I believe another commenter mentioned this, but the only thing I'd consider doing is notching a hole in the pickguard so that you have easy access to the truss rod. Especially if you don't plan to flip this bass (and why would you... it sounds great!), I'd not worry too much about diminishing resale value/maintaining the original components. That is an eminently practical mod! None of the potential buyers wondered why I didn't keep my vintage Ampeg B-18-N original when installing a three-prong power cord! ;)
You make an excellent point. At the time I was pondering doing that I didn't know if I was going to keep it or not, but it's too good to let go. And as you say, a minor mod as a vast improvement is usually well worth it. Cheers.
From the first time I played it in the garage after setting it up I knew I had something special. It's an extremely rare bass that makes me want to finish work and come straight home to play it some more, I can only think of one other time that happened, a Cort Curbow of all things, I love those basses. And of course the other one in the top 3 is the Rickenbacker because it makes other bass players in my area weep that I have one and they don't haha😎
"Personal bass" has me and my wife cracking up. What an interesting way to avoid copywrite. Also i just found your channel today and enjoy your videos alot, new favorite youtube Luthier.
Yes, it's a bit closer than I would like, but it is a proper bone nut, I may replace it if it keeps being a problem but it's playing great at the moment, thanks
When I was touring with the Motown group The Miracles I picked up one of these basses for about $150 after demo-ing it in a pawn shop in Thailand to leave at my in laws there as a cheap practice bass! I was literally amazed at how well this bass plays and sounds! I’ve upgraded the electronics, put a set of DiAddario round wounds on it (I have LaBella flats on my actual Fender P touring bass) and had a proper set up but other than that it’s just a very good bass out of Japan! I’d actually have no issue gigging with this bass! Sleeper bass here I knew nothing about and never heard of. Great info here!
Crazy tuning machines!! The tone cap basicaly goes to ground on either wiring setup, you're used to the pot being between the volumee pot and the cap, what you have here is the cap being beteen the volume pot and tone pot. They basically do the same thing. It can change the overall frequency response, but only slightly. Stewmac has a video on this, it's what changes between old style Gibson wiring and new. I really like that little block you used for the fret ends, I might have to borrow that one!! Ia the nut slot for the G right at the wdge, or is that the camera angle? Really loving the way this one turned out too! I really dig the sound too, I'd probably keep the roundwounds. Cheers!!
Woah. Man, I have a Fresher "Personal" which *has* to be 80s at the earliest, I can't tell because the headstock detail is badly worn. And yes, haha you have to rip it apart to access anything fun on this bass. I thought that they're just some random brand. I bought it from a pawn shop really cheap and in nasty shape, alongside a Daion Jazz bass from around the same time, and this was in the early 2000s when I found these. They both play pretty nicely now. This is incredible. Great video, and I'm really gonna do a deep dive on mine.
Finding one with the original sales tags is a bit of a unicorn.1979 was the sweet spot, this is the specific era of instruments that made Fender start to worry. Very shortly after they decided that if they can't beat them, join them, and in 1982 the first Japanese Fenders appeared. This one is very definitely up to those standards, it's incredible.
It turned out a very nice Bass. I did find the G string nut slot was cut a little low, too close to the edge of the neck, but if it plays well then no need to replace the nut. Some ceramic pups do sound very good, Good job once again and nice find!!
I've always preferred ceramics actually, I find they've got a bit more output and you can do a lot with the extra dynamic headroom. Alnico magnets are just a little bit weak for my tastes and I'm always left wanting - special exception for Seymour Duncan's Quarter Pounders, their magnets are larger, therefore stronger, therefore louder, therefore hit the mark and then some, I'm never sad to drop a set of them into any bass. Cheers
Yes, everyone was making parts for everyone else at the time, does your one still have the little set screws in place? I suspect mine rattled loose and disappeared a long time ago.
@@fanbladeinstruments There never was a setscrew. You can tighten or loosen the sleeve to make the machinehead turn harder or softer. The hole has no threads, it's meant to stick in an allen wrench to turn the hole thing left or right. It only looks like the head of a screw in the illustration but in actuality it's just a hole. Totally overengineered but very cool nonetheless.
Wow! Just tried it and 100% correct...I had no idea. I was looking at the picture and I couldn't figure out how a little set screw was going to do anything but imprint and damage the shaft, but of course it's a genuine tension adjuster...such a needlessly marvelous design...I love it even more now, thank you
Yeah, it needs a little bit of adjusting to get it perfect, that's why I haven't glued it in yet, I need to play with it a bit to get it just right, cheers.
