What makeshift gear did you use when starting out all those years ago?

[thebrig]

[color=#000000][font=Helvetica][size=3][size=4]Just been reading The Dood’s thread asking: [b][i]Is there any really bad new gear out there[/i][/b]? and chris b posted, [i]“[b]When I started I played bass lines on a Spanish guitar, and an amp was out of the question. A friend used his parents radiogram instead of an amp.[/b][/i][i][b]Today's rubbish gear is sheer luxury compared to the gear we started on back then[/b]”.[/i][/size][/size][/font][/color]

[color=#000000][font=Helvetica][size=3][size=4]And this prompted me to start this thread, I know there have been a few threads discussing our first basses, but I thought it might be interesting to find out what other bits and pieces we used all those years ago to make music when we were starting out.[/size][/size][/font][/color]

[color=#000000][font=Helvetica][size=3][size=4]I for one started off in the mid-sixties playing bass on an acoustic guitar strung with mono filament wound strings to make it sound a bit “bassier”, I put the cheap plastic mic that came with my Dad’s Philips Cossar tape recorder inside the soundhole, then plugged it into the mic-in socket on the tape recorder and away I went, it was only a little bit louder than playing acoustically, but being just a kid of about ten or eleven, the extra volume made me feel like a rock god! mind you, after a few months the tiny speaker was totally knackered.[/size][/size][/font][/color]
[color=#000000][font=Helvetica]The lad next door also played guitar through his parent's tape recorder, and we got together with another mate who played along with us on a kids snare drum which had Ringo’s head on the skin, and a tiny little cymbal that came with it.[/font][/color]

[color=#000000][font=Helvetica][size=3][size=4]These days a Squier starter bass and amp would probably cost less in real terms than what my acoustic guitar and tape recorder did back then, and definitely would have sounded better![/size][/size][/font][/color]

Edit: Thought I would add a pic of the tape recorder I used at the time.

Edited November 1, 2017 by thebrig

[stingrayPete1977]

Our band during school years had a carslbro amp with four inputs hooked up to a single 1x12 but in a 4x12 sized home made box, we had no idea what the ohms switches on the back did so we messed with them which made no noticeable difference to anything, we put a Tandy mic in one jack, an Aria pro guitar in one (that was a good guitar) and an Avon SG copy bass in another, we then ran that flat out against the drums but it had a spare input so there's no way we could have been overloading it right?

[BassTool]

[quote name='stingrayPete1977' timestamp='1509533553' post='3399632']
Our band during school years had a carslbro amp with four inputs hooked up to a single 1x12 but in a 4x12 sized home made box, we had no idea what the ohms switches on the back did so we messed with them which made no noticeable difference to anything, we put a Tandy mic in one jack, an Aria pro guitar in one (that was a good guitar) and an Avon SG copy bass in another, we then ran that flat out against the drums but it had a spare input so there's no way we could have been overloading it right?
[/quote]

Pretty much this ^ 😂 with our guitarists unbranded but marked '50W' amp...

Good thread 😉

[tonyquipment]

Great thread. Like these ones.

I started with a crummy acoustic in early 2000s trying to learn beatle covers with a pal during school

We realised there was no point in two rhythm sections so I decided to go on bass on the acoustic

Record our jams to tape and tried multi tracking when I got a portastudio. Tapes. Ah the nostalgia.

[obbm]

The year was 1963. Jet Harris had left the Shadows and I'd just seen Little Richard and a few other artists at a show in Slough. I decided that I wanted to play a bass so I set about building myself one because real basses were just far too expensive, about 8 times the average weekly wage and I was still a poor schoolboy. My first bass was made out of one piece of plywood with no form of truss rod - I had no idea about such things as a 16 year old. The frets were inverted pieces of model railway track and the spacing was calculated using logarithmic tables. I needed a pick-up and remembered that during WW2 when my father was in the anti-aircraft artillery, one of his spoils was a German flying helmet. I'd used this as a headphone however needs must so I removed the ear-pieces and used them as the pick-ups. I saved up to to buy some tuners, a bridge and strings from a local music shop put it all together and amazingly it worked although the neck was like a banana and the action appalling. The second bass was made from a 1-inch thick piece of Pirana Pine and used most of the components from the original. I bought a cheap pick-up for this one.

I had no amplifier so I got inside the family radiogram and soldered a screened cable to the volume pot. It worked but wasn't loud enough so I had to use my tape recorder to boost the signal. All very Heath Robinson but it worked and it meant that I could play along with records.

