This one came in with its custom shop JazzBass/P-Bass brother. Matt is an old student of mine and an incredible bassist. Matt covered for Ghost Riders on our tour with Waco in 2016 and has gone on do a lot of session work and now plays for Louis Tomlinson (One Direction).

So the ’69. Matt wanted the original strings to stay on the bass, so the first step was loosening off the strings and cleaning up the fretboard and the frets. Taking some fine steel wool to remove any dirt from the board (there wasn’t a lot, this is an incredibly well kept instrument) and then, work on each fret and head up from 1500 grit to 12000 grit paper to gloss those frets!

Next, I took some time to wipe down all the strings and remove as much dirt from each string as possible.  I did this by holding the strings between a clean cloth and the D’addario XLR8 string cleaner.

Once the strings and fretboard are clean, it’s time to work on some of the body. Now with vintage instruments, I tend to not go to town on them.  The last thing I want to do is remove some of the life from the instrument, so instead I work on specific areas that need it.  Removing any dirt from the hardware and work on the pick guard to remove any finger prints.

Get the strings back on the guitar and bring everything up to tension. Once the strings are in tune, work on the string heights and the intonation, the G was a little low and gave some mild buzz on the 12th fret, so that needed to be lifted and then the intonation adjusted on the D, A and E strings. And we’re done!