Fender Special Edition Deluxe PJ Bass Sea Foam Pearl

I use this primarily for my home studio, but would not hesitate to use it on the road. The tone is great. The noiseless J/Bridge pickup is very good. The tone is not exactly the same as a regular single coil - I would not say, at least for my style of playing, that the pickup is worse than a regular single coil, just different. I rely more on the P/Neck pickup than the bridge, and it is excellent. I bought it because it was on sale, but now that I've been playing it for a few days, I'd have been perfectly happy with it if I'd paid full price. The neck is comfortable, even in the 12+ frets. And by the way, the image online doesn't do it justice - it really is a beautiful instrument.

I bought this to use in my home studio. It's versatile and sounds great overall.

The only thing I have to say that's good about this bass is that it has a Jazz neck on a P body. That's about it. Maybe I received a lemon, but here's what I found. First out of the box, you'll need to have the frets leveled, crowned, and polished because the fret outs and buzzes are all over the place (even after a proper setup). Second, the grounding on this bass is horrible. The hum is almost as bad as playing through an amp and pedal with high gain, even with a noise suppressor on. Third, the nut at the A string doesn't seem to be cut correctly so if you don't fix it, you'll have to have multiple winds down the peg just to get the right angle break at the nut. Fourth, the knobs crackle out of the box, so you'll have to spray those with cleaner. Fifth, on any of these models, the G string doesn't sit over the pole pieces correctly on the J bass pickup. And finally, when you find all of these issues out, be prepared to have to pay GC to fix all of them even though you just bought the bass. Luckily, they comped the price of mine at the last minute, which I was happy with, except the reason they comped it was because they claimed to fix it and didn't. They raised the string height to fix some of the buzz and claimed a full set up with a fret level and dress. Won't say which GC but I took it to my other local GC and they helped me return it to get an American Pro II P bass. Way better customer service and the only reason I didn't give it a 1 star. If you want to buy a Bass similar to this but better, buy a Squier. Way cheaper and better build quality. P.S. if you love a smooth satin neck, this is not the bass for you. It is layered with lacquer!

I thought it would come with at least a gig bag

Went in just looking to figure out my next bass purchase and they had this on sale. It's gorgeous looking and sounds great. You do need to do a little bit of legwork on your own to get it gig ready. Positives out of the box: -Extremely pretty. I'm very partial to block inlays and binding and even the decaling on the headstock just looks great to me compared to what comes on a regular P Bass. -Sounds great. -Good hardware. The bridge was especially nice. -Jazz neck on P body. Slim and narrow, yet also feels as rock solid as any neck I've played on. -Action was good right away. Very little adjustment needed to neck and bridge to get action just right and intonation taken care of -Very easy to get a wide range of tones by adjusting how much of each pickup you want. Things I needed to fix out of the box: -The factory strings aren't that great and if you play with any amount of force, the bass can get very clanky, especially if you have the knobs at full go. I put Rotosound RS66LDN strings on and it softened things up a bit. -The frets are sharp on the edge to an unacceptable point. It almost broke the deal for me. Complete factory oversight, and if it's not an oversight, it's a complete failure in process. Filed them immediately. -Pluck the A string with your thumb, you're gonna get a very ugly buzz. Factory only wound the string twice. After putting new strings on, I wound it three times on that peg and the problem simply went away because the string went over the nut at a better angle. Overall I love this bass to death. As long as you know how to fix some of the shortcomings out of the box, it's a beautiful instrument that plays like a dream.

Best of both worlds. I put flats on it.