Having played the trombone at school I had some understanding of music fundamentals however there were no tutors or internet back in 1963 so I bought just about the only tutorial book available and set out to learn some scales.





Eventually I persuaded my mother to lend me £45 to buy a Framus Star bass, saved up and bought a Linear 30 amplifier and got a cabinet maker to build me a copy of a Marshall 4x12 which was fitted with Bakers Group 25 speakers from shop in Croydon. This rig served me well for several years.

[ivansc]

Had been playing banjo and an acoutsic guitar with a WW2 pilots throat mic dangled inside, feeding a converted portable rtadio with a pair of KT 66s, in turn powering an original RAF camp Tannoy 8 or 10" open backed speaker. Replaced when we moved to Cambridge in 1961 by an Italian valve amp with two 6x9" ellioptical speakers and a magic eye tremolo!
Fast forward to 1963 and I bought a 1962 Precision bass second hand. First bass rig was a Pye 50 watt mono valve hifi amp feeding an ex-jukebox 22" speaker in an open backed cabinet made out of 3/8" plywood! Not the greatest combination, but when I dropped the speaker down a flight of concrete stairs it was replaced with a pair of 18" Goodmans axiom (or was it audiom) 90s in huge home made cabinets.
My gear nowadays is somewhat smaller lighter and more powerful....

Edited November 1, 2017 by ivansc

[tonyquipment]

LOl these stories ..

To get the sub bass I needed

I farted in a can, recorded that to tape and played it at half speed and over dubbed dogs barking at postmen for dubstep in 1971

[BigRedX]

My first guitar was a horrible 1960s catalogue bought steel-strung acoustic that my parents got for reasons only best known to themselves. It had the typically high action of cheap guitars of the time, and even after I had found out enough to know to shave about half an inch off the bottom of the bridge to make it playable, I discovered that it sounded terrible.

After pestering my parents for the whole of the summer, they relented and bought me a Kimbara acoustic guitar for my 14th birthday (the only real concession they ever made to my musical aspirations) I still own this guitar although these days it rarely gets played:





As you can see it has undergone some modifications from it's original condition. The year after I got it, I sold all my model railway stuff and with the proceeds took a trip to Leicester where I was able to buy a second hand Carlsbro Wasp 10 Watt amp and a piezo pickup for my guitar. Unfortunately my £35 wouldn't stretch as far as a used "Woolies Special" electric guitar as well as the amp so I had to settle for the pickup stuck to the bridge of the Kimbara. However I now had amplification, and it was bigger and louder than the amps my school friends had - which just goes to show what terrible amps were around at the time for those of us on a very limited budget.

Unfortunately a piezo pickup on an acoustic guitar didn't really make it sound like the guitars on the records I was buying, so after lots of trawling around the local music shops I added a cheap Schaller magnetic pickup. This was supposed to be fitted to the end of the fingerboard, but I didn't like how it sounded in that position, so I glued it to the soundboard next to the bridge and drilled a hole in the top to take the cable. At the same time I moved the piezo pickup to the inside of the body under the bridge and connected both pickups to a stereo jack. The output connected to a box with 2 foot switches in it, one which allowed me select the pickup and other which chose whether I was connected to the bright or normal input of my amp.

However I still wasn't able to make it sound much like Slade or The Sweet, until I discovered distortion. After trying out a pedal that a school friend had made I saved up for the bits and added my own (Practical Electronics) fuzz box between the pickup selector and the amp and I was finally able to get something similar to the sounds on the records I was listening to.

And that set up was what I used until I built my own solid electric guitar in the woodwork shop during my last year at school at the end of the 70s.

I didn't own a bass until 1981, when as a student, I finally had some disposable income of my own and was able to buy a second hand Burns Sonic Bass complete with the original hard case for £60 (with a Fender-branded strap thrown in the seal the deal!)

[radiophonic]

I had a Sunburst / tort 'Sattelite' Jazz bass with block inlays and tape wounds and a Gem (Mars?) 30 guitar amp that had been owned by at least two other guys in our village. The bass weighed a ton. I can remember lugging the amp about balanced on one pedal of my bike. Terrible thing. If you got you hand too close to the fuse, you got a jolt. It had tremolo though, which was fun. Later I had a kit built 60w head that had a key to turn it on. It was paired with a 4 x 12 cab with Celestion G12 speaker that I wish I still had, but I had to ditch it when I left Newcastle on account moving in a Renault 5.

