A fantastic and fasinating beast.

I used to own one of these...

It had a gorgeous translucent blue finish, with a subtle greenish tint; and gold hardware...

But what was best about it was that it was a fretless model, with the fret lines inlayed in the neck, and it had a Hipshot on the low E String allowing for quick and easy drop d tuning. I bought it used, so I'm pretty sure those may have been some customizations done to it by a previous owner... but these features only made it so much better!

However, I eventually stopped playing for a long while and sold my Yamaha RBX800A... and it has been one of my biggest regrets ever since.... especially now, 20 years later, I decided to start playing again, and I wish I still had it, wishing I had never sold it...

It was remarkably easy to play with a slim, smooth and fast neck and was easy to reach the 24th fret. It had a magnificent tone with the D'Addario XL's that I used at the time; and since the frets were inlayed, I used flatwounds on it which gave it a smoother tone... yet because of the active pickups, it still had a brighter 'punch'... and I usually favored playing this over my Fender Jazz bass.

When I sold it 20 years ago, the music store offered me almost the same as what I originally paid for it... so it apparently hadn't lost much value in the nearly 8 years that I had owned it.

Versatile workhorse

Every fretted bass line I've ever recorded has been on a Yamaha CBX800A from the 1980s. This is a bit of a quirky animal—a 4-string, long-scale, active-electronics beast that's fatiguing for smaller people to play, but offers some of the most tonal versatility I've ever heard even in a bass that doesn't, in its design, feel like it's meant to be versatile.

The active pickups are terrific, and provide a much different response than the standard J-Bass/P-Bass pickups on your neighbourhood Fender. The neck is a bolt-on, but it's very deeply bolted into the body, if that makes sense; sustain goes for days and the bass isn't too muddy or thumpy on the bottom end, even on strings that have been dead for years. Hang onto one of these beauties if you can find one—they're not worth much to sell, but you'd pay two or three times as much for a custom shop bass that does the job so well, if the long-scale neck is something you can learn to like.