I bought the cheapest bass, and it's actually pretty good

This really is the cheapest stringed instrument I've ever bought.

I'll say first that the company who made this bass has sponsored a lot of people. I am not one of them. I paid full price for this, meaning I'm not sponsored.

What I bought was a Glarry GJazz. It is under $100.

Before I get into more detail, I'll explain why I bought it first.

While I do have a synthesizer that has bass guitar sounds in it, I simply can't replicate decent bass playing on a synth. All a synth can do regardless of price is do very simple bass lines, provided you have a sustain pedal. For example, you can do this dirt cheap with a Yamaha YPT260 synth and a Yamaha FC-5 pedal. If all you need is something that makes a decent bass sound that you can play with one finger, the synth and pedal is all that's required.

I do have a synth setup similar to that, but to get the bass lines I wanted, I knew I had to get a real bass.

I've owned basses before. In the video I said I owned 4. Actually, the Glarry is my 5th. The first bass was an Epiphone with a model name I don't remember, then a Yamaha RBX170, then a second Yamaha RBX170, then a Squier Jaguar Bass Special SS, and now the Glarry GJazz.

What would happen is I'd buy a bass, own it for a while, then trade it out. The trade would usually go towards some guitar I wanted at the time.

This time around, I decided to go for the cheapest bass I could find. Originally I was going to get the SX Ursa 2 from Rondo. But at the time of this writing, the only full size long scale model available was $235. That was more than I wanted to spend and it didn't even come in a color that I liked.

Xaviere brand does sell a Jazz Bass model called the JB, and as of this writing it's $209 (not including shipping cost). And it looks awesome too. But that was still more than I wanted to spend.

Then I remembered Glarry, so I looked them up. They had a Jazz Bass style at a very nice price in a color that worked for the body shape. Okay, sold. I bought one.

"So... how is it?"

Surprisingly good, but it needed some attention.

The neck had a mighty hump in it, meaning it was back-bowed. A few cranks of the truss rod fixed that.

I noticed a rather large gap at the neck pocket. What I discovered is that it appears the neck wasn't screwed down all the way from the factory. Detuned the strings, took off the neck, reseated it, fixed. And I didn't even need to shim it, which was nice.

Intonation was way out, so I intonated it. Fixed.

The 45-100 string set wasn't to my liking, so I switched over to a lighter D'Addario 45-90 EXL220BT set. Cheap and good at under 20 bucks.

The pickup screws needed to be reseated. Took them out, put back in, adjusted height, done.

...and that's it. The neck has proper relief now, the pocket gap was fixed, it's intonated and has the strings I want on it. Good to go. All the electronics work like they're supposed to.

Do I recommend this bass for guitar players?

Yes. It's a cheap Jazz style bass that works. If you need a bass for recording bass tracks at home, get one of these.

The only requirement is that you have to know how to set one up. If you know how to set up a guitar, then you already know how to set up a bass. Same thing, bigger strings. There's really not much to it. Check the instrument over, set neck relief, adjust pickup height, adjust string height, and so on. You know the drill.

I should also note there is the Glarry GP, which is their Precision Bass copy. I wanted a bass with two pickups in it with the Jazz Bass shape, but if you prefer the Precision Bass shape with one pickup, that works too. And they even have one in Hot Yellow, which is basically Graffiti Yellow. That I like, but that color isn't available on the GJazz, hence why I got the white one.

Published 2020 Oct 22