[Skybone]

My first bass (a Kay P bass) came with a homemade amp, that was dreadful (so was the bass TBH). Thankfully, managed to save up & buy a small Marshall Bass 20, and binned the homemade affair.

[SICbass]

[quote name='obbm' timestamp='1509536612' post='3399663']
The year was 1963. Jet Harris had left the Shadows and I'd just seen Little Richard and a few other artists at a show in Slough. I decided that I wanted to play a bass so I set about building myself one because real basses were just far too expensive, about 8 times the average weekly wage and I was still a poor schoolboy. My first bass was made out of one piece of plywood with no form of truss rod - I had no idea about such things as a 16 year old. The frets were inverted pieces of model railway track and the spacing was calculated using logarithmic tables. I needed a pick-up and remembered that during WW2 when my father was in the anti-aircraft artillery, one of his spoils was a German flying helmet. I'd used this as a headphone however needs must so I removed the ear-pieces and used them as the pick-ups. I saved up to to buy some tuners, a bridge and strings from a local music shop put it all together and amazingly it worked although the neck was like a banana and the action appalling. The second bass was made from a 1-inch thick piece of Pirana Pine and used most of the components from the original. I bought a cheap pick-up for this one.

I had no amplifier so I got inside the family radiogram and soldered a screened cable to the volume pot. It worked but wasn't loud enough so I had to use my tape recorder to boost the signal. All very Heath Robinson but it worked and it meant that I could play along with records.

Having played the trombone at school I had some understanding of music fundamentals however there were no tutors or internet back in 1963 so I bought just about the only tutorial book available and set out to learn some scales.





Eventually I persuaded my mother to lend me £45 to buy a Framus Star bass, saved up and bought a Linear 30 amplifier and got a cabinet maker to build me a copy of a Marshall 4x12 which was fitted with Bakers Group 25 speakers from shop in Croydon. This rig served me well for several years.
[/quote]

That is absolutely briliant. For a moment there, I thought it was going to be one of skankdelvar's (a most excellent BCer) imaginative pieces of work á la Monty Python's "Luxury - t't kids uv tuday" etc. and then it turns out the whole thing is real. Or it least I hope it is and I'm not just a gullible prat, because it makes super reading.
My beginnings in the late 70s were pretty humble, but pure luxury compared to that. Congratulations for all your initiative and thanks for sharing a cracking bit of history.

[Happy Jack]

[URL=http://s1128.photobucket.com/user/h4ppyjack/media/Just%20Stuff/Music%20and%20Musicians/File0505_zps86bda306.jpg.html][IMG]http://i1128.photobucket.com/albums/m496/h4ppyjack/Just%20Stuff/Music%20and%20Musicians/File0505_zps86bda306.jpg[/IMG][/URL]

[URL=http://s1128.photobucket.com/user/h4ppyjack/media/Just%20Stuff/Music%20and%20Musicians/File0401_zpse724801e.jpg.html][IMG]http://i1128.photobucket.com/albums/m496/h4ppyjack/Just%20Stuff/Music%20and%20Musicians/File0401_zpse724801e.jpg[/IMG][/URL]

[bassbiscuits]

I had an awful Satellite short scale bass with sky-high action, and my brother had the corresponding guitar.

Our other mate played the drums by hitting our bed mattress and pillows with some sticks while we fizzed away through our five-watt practise amps and tried to play U2 and Thin Lizzy songs.

[PaulWarning]

when I first started playing guitar I plugged into an old reel to reel tape recorder (valve amp) turned the record level right up and pressed the record button and got a very nice distorted guitar sound out of it at low volumes, as an added bonus the green record level light (remember those) osculated until the strings were in tune with each other, this in the days before electronic tuners were invented

[thebrig]

[quote name='BigRedX' timestamp='1509537084' post='3399669']
My first guitar was a horrible 1960s catalogue bought steel-strung acoustic that my parents got for reasons only best known to themselves. It had the typically high action of cheap guitars of the time, and even after I had found out enough to know to shave about half an inch off the bottom of the bridge to make it playable, I discovered that it sounded terrible.

After pestering my parents for the whole of the summer, they relented and bought me a Kimbara acoustic guitar for my 14th birthday (the only real concession they ever made to my musical aspirations) I still own this guitar although these days it rarely gets played:





As you can see it has undergone some modifications from it's original condition. The year after I got it, I sold all my model railway stuff and with the proceeds took a trip to Leicester where I was able to buy a second hand Carlsbro Wasp 10 Watt amp and a piezo pickup for my guitar. Unfortunately my £35 wouldn't stretch as far as a used "Woolies Special" electric guitar as well as the amp so I had to settle for the pickup stuck to the bridge of the Kimbara. However I now had amplification, and it was bigger and louder than the amps my school friends had - which just goes to show what terrible amps were around at the time for those of us on a very limited budget.

