Not sure which bass to buy? Fed-up with crappy fake Amazon reviews, reviews from inexperienced bassists, or blatantly biased reviews? I’ve got you covered with our no B.S. reviews.
How? This beginner bass shootout was done BLINDFOLDED by our pro reviewers. No B.S., no bias, just rock solid reliable reviews you can trust.
We scoured the web for hours creating a list of every single bass guitar we could find under $500, ending up with a list of about 200 basses yep — 200.
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In order to get from 200 basses down to 7 contenders for the shootout, we needed a lot of tricks. Here’s how we did that…
1. Known Brands Only. We started by eliminating basses from companies with no reputation, and basses with no reviews to be found anywhere. It’s safest as a beginner to stick to the popular brands, so that’s what we did.
2. Four Strings. We stuck to four string basses. As a beginner, you’ll have a way easier time learning on a four string bass, and then trying out a five or six string bass later on if you feel like it.
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3. Standard Scale Length. For the most part, we stuck to standard 34” scale length basses (one 35” bass snuck in there), which are the most common, and suitable for most people. If your hands are particularly small, it’s worth checking out short-scale basses (which we’ll review in the future).
4. Two Pickups. We limited our choices to basses with two pickups. Single pickup basses have their place in the world, but two pickup basses are better for most beginners because they offer more tone options, so you can explore a wider variety of tones as you “find their sound” and explore different styles of music.
From there, we still had way too many basses to tackle at once, so we used a combination of looking at reviews, popularity, brand reputation, plus more than a little bit of professional intuition, to choose our short list of seven basses for the showdown.
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As much as humanly possible, we wanted to remove personal bias from these reviews. To do this, I blindfolded my two bass playing buddies so they wouldn’t know what bass they were playing until the end of the review. All three of us are experienced in a wide variety of musical styles, which gave us a basis to judge tone and feel in different instruments.
We approached this review process with genuine curiosity and desire to bring you the best possible recommendations for beginner basses. We aren’t paid by or affiliated with any of the brands we reviewed, and I told my reviewers not to pull any punches.
To make the group test even fairer, we took all seven basses to our bass tech Kent Fossgreen, the go-to guy for instrument and amp repair in the area (and also my dad). First we inspected construction quality and factory setup.
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We then put brand new strings on all the basses and did setups so that differences in setup wouldn’t affect our reviewers’ ratings.
In the review room, we monitored the basses out of my TC Electronic RH450 amplifier with RS210 cabinet with the same flat EQ settings for every bass. Again, the only tonal/EQ tweaks that happened at any point in the review process were on the basses themselves.
For the audio you’ll hear on the video reviews I recorded all of our test basses direct into an Audient iD14 digital audio interface running into Logic Pro. In order to give you the best sense possible of the actual “dry” sound of these basses I used no compression or EQ at any point. This is not how bass is usually recorded so keep in mind that all these basses would sound better if the signal was processed in the usual ways.
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Our four review criteria were Playability, Tone, Comfort, and Versatility. Here’s what those terms mean as I explained them to my blindfolded reviewers:
1. Playability. This focused primarily on the neck of the bass – how comfortable it felt to move around, how the string spacing felt, thoughts about upper fret access, string tension, and if any glaring issues came up like sharp fret edges or dead spots.
2. Tone. We explored the tones we could get by sticking with standard fingerstyle technique and changing the knob settings on the bass. This rating came from overall impression of the tone of the instrument, the quality of the pickups/electronics as perceived by our ears, and if we could imagine actually using the bass on a gig.
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3. Comfort. This criteria had the least influence in the overall rating. I asked my reviewers how the bass felt on their body in terms of weight and balance.
4. Versatility. I had reviewers try out a variety of techniques on the bass like picking and slapping to determine if those techniques were physically comfortable to perform, and also if the bass responded with some good sounding tones.
We also examined each bass for construction quality with our bass tech, but since none of the basses had glaring issues this wasn’t factored into the rating system. We did include interesting tech info in the Tech Corner for each bass though.
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All of our basses shipped in good condition with a playable setup. Our bass tech Kent said in regards to the setups and quality control we observed, “You could buy any of these basses confidently online.” Basses made in Indonesia came with slightly higher setups than basses coming from China, but they were solidly playable across the board.
They had probably only been hand-tightened in the factory, which may have been done on purpose to avoid issues when basses are shipped around the world. You should be aware of this so that you can grab a hex wrench and tighten those bushings up when you get your bass, otherwise your tuners might flop around or fall apart.
VERDICT Did this bass live up to the Michael Tobias name? In our opinion, not so much. The only sounds that really impressed us from this bass were the aggressive rock sounds. For anything else, keep looking.
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The first thing you might wonder about this bass is “why is the name so complicated?” Here’s the deal: Michael Tobias has been a respected bass luthier for decades. After a couple years of collaboration with Gibson/Epiphone in the early 90’s, he left to make basses on his own under the name MTD (Michael Tobias Design), but Gibson still owns the “Tobias” name.
So this bass is made in the style of Michael Tobias, which set our expectations high, having had the pleasure of playing some of his custom instruments. Let’s find out if it merits the Tobias name.
This bass needed a little more setup than the others, but it set up nicely. The 9V battery for the active EQ didn’t have its own compartment, instead it was designed to fit into a clip in the main compartment. However, the battery had come loose from the clip when we opened up the bass, which caused rattling inside the body of the bass.
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I love the 24 fret neck and it feels easy to use the high frets, although the neck is a little thicker than I like. The string spacing is a little wider than I need but that could be good for a beginner.
This bass’s default tone is thin with a ton of top end coming from the tone knob. Most of the tones we explored really needed the active bass boost to sound good, which isn’t my favorite – I’d rather the bass sound good “plain.” On the other hand, this was our favorite bass boost knob out of all the basses we tried, it had a nice focused sound. My favorite tones from this bass were with the tone maxed and some bass boost, provided some solid aggressive rock options. I couldn’t get a quacky funk sound I liked, I just couldn’t stand the brittleness of this bridge pickup.
I had a huge problem slapping on this bass because the bridge protruded in a way that dug into my arm unpleasantly. This may not affect all players depending on arm length and technique, but for me this alone makes the bass not even an option. Ben and Gio didn’t experience that issue with the bridge, so they enjoyed the slap tones more than I did.
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VERDICT Squier makes some really solid entry-level instruments, but this Jaguar has a couple issues. Gio described the active bass boost as a “doom knob” that could be really dangerous on your first gig if not handled carefully, and I totally agree.
This bass had a wide spread in the ratings between the three of us. Despite the bass boost issue, Gio liked it a lot more than Ben and I did, which he readily admits may be because a higher-end Fender Jaguar is one of the basses he plays regularly so this bass felt very familiar.
Squier, Fender’s budget line of instruments, has been a standby of the beginner bass market for a long time. Having played the higher priced Fender Jaguar
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