebay/Reverb says it is.

Every time an SQ P comes up I get a mildly accelerated pulse as I check to see if it's my old one. I even did a little gasp when I saw this one had a (non-original) tort plate, just like mine. But no. Not sure I'd buy it back even if it was, but I do remember mine as the nicest-playing P I ever encountered. Also had the prettiest burst & grain, by a long way.

J'arrive! These are interesting, and subject of a lot of speculation over in MIJland. Prepare to be bored into a coma. Strongly Burns-influenced, but not a straight copy, there are several variations on this same design, indicating a number of different factories made them over quite a long period. What seem to be the earliest ones have a 2-a-side headstock & a pronounced German carve. Hardware & general features place these at mid-late 60s. As ever with this sort of thing, unless a brand name refers to a specific factory, ignore it: https://reverb.com/item/18207457-dynatone-guyatone-short-scale-bass-1960-s-aged-white There's also a guitar version of this style. Subsequent versions have the 4-inline headstock, chrome pickups, tort plate etc that @Lord Sausage's example have. Here's where a brand name is useful, up to a point - these sometimes turn up branded Sakai, which was an actual manufacturer, Sakai Mokko. They can also have build traits associated with Sakai. This version appear in an early 70s Aria catalogue (probably 73-4, not 1970 as the link suggests) alongside a pair of Kalamazoo KG copies, which are also thought to be Sakai Mokko guitars: https://www.vintagejapanguitars.com.br/en/aria-1970-catalogue/ This is where the mistaken connection with Matsumoku comes from - the incorrect assumption that all Aria/Aria Pro II instruments were Matsumoku products. It's interesting that the images are unbranded factory catalogue shots, and I can't remember one of these (or the KG lookey-likeys) being seen in the wild branded Aria. However while I don't think Matsumoku was connected with these, there are enough variations to suggest several other factories were - some have 6-bolt neckplates, some have mahogany necks, others maple, while still others have painted necks covering strip ply construction - a known Sakai trait. All these minor differences suggest different factories made them, or were involved in supplying components. This might likely point to the involvement of Matsumoto Gakki Seizou Kumiai, the so-called Matsumoto Manufacturers Association, a collaborative group building instruments sourced from various woodshops, hardware & electronics manufacturers in the Matsumoto City area. There are later, and slightly more crude versions of the same bass which were made in Korea, not Japan. This points to the migration of the manufacture of low-end instruments from Japan to Korea in the mid/late 70s, and demonstrating how specific established designs were exported. This one is branded Arirang (named after a traditional Korean song), a common 70s/80s Korean brand name. It's unclear whether Arirang was a manufacturer in its own right, as there's evidence suggesting it might have been a sub-brand of Samick. https://reverb.com/item/786783-arirang-short-scale-bass-1970s-olympic-white-mahogany-neck It's entirely probable that manufacture of this style continued in Korea (and possibly Taiwan) into the 80s, like many designs & styles that originated in Japan in the 60s did. Which coincidentally, leads me quite neatly to... Yeah - I can & they didn't! Well, broadly anyway. Excuse me while I rant incoherently: There's a tendency for people to look at anything old looking & Far-Eastern looking and go TEISSSCOOOOO!!! (in the same way anything late 70s/early 80s & stripey provokes MATSUUMOOKUUUU!!! - as though no-one else ever ripped off Alembic) whereas the reality is there were countless manufacturers making & exporting similar odd little guitars in the 60s. Many of these designs continued being made as starter instruments in the 70s, alongside the 'proper' copies, and later being manufactured in Korea & Taiwan through the 70s & 80s. Teisco was actually taken over by Kawai Gakki in 1967, and ceased manufacturing in its own right at that point, and a lot of what people try to flog as '60s Teisco' is actually 80s Taiwanese catalogue tat. And breathe. There. It's over. You made it. Well done you!

