A few months ago, I stopped by a café called Arcadia Village Café, a place with instruments scattered around for anyone to play. Among them was a bass guitar called LEGEND, made by ARIA. It’s a budget instrument you can still find on Amazon for around 20,000 yen. Yet when I picked it up and played, I was struck by how long the sustain was and how vividly the vibrations carried through each note.
Over the years, I’ve tried many different basses. I’ve never laid hands on a Fodera or custom-shop basses that cost upwards of 800,000 yen, but I have spent time in Tokyo’s Ochanomizu, testing out Fender Vintage models and others. It wasn’t so much about wanting to buy them or having a particular gear obsession. Rather, I was chasing a kind of equation; trying to understand what exactly determines the quality of a bass guitar’s sound.
The second is the one I brought with me.
From the green bass at Arcadia Village and my past experiences, I’ve come to realize that the quality of a bass guitar’s sound has little to do with its price. Interestingly, the opposite is often true for the double bass where cost does tend to reflect sound quality. This is likely because its tone depends on how well the ebony fingerboard responds and on the resonance created when strings vibrate against solid carved plates, rather than laminated ones. The double bass has a large body, and the quality of the wood plays a decisive role.
Electric bass guitars, with their solid bodies, are different. No matter how old or fine the wood, the sound ultimately passes through magnetic pickups. Tone also depends on the interaction between neck, fingerboard, and body. Each combination has its own chemistry. You can make predictions for instance, that an ebony fingerboard will sound brighter or maple will respond in a certain way but those expectations don’t always match the actual result.
The green bass at Arcadia Village resonates beautifully. But describing the sound of a good bass is difficult. It’s like trying to explain what makes a certain shade “red”: easy to point to, hard to put into words. That’s why the only reliable way is to build up experience, gather observations, and make judgments from there.
A truly good bass reveals itself even without an amp. You can feel the difference just by plucking the strings. In fact, you often only notice it when you actually play the instrument. Which is why buying a bass online based on looks or model name alone rarely makes sense unless you have a special reason because you simply can’t know its acoustic quality without touching it yourself.
P.S. If you happen to be a luthier, I’d love to hear your perspective on this. Please share your thoughts in the comments. I’m always curious to learn how a builder views these things; maybe you can offer a new angle that I haven’t considered yet.