Have you changed the way you record your basses? With previous videos I noticed a lack of mids and highs perhaps, I wouldn´t say it sounded muffled but it was a very characteristic tone in almost all your basses. Now I preceive some more highs and difference between all the pickups. Great video and great find.
Haven't changed anything recently, it's still The Trace Elliot GP7 preamp straight into the interface, my really earliest videos may have just been amp sound picked up by the phone I started filming with, I did record some by miking a little 2x10 I have in the studio but I found mic placement was too inconsistent to be of any real use. I should also add that anything recorded in the garage is just a room mic picking up the little Peavey microbass practice amp I have for testing things out, It's not great but it's just something to play through. Possibly I've just gotten better at selecting basses that sound better? I know my homemade pickups have evolved quite a lot and the latest batch sound miles clearer than anything I've shown before. The first few were barely listenable, I think the first ones I made and played on camera weren't that great but they at least made a sound I could work with. Since then I've just been paying more attention and if you've noticed an improvement then I guess that's a sign that I'm on the right track. Awesome😁
Car paint cutting/rubbing compound with a damp cloth and some elbow grease would blend that discolouration a bit Geoff. Best to buff the entire body though and then use car paint wax to seal the paint afterwards. Better living everyone......😁
re tone controls.... it looks like the "standard" way of doing it is to connect the "hot" lead from the pickup to the wiper of the tone pot and then conect the other end (of the pot)to ground in series. Thus varying the impedance to ground via the (dc blocking) capacitor. As far as i can see you could simply swap the positions so that the PU hot goes directly to the capacitor, and then you use the pot to simply vary the "resistance" to ground of the output of the capacitor. Don't think it really makes a difference. You still end up with a cap with variable impedance w.r.t. frequency going to ground via a variable resistance.
Aww, thanks. I tend to use whatever I've got to hand, this week it's popsicle sticks, next week it'll be a slice of the cardboard from the string packet. just whatever I've got that's the right thickness and not too soft.
It's just a friction fit, i may want to adust it later, as another commenter pointed out it's still not perfectly centered so I need to work it a bit to get it exact. Thanks
@@fanbladeinstruments Thank you for you comment. I have a Tele with a loose neck pocket which causes the high e string to be too close to the edge of the fretboard. I only know how do do a basic setup, anything like filing and working with glue is beyond my skills, so your method is viable enough for me to try. Thank you again.
There was a local guy selling one recently, he made a quick video where he guessed that it was Camphorwood. I would've though that I'd be able to smell that but maybe not. Whatever it is it's made for a damn fine bass and I love it, Cheers
@fanbladeinstruments Camphorwood, also used in plywood? I had a nasty chip in the paintwork on mine, it's an early/mid 80s one going by the logo, which has a yellow (more yellow) sunburst effect around the logo. It did have that grainy look of plywood underneath, but let's face it, they sound great and have lasted this long and probably will out last us lol
"They've got tan lines from somebody who thought it was a good idea to put stickers on their bass..." I guarantee it was from a teenager who thought they should put stickers on their bass because it would give it 'personality' and 'charm', as they thought they would never part from it nor ever decide later on they wouldn't want the stickers. I know this because once upon a time long ago I put stickers on every single instrument I owned. I may or may not have regretted it later on. 😂
I totally get it. I did waaaaaay worse things to my first bass to give it a sense of 'uniqueness', Stickers, quite frankly, would've been preferable to some of the awful things I did to that instrument, including (but not limited to) sanding the black paint off every second tuner for a zebra effect, defretted, shot it up with an air rifle, spraypaint, gunpowder, staples(!), and we even "borrowed" my uncles car to drive over it on a gravel driveway a few times. The idea was to have a completely unique bass that would become my signature instrument as I ascended into the realm of iconic billionaire rockstar🤣 I was 17 and wildly optimistic. Ironically I've searched for years for a pristine example of my first bass, a 1995 Samick Artist Series, with 2xJ pickups and a paint job I can only describe as a black and gold bubble effect, and I've never seen another one quite like it. Turns out it was completely unique the whole time. Sigh.