This might be a good start: http://www.vintageunivox.com/ Unfortunately the site hasn't been updated for 20 years so it's a bit of a nightmare to navigate, but history, plus pics & info about specific models are there if you're willing to dig. There is a plethora of Facebook groups devoted to Japanese guitars from the 60s, 70s & 80s, including a Univox-specific group, and also The Original Vintage Japanese Guitar Fanclub, which is pretty much a repository for all the current knowledge & research about old MIJ instruments. As far as the Basschat community's concerned, it's unlikely anyone here will have specific info for you, as Univox was a US-specific brand & never exported to the UK - but I would be failing in my civic duty if I didn't insist that you post some pics!

Prosaic answer: From 1981, I'm sure Lars never owned a copy... And how many artists mentioned on the front would by any stretch be considered 'metal' at any point after, say, 1985?

Would be Stoner/Doom these days. Sabbath never considered themselves to be 'metal' & still reject the label.

Needs a 'not any more' option. A lot of 'classic' hard rock would've been called heavy metal at the time but as the music's become more extreme, the term's been redefined. Lots of speculation about the origin of the term - I've always understood it to have come from biker slang for large capacity (and therefore loud) motorcycles - hence its appearance in the lyrics of Steppenwolf's Born To Be Wild. Which would have been pretty heavy in its day.

Hang on - I'll just pop back to May 2010 and find out.

Wasn't me. Unfortunately!

Just plain white on the original MIJs. For the 2012 Clockwork Angels tour Geddy used a custom plate bearing a symbol from the album artwork - not sure but these might've been used on Geddy sigs around that time. This bass pre-dates that, though.

Cheap for any MIJ Jazz, never mind a desirable high-spec god-sig model. Tempted, despite the fanboi connotations...

I believe this particular bass might have been discussed recently elsewhere on t''web, where I already said stuff about it, some of which I'll repeat for the interested. And the unconvinced. This is part of a curious sub-genre of 80s MIJ instruments which is 'Japanese copies of Japanese originals'. It's not a Blazer, but a lower budget copy of a Blazer from a different factory. Not 100% clear which particular factory, but it's absolutely not made by Fujigen, which was the manufacturer of 70s & 80s Ibanez, including the Blazers. These basses (and the guitar versions) appear branded Jarock, Madeira (sub-brand of Guild) and Oakland. The Oakland brand is thought to be connected to the Kiso (Nagano) Suzuki factory therefore it's speculated that these were made by Kiso, rather than Chushin Gakki, as the MIJ community had previously assumed. These seem to be decent basses but are unlikely to be of the same quality as the Ibanez original - they feature generic closed-back tuners, not the Gotoh GB-1-based 'Hercules' units used on Blazers, the bridge is a standard BBOT type rather than the cast, heavy duty Blazer units, pickup is not the 'Super P-4' DiMarzio clone used by Ibanez, and I'd suspect the solid finish (also available in sparkly red & blue!) conceals a ply body, rather than the solid ash/sen used by Ibanez. So, value-wise it depends. At a guess an original Ibanez Blazer will probably sell for about £350 - £450 these days, so this, being a budget Ibby copy, should realistically be a bit less, if I was sticking it on Ebay with a no-reserve auction I'd hope for maybe £200 - £250. Assuming I was being clear about exactly what it was - and what it wasn't.

Top Twenty was the Woolies brand, probably sold elsewhere too as that was Rose-Morris' ultra-cheapo brand beneath Avon & Shaftesbury. Anyone's guess what the Jazz was, there were loads of unbranded instruments & literally dozens of different factories making good ones.

Satellite (as the attentive reader will know, me having pointed it out a couple of posts up! ) was from the same distributor, FCN Music, Korean-made and even cheaper & tackier. Columbus was posh by comparison! Back in the heyday of Ebay, for about 5 years or so I made a few bob buying & selling old 70s MIJ & MIK stuff, I always did a 99p no reserve auction & people did sometimes bid things up to downright silly money. Like many us, I started out playing this sort of thing, and while very little of the old Columbus, Avon, Hondo etc stuff was exactly pro-standard, I did appreciate how much poor setup & lack of any ability to fix it had held me, and I would think most of us, back, 30 or 40-odd years ago. Of the ones I worked on to sell, I'd say it was only one or two instruments that couldn't be made perfectly playable, due to problems such as warped necks.