I started with a shortneck electric bass. Looked like
a strat copy guitar, with a very short bass on it. How I started is kinda funny...
in high school, I and three friends who were in the marching band decided that "to get chicks" we needed to increase our popularity. So, we put our four names in my baseball hat, and four key instruments in someone elses hat. We pulled a name from one hat, and the instrument from the other hat. The "deal" we all agreed on was we each had a month to acquire our instrument / equipment and after that point, we'd practice every day after school from 3pm to 7pm, and weekends we had off.
Mike ended up as the drummer.
John ended up as the vocalist (and had to buy a microphone and a simple amp)
Chris became the guitarist
and I became the bassist.
So, after school that day we headed to the local music store (not a chain, but family owned), and presented our situation. dirt poor freshmen, starting a band, willing to buy all the equipment at once if that helped our "buying power".
For $55, I ended up with a shortneck bass, with cello strings, and no amp. My first amp was a tube-based mono amplifier I spent a week cleaning up solder connections as I found it in the trash, and a 12" speaker I pulled out of something and sat it on a pillow next to it. By senior year I purchased a Peavey TKO65, and trust me, it was an improvement
Chris asked for a guitar/amp for christmas, so his parents got him a black squire strat and
a peavey bandit 65 amp. Damn nice. He covered the guitar in electrical tape for cool striping.
John bought a $100 peavey guitar head and bought used a dual-15" cabinet out of the newspaper. The cabinet was homemade, but if I remember he got it extremely cheap.
Mike's drumkit was funny... the store sold him a used, highly beat up starter kit that had one tom, a bass drum, a snare, and the rest of the equipment (high hat, a cymbal stand and cymbal, etc, he bagged from the high school equipment room. Okay, not the most ethical way to get started. By senior year he has added more toms and a second bass drum. None of it matched in color, style or brand, but he seemed quite happy.
this was frosh year right before christmas. By the end of our senior year, we finally entered our HS battle of the bands, and did the following songs:
YYZ by Rush
Run to the Hills by Iron Maiden
Tom Sawyer by Rush
Rock and Roll by Kiss
Surrender by Cheap Trick.
Loud n Clear by Styper
Tooth and Nail by Dokken.
Why this may or not be amusing for any of you... just know that the above songs is all we practiced for 3 and a half years... none of us could really play anything else, but through repetition and practice practice practice together we were able to play seven or eight fairly hard songs (at the time) and have them sound significantly better than we thought it would in the beginning. In fact, out of 8 or 10 bands, we ranked 2. Either everyone else really sucked, or we actually did okay.
Though it was strange wearing electric blue parachute pants. Well, it was 1985.
Thanks for letting me share... brought back some nice memories.