@@fanbladeinstruments Well if we're sharing the horrors we did to our instruments, I do have quite a few awful 'repair jobs' I did, as I refused to pay a professional. I took the pickups off of a Fender Squire and horribly mounted them onto a custom made hollow body guitar I semi-built, but I didn't have the proper tools when I did it, so I carved away pickup cavities with a pocketknife and a screwdriver. I didn't know how to solder either so I carefully moved the pickups, and where the wires were supposed to go through I just instead carved those parts off of the body. I fixed a mandolin that had a G string that would pop off of the nut with a nail driven into the head of it. I replaced my bass pickups with 2 acoustic guitar pickups and it sounded about as bad as you'd think. And last but not least I sanded the neck of a really nice Epiphone guitar to make it 'play faster', but I ended up sanding too much and exposing the truss rod. I then had to use epoxy putty to cover it up. I actually still have it, and surprisingly it has held together and plays fairly well. At some point I decided that maybe repair jobs should be done with proper tools, in an actual workshop and not my bedroom, and with lots of studying for proper knowledge on how to do what I was doing. 😂
It's a weird one, inside the control cavity you can see endgrain consistent with my theory of it being two slabs but the sideways grain in the neck pocket definitely says otherwise. I wonder if there's just one extra ply in between the two slabs that would be revealed in the neck pocket only...? Maybe one day it'll get a nasty chip on the edge and I'll be able to see for sure, but till then It'll just have to remain a mystery.
I believe another commenter mentioned this, but the only thing I'd consider doing is notching a hole in the pickguard so that you have easy access to the truss rod. Especially if you don't plan to flip this bass (and why would you... it sounds great!), I'd not worry too much about diminishing resale value/maintaining the original components. That is an eminently practical mod!
None of the potential buyers wondered why I didn't keep my vintage Ampeg B-18-N original when installing a three-prong power cord! ;)
You make an excellent point. At the time I was pondering doing that I didn't know if I was going to keep it or not, but it's too good to let go. And as you say, a minor mod as a vast improvement is usually well worth it. Cheers.
Thats always the best when a new bass immediately cracks the top 3 congratulations on the find.
From the first time I played it in the garage after setting it up I knew I had something special. It's an extremely rare bass that makes me want to finish work and come straight home to play it some more, I can only think of one other time that happened, a Cort Curbow of all things, I love those basses. And of course the other one in the top 3 is the Rickenbacker because it makes other bass players in my area weep that I have one and they don't haha😎
Those make so much since I'm surprised I didn't guess them 😂
"Personal bass" has me and my wife cracking up. What an interesting way to avoid copywrite. Also i just found your channel today and enjoy your videos alot, new favorite youtube Luthier.
That bass is fantastic. Don't change anything about it. Only the strings.
Looks like the nut slot for the G String might also a bit too close to the edge of the fret board?
Yes, it's a bit closer than I would like, but it is a proper bone nut, I may replace it if it keeps being a problem but it's playing great at the moment, thanks
When I was touring with the Motown group The Miracles I picked up one of these basses for about $150 after demo-ing it in a pawn shop in Thailand to leave at my in laws there as a cheap practice bass! I was literally amazed at how well this bass plays and sounds! I’ve upgraded the electronics, put a set of DiAddario round wounds on it (I have LaBella flats on my actual Fender P touring bass) and had a proper set up but other than that it’s just a very good bass out of Japan! I’d actually have no issue gigging with this bass! Sleeper bass here I knew nothing about and never heard of. Great info here!
Sound like a perfect candidate for flats. That is the same color and style of my very first bass, back in 86. Love it.
Thr flats are already on it, short sound clip in the next vid😁
Crazy tuning machines!! The tone cap basicaly goes to ground on either wiring setup, you're used to the pot being between the volumee pot and the cap, what you have here is the cap being beteen the volume pot and tone pot. They basically do the same thing. It can change the overall frequency response, but only slightly. Stewmac has a video on this, it's what changes between old style Gibson wiring and new.
I really like that little block you used for the fret ends, I might have to borrow that one!! Ia the nut slot for the G right at the wdge, or is that the camera angle? Really loving the way this one turned out too! I really dig the sound too, I'd probably keep the roundwounds. Cheers!!
Don’t forget to take a notch out of the scratch plate so it’s easier to adjust the truss Rod
that is my thought too...but it might effect value...
Very nice bass, and it's Personal!
Woah. Man, I have a Fresher "Personal" which *has* to be 80s at the earliest, I can't tell because the headstock detail is badly worn. And yes, haha you have to rip it apart to access anything fun on this bass. I thought that they're just some random brand. I bought it from a pawn shop really cheap and in nasty shape, alongside a Daion Jazz bass from around the same time, and this was in the early 2000s when I found these. They both play pretty nicely now. This is incredible. Great video, and I'm really gonna do a deep dive on mine.
That is one beautiful looking and sounding bass. Everything about that bass, including it Japanese beginnings. Wonderful.
Finding one with the original sales tags is a bit of a unicorn.1979 was the sweet spot, this is the specific era of instruments that made Fender start to worry. Very shortly after they decided that if they can't beat them, join them, and in 1982 the first Japanese Fenders appeared. This one is very definitely up to those standards, it's incredible.
