Ryan's Bass BoutiqueSuivre la boutique

I have been playing bass long enough that most of my favorite players are either dead or making greatest hits albums. I work with high-end US made boutique basses as well as Japanese golden era instruments. And just for fun, I love older Fenders that have been actually played, i.e. they are modded and worn to make them actual tools of the trade. I have several gripes about the state of internet sales.
• Do not call an instrument custom unless it is a)made as a custom shop model or b) required significant collaboration between a builder and musician. Adding a new pickguard or replacing a broken pickup is not custom. Honestly, calling your shop a “custom shop” is also a cop out. Making the same models that you did decades ago just proves that you never throw out old templates.
• Handcrafted….so this one is particularly contentious. I don’t believe that everything has to be entirely handcrafted to be great. It is very cool to me what a craftsman can do with their hands. High quality precision built instruments can also be great, particularly if enough human hands touch it to select and test the parts that resonate (bodies, necks) and can add those little details that can make an instrument that much more special. However, much like “custom”, there is a serious over-usage of the term “handcrafted”. I think the current trend in relic guitars is awesome. However, if you bought a new guitar and beat the living shit out of it, it’s neither “custom” nor “handcrafted”. It just isn’t.
• Please stop trying to sell hardcases with non-working latches, broken handles, and bad hinges as “working”. If you pick up a case and the instrument falls out, then it doesn’t work by definition. I really hope you don’t think a baby stroller is “working” if the kid continuously falls out of it.
• I am an incredibly shitty photographer. I don't enjoy taking pictures of basses, and barely possess the skill required to photograph an immobile object such as an instrument. But it is the name of the game when the internet is your primary focus. So if you have a 5K instrument for sale, please take more than one pic of the face. To be honest, unless I can see the front and back of the entire instrument (often with details from the front and back of the headstock), I get pretty nervous. And I'm not alone.
• I love to obsess over the details of instruments. But please stop trying to make construction techniques or parts sound like some grand scientific experiment, or that they are magical in some unseen way. There are many ways to make the instruments sound great and improve upon them, but be careful in any commentary about scale length, neck construction, headstock size, whether the wood was harvested in the spring vs. the fall, whatever. As an example, I have a Brooklyn era Spector bass. It’s a wonderful instrument with ridiculously deep flamed maple and a pau ferro fingerboard. But it’s not magical because it was made in Spector’s early shop. And the fact that it has a brass bridge and its neck through probably influence the tone, but go ahead and try to quantify exactly how it is done.
• If you are the kind of person that sees an instrument at a ridiculous price, minimal detail, 2 lousy out of focus pictures, and no return policy, and wants to just message the seller "NO.", then you feel the same way I do. Come on people, lets keep this respectable.

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