Unfortunately a piezo pickup on an acoustic guitar didn't really make it sound like the guitars on the records I was buying, so after lots of trawling around the local music shops I added a cheap Schaller magnetic pickup. This was supposed to be fitted to the end of the fingerboard, but I didn't like how it sounded in that position, so I glued it to the soundboard next to the bridge and drilled a hole in the top to take the cable. At the same time I moved the piezo pickup to the inside of the body under the bridge and connected both pickups to a stereo jack. The output connected to a box with 2 foot switches in it, one which allowed me select the pickup and other which chose whether I was connected to the bright or normal input of my amp.

However I still wasn't able to make it sound much like Slade or The Sweet, until I discovered distortion. After trying out a pedal that a school friend had made I saved up for the bits and added my own (Practical Electronics) fuzz box between the pickup selector and the amp and I was finally able to get something similar to the sounds on the records I was listening to.

And that set up was what I used until I built my own solid electric guitar in the woodwork shop during my last year at school at the end of the 70s.

I didn't own a bass until 1981, when as a student, I finally had some disposable income of my own and was able to buy a second hand Burns Sonic Bass complete with the original hard case for £60 (with a Fender-branded strap thrown in the seal the deal!)
[/quote]A Burns Sonic bass was my first real instrument, it cost me £15 which I borrowed from my sister and paid her back a £1 a week for fifteen weeks.

Edited November 1, 2017 by thebrig

[obbm]

[quote name='SICbass' timestamp='1509537501' post='3399680']
That is absolutely briliant. For a moment there, I thought it was going to be one of skankdelvar's (a most excellent BCer) imaginative pieces of work á la Monty Python's "Luxury - t't kids uv tuday" etc. and then it turns out the whole thing is real. Or it least I hope it is and I'm not just a gullible prat, because it makes super reading.

[/quote]

Thanks. Absolutely true. The local music shop was Potters in Aldershot. It closed years ago but the edifice is still there.

[BigRedX]

[quote name='thebrig' timestamp='1509538208' post='3399697']
A Burns Sonic bass was my first real instrument, it cost me £15 which I borrowed from my sister and paid her back a £1 a week for fifteen weeks.
[/quote]

I still have my Burns Sonic Bass:



It was already pretty heavily modified when I bought it 1981. A previous owner had stripped off the red finish, and had also added two more controls and a second jack socket to the scratch plate that weren't connected to the other electronic on the bass. The original bridge had just about given up and was held together by wire wrapped around it and the machine heads slipped as you tried to tune up to pitch, something the shop had disguised by tuning it down a tone where they were relative stable.

Still this bass lasted me all through the 80s (when I wasn't playing synth or guitar) and recordings made with it nearly got the band I was playing in signed to CBS Records!

Edited November 1, 2017 by BigRedX

[Happy Jack]

[quote name='BigRedX' timestamp='1509539599' post='3399718']
... and recordings made with it nearly got the band I was playing in signed to CBS Records!
[/quote]

Had it been a Westone you might have been nearly signed by Parlophone instead!

[stingrayPete1977]

[quote name='Happy Jack' timestamp='1509537724' post='3399686']
[URL=http://s1128.photobucket.com/user/h4ppyjack/media/Just%20Stuff/Music%20and%20Musicians/File0505_zps86bda306.jpg.html][IMG]http://i1128.photobucket.com/albums/m496/h4ppyjack/Just%20Stuff/Music%20and%20Musicians/File0505_zps86bda306.jpg[/IMG][/URL]

[URL=http://s1128.photobucket.com/user/h4ppyjack/media/Just%20Stuff/Music%20and%20Musicians/File0401_zpse724801e.jpg.html][IMG]http://i1128.photobucket.com/albums/m496/h4ppyjack/Just%20Stuff/Music%20and%20Musicians/File0401_zpse724801e.jpg[/IMG][/URL]
[/quote]


What's that on your head?

[gjones]

I bought a Grant 'Jap Crap' Precision,secondhand, for £50 and a year later, managed to save up enough for a Carlsbro 90 watt combo. The bass was crap and so was the amp but it didn't stop me.

[Dr.Dave]

I went from an unplayable ( I know that now ) cheap acoustic to a Woolworths electric to a Columbus SG copy - played through a Woolies amp - to a Hofner Violin Bass which was the first thing I bought with my own cash.