It turned out a very nice Bass. I did find the G string nut slot was cut a little low, too close to the edge of the neck, but if it plays well then no need to replace the nut. Some ceramic pups do sound very good, Good job once again and nice find!!
I've always preferred ceramics actually, I find they've got a bit more output and you can do a lot with the extra dynamic headroom. Alnico magnets are just a little bit weak for my tastes and I'm always left wanting - special exception for Seymour Duncan's Quarter Pounders, their magnets are larger, therefore stronger, therefore louder, therefore hit the mark and then some, I'm never sad to drop a set of them into any bass. Cheers
You really refreshed that Fresher.
It's fresher than it was😉
Jobs a gudun 😎 got a great looking bass there.
Bring on the Fernández 👀🤞
The Fernandes has been on the bench for a couple of days now and it's turned out very surprising, vid coming next week😁
@fanbladeinstruments Seriously, I can't wait! Cheers for the great vids sir 👍
Love the vids. Your Japan haul is something quite crazy and I love the videos it has created
Sounds Great :) Nice Set-Up :)
My Tokai Jazzbass copy has the same tuners, very cool!
Yes, everyone was making parts for everyone else at the time, does your one still have the little set screws in place? I suspect mine rattled loose and disappeared a long time ago.
@@fanbladeinstruments There never was a setscrew. You can tighten or loosen the sleeve to make the machinehead turn harder or softer. The hole has no threads, it's meant to stick in an allen wrench to turn the hole thing left or right. It only looks like the head of a screw in the illustration but in actuality it's just a hole. Totally overengineered but very cool nonetheless.
Wow! Just tried it and 100% correct...I had no idea. I was looking at the picture and I couldn't figure out how a little set screw was going to do anything but imprint and damage the shaft, but of course it's a genuine tension adjuster...such a needlessly marvelous design...I love it even more now, thank you
@@fanbladeinstruments Thank you for all the great content! I love watching your videos and your approach to luthiery. Keep up the great work!
I think this one might need the side shim to be in an angle since the inlays in the neck are not centered, sounds killer, love the vids!
Yeah, it needs a little bit of adjusting to get it perfect, that's why I haven't glued it in yet, I need to play with it a bit to get it just right, cheers.
Have you changed the way you record your basses? With previous videos I noticed a lack of mids and highs perhaps, I wouldn´t say it sounded muffled but it was a very characteristic tone in almost all your basses. Now I preceive some more highs and difference between all the pickups. Great video and great find.
Haven't changed anything recently, it's still The Trace Elliot GP7 preamp straight into the interface, my really earliest videos may have just been amp sound picked up by the phone I started filming with, I did record some by miking a little 2x10 I have in the studio but I found mic placement was too inconsistent to be of any real use. I should also add that anything recorded in the garage is just a room mic picking up the little Peavey microbass practice amp I have for testing things out, It's not great but it's just something to play through.
Possibly I've just gotten better at selecting basses that sound better? I know my homemade pickups have evolved quite a lot and the latest batch sound miles clearer than anything I've shown before. The first few were barely listenable, I think the first ones I made and played on camera weren't that great but they at least made a sound I could work with. Since then I've just been paying more attention and if you've noticed an improvement then I guess that's a sign that I'm on the right track. Awesome😁
I think we need a video on your top 5 of your collection. 😉
It would be impossible to choose...I can definitely lock in a top 12🤣
Car paint cutting/rubbing compound with a damp cloth and some elbow grease would blend that discolouration a bit Geoff. Best to buff the entire body though and then use car paint wax to seal the paint afterwards. Better living everyone......😁
Heya dude, good to hear from ya, are we well overdue a jam session soon?
Well overdue we could do a thing!@@fanbladeinstruments
Always enjoy the vids, so were about’s did you buy them string from ?
Rockshop. I used to go through Music Planet but they stopped carrying D'addario.
👏👏👏👍 l love the pbass.
re tone controls.... it looks like the "standard" way of doing it is to connect the "hot" lead from the pickup to the wiper of the tone pot and then conect the other end (of the pot)to ground in series. Thus varying the impedance to ground via the (dc blocking) capacitor. As far as i can see you could simply swap the positions so that the PU hot goes directly to the capacitor, and then you use the pot to simply vary the "resistance" to ground of the output of the capacitor. Don't think it really makes a difference. You still end up with a cap with variable impedance w.r.t. frequency going to ground via a variable resistance.
