Asked By: Young But Bright =] - 10/24/2008

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Thats a trickey question. When considering a person who is playing an instrument, I take it your not at the professional level yet, so this means that you will be testing the waters for your own unique sound.
As a rule of thumb, most instruments will last you a lifetime as long as you take care of them. Clean and polishing the instrument, seting the neck tension as the humidity efffects the neck ect.. Instead of going out and upgrading to that $2500 base, I recomend that people do what I did with many first guitars I owned wich was upgrade the the pickups and then the hardware. 99?f your guitar bodies are made of wood and that is your primary portion of tone. Mahogany, Black/white Korina, walnut product nice thick tones while Maple, popler, ash, alder produce a more bright sounding tone. Unless you beat on the thing or drop it, you should expect this instrunment to last you quite some time, as a matter of fact you should be able to hand it down to your own children if you already have some or will have some in the future.

Before I started to build my own electric guitars, I used to hotrod guitars for people. A friend of mine had bought a $5500 Gibson Les Pual Slash model a while back. I ended up taking an Epiphone Les Paul Elight that I bought off ebay for $475, put in a set of SD alnico 2 pros, swaped out all the jap crap electronics for CTS pots ect... and installed a piezo bridge system just like the $5500 Gibson. The result? Same guitar at a 5th of the price and they sounded no differant from one another. Both were mahogany with a maple tops and mahogany neck. Both had SD alnico 2 pro humbuckers, both had the LR Baggs piezo system and bridge installed and both had american made electronic componants in them.

Getting your bass serviced is up to you but if you want to go down that road then your looking at every 4 months due to tempurature changes.
Anytime you go from winter to summer, humidity changes the tension in yor neck and being that it is a base, this plays havock on your instrument. You could also get yourself a book on bass guitar maitnance and memorize the book. You can still bring your bass to a pro for the first couple tune ups but if the tune up is what you like then take your knowlage you learned from the book and start doing it yourself. A pro will adjust your pickups if need be, set the intonation, change out the strings, make sure that the nut is in good working order and set the string height according to your preferance. You can learn all this as you go along and instead of paying out on average 40-120$ depending on what services you need, you end up saving much down the road.

I started out by myself and learned everything I know from books. I learned how to set intonation which makes the sound a night and day differance. I also learned the proper height to set strings, adjusting pickup height, crafting a new nut ect. When you learn all that and become proficant at it you can then leave your own cards at the local music shop and do side jobs on other guitars for less and pull in enough money to upgrade if you desier that Langcaster Bass.

I made enough money doing tune up work to buy all the shop equiptment I needed to start building my own electric guitars over the period of 2 years. We are talking upwards of about 15K here and I still make an average of about 100-250$ per week doing this as an odd job.
It takes me all but 30 minuts to do a complete setup . When my wife and I sat down to figure out my average per hour rate based off all my work in 1 year it turned out to be $322 per hour. This also includes putting in new pickups, strings, and hardware but still, not bad for reading a few books and using that knowlage to earn a few extra bucks.

I know this is a long answer to your question but I hope I not only answered it for you, but hopefully this will give you some motivation to look into this yourself. The best book I can recomend to anyone one is a book by Melvyn Hiscock called "Make your own Electric Guitar".
He builds a Bass in this book and the information is priceless. Dont let his last name fool ya :) and if you are interested in it, try out amazon for a slightly used version. I got mine for $14 shipped to my home.

Answered By: iwas1ncthr - 10/25/2008