Not long afterwards I bought my Precision at 16 for £150 from a bloke I was working with ( deal done at break time in the works toilet !!) which I still use , had it 39 years. That was what I first gigged with and I'd cobbled together a Marshall JTM45 , a copy of a 15" JBL bass bin and a 1x12 cab my Dad made for me. That rig sort of survived til the first Trace Elliots appeared and I used Trace until they went furry. At that point I switched to GK - sometimes with Ashdown cabs - until just weeks ago when I got myself a Peavey Minimax/Barefaced set up.

Talking of makeshift kit - a drummer I was playing with bought most of the parts for a Fender Musicmaster bass on the cheap , to encourage his son to learn to play an instrument. He was only about 10. Our drummer thought if he saw a pic of me playing it onstage with his Dad he'd get excited so we screwed it together with a Strat pickup , used 3 of my old strings ( 2x A's and a D !! ) and screwed on a camera strap in the back of an estate car on the way to a gig. I played half the gig with it , got the pics , drummer's son got giddy about it and he's now been making a decent living as a pro player in the Canary Islands for the past 15 years and still has the musicmaster - there's a nice story !

[FinnDave]

The first guitar I had was an Audition 6 string electric from Woolworths, but after a few months i had changed to bass, playing an anonymous plywood semi-acoustic with no paint or any kind of finish at all. It wasn't mine, but someone lent it me for a few months. I next played a short sale Burns (again, just bare wood) until I was able to buy my own bass, a short scale Vox from a neighbour. I think I paid about 7 quid for it. I can't remember what I was using as an amp, I remember making speaker cabs in the woodwork class at school. I finally bought a Selmer Treble & Bass 50 in the mid 70s and used for the next 10 years or so.

I also remember a no-name Fender-ish long scale with a single pick-up that was in terrible condition, so I stripped and sprayed it white and made a scratch plate out of formica. I think that one broke its neck when it fell over. I then moved up market and my first 'proper' bass about 1976 or 7 was a Framus Jazz bass (and here's a pic to prove it!

[attachment=256731:2980185113_d584efabdf_o.jpg]

[yorks5stringer]

Started out ( c 1970) with a Futurama Guitar and plugged the jack wires into the back of an old Dansette stacking record player. Oh, how I rocked.....!

First real rig (1974) was a Gibson EB2 (!),a Truvoice (Selmer T&B 50 watt valve head (again) and someones self- made 15" cab, the size of a small house.

Edited November 1, 2017 by yorks5stringer

[casapete]

Some great stuff in this thread.
My initial music was made via a no name semi acoustic, loosely based on a Gibson 335. Wasn't great, but it was
cherry red and looked a bit like Chuck Berry's so that was the main thing. Cost £33 in the early 70's from a shop selling
mainly household appliances in Hull. After my mate's father made me a faux mother of pearl Gibson logo for the
headstock (I'm cringing at this now...) I used it for my first band. Initially had an Antoria 5 watt valve combo I'd
swapped for my first dodgy acoustic guitar with a lad from school, but this had to go after it threw me across my
bedroom with the biggest electric shock I've ever had, bit like the bit in Back to the Future!
Next amp was a Zenta 10 watt head/cab combo, similar to the Audition range at Woolies. Had reverb too, which
was amazing at the time. When the next band started getting a bit more serious, we used a Tuac transistor 100
watt head into a Tuac 4x12 for rehearsals, loaned to us by my mate's brother who was in a soul band at the time.
Also remember borrowing a snakeskin Selmer Treble n bass 50 watt head and matching 18" cab, which sounded
much better IIRC. I was still on guitar at this point, gravitating to an Avon then an Antoria Les Paul copy.

Finally got my first proper guitar amp, a Marshall 1974 18 watt combo. Bought this from a brass instrument shop
in Shipley near Bradford, Ray something? It was £45, but Ray wouldn't accept a cheque for this amount as at the
time cheque guarantee cards (remember them) were only for £25 max, so I gave him two cheques of £25 and £20.
Still got the Marshall now, some 40+ years later. Just had it serviced and it still sounds the business.

[gs_triumph]

I started out with a used encore strat bought through the classified ads in the local rag. It came with a headphone amp that ran on batteries and had a built in chorus effect.

I connected this to the mic input of my dad's vertical turntable hifi type thingy (might have been a Mitsubishi?) And blasted power chords and feedback across the lounge when no one was home.

The mic input stopped working after a short while... Never did 'fess up about that.