Brilliant, thanks for that. I have a lot of experience in electronic assembly but not a lot of circuit theory, cheers😁
Nice xxxx
Niiiiice!
Any idea what flats you'd put on this baby?
D'addario Chromes. Already installed and soundchecking at first gig as I type😁
i use business cards for my shims, really like your music BTW.
Aww, thanks. I tend to use whatever I've got to hand, this week it's popsicle sticks, next week it'll be a slice of the cardboard from the string packet. just whatever I've got that's the right thickness and not too soft.
When you added a shim to the side of the neck pocket ( 22:55 ), did you glue it or was it enough to just screw in the neck?
It's just a friction fit, i may want to adust it later, as another commenter pointed out it's still not perfectly centered so I need to work it a bit to get it exact. Thanks
@@fanbladeinstruments Thank you for you comment.
I have a Tele with a loose neck pocket which causes the high e string to be too close to the edge of the fretboard. I only know how do do a basic setup, anything like filing and working with glue is beyond my skills, so your method is viable enough for me to try. Thank you again.
No problem, glad you found it useful, and good luck.
i can see that the nut seems to be a bit off-center towards the treble side
Body on Fresher basses is most likey Katsura (japanese Judas tree) so ive been told Geoff.
There was a local guy selling one recently, he made a quick video where he guessed that it was Camphorwood. I would've though that I'd be able to smell that but maybe not. Whatever it is it's made for a damn fine bass and I love it, Cheers
@fanbladeinstruments Camphorwood, also used in plywood? I had a nasty chip in the paintwork on mine, it's an early/mid 80s one going by the logo, which has a yellow (more yellow) sunburst effect around the logo. It did have that grainy look of plywood underneath, but let's face it, they sound great and have lasted this long and probably will out last us lol
"They've got tan lines from somebody who thought it was a good idea to put stickers on their bass..." I guarantee it was from a teenager who thought they should put stickers on their bass because it would give it 'personality' and 'charm', as they thought they would never part from it nor ever decide later on they wouldn't want the stickers. I know this because once upon a time long ago I put stickers on every single instrument I owned. I may or may not have regretted it later on. 😂
I totally get it. I did waaaaaay worse things to my first bass to give it a sense of 'uniqueness', Stickers, quite frankly, would've been preferable to some of the awful things I did to that instrument, including (but not limited to) sanding the black paint off every second tuner for a zebra effect, defretted, shot it up with an air rifle, spraypaint, gunpowder, staples(!), and we even "borrowed" my uncles car to drive over it on a gravel driveway a few times. The idea was to have a completely unique bass that would become my signature instrument as I ascended into the realm of iconic billionaire rockstar🤣 I was 17 and wildly optimistic.
Ironically I've searched for years for a pristine example of my first bass, a 1995 Samick Artist Series, with 2xJ pickups and a paint job I can only describe as a black and gold bubble effect, and I've never seen another one quite like it. Turns out it was completely unique the whole time. Sigh.
@@fanbladeinstruments Well if we're sharing the horrors we did to our instruments, I do have quite a few awful 'repair jobs' I did, as I refused to pay a professional.
I took the pickups off of a Fender Squire and horribly mounted them onto a custom made hollow body guitar I semi-built, but I didn't have the proper tools when I did it, so I carved away pickup cavities with a pocketknife and a screwdriver. I didn't know how to solder either so I carefully moved the pickups, and where the wires were supposed to go through I just instead carved those parts off of the body.
I fixed a mandolin that had a G string that would pop off of the nut with a nail driven into the head of it.
I replaced my bass pickups with 2 acoustic guitar pickups and it sounded about as bad as you'd think.
And last but not least I sanded the neck of a really nice Epiphone guitar to make it 'play faster', but I ended up sanding too much and exposing the truss rod. I then had to use epoxy putty to cover it up. I actually still have it, and surprisingly it has held together and plays fairly well.
At some point I decided that maybe repair jobs should be done with proper tools, in an actual workshop and not my bedroom, and with lots of studying for proper knowledge on how to do what I was doing. 😂
I guess we can say that nass is "Fresher" than it used to be. 🤣😂🤣
It's been refreshed😉
U can totally see the plys in the neck pock it looks like one of the waffer cookies with cream in between the waffers
It's a weird one, inside the control cavity you can see endgrain consistent with my theory of it being two slabs but the sideways grain in the neck pocket definitely says otherwise. I wonder if there's just one extra ply in between the two slabs that would be revealed in the neck pocket only...? Maybe one day it'll get a nasty chip on the edge and I'll be able to see for sure, but till then It'll just have to remain a mystery.
Man it seems like this bass is screaming for some punk pick playing!