Do players stick with the Bronco/Mustang Short Scale?

[Okieactor]

There is a Bronco bass on sale on craigslist right now. There was a Mustang that I missed. I guess I'm looking at basses again.

I am a dumbass and sold my black/rosewood J Bass (Got it for $200, why did I ever sell?). I keep debating about whether to play bass as well as guitar. I'm not a small guy, but I always had the issue that the finger dexterity required for bass is just different from guitar, I guess, especially because there's like a 15 year gradient between my guitar experience and my bass experience.

So my question is: do guitar players who go with a short scale bass to start stick with it, or should I just get another P-Bass, J-Bass, or Epiphone Thunderbird and get used to the 34" scale? (I have had 3 basses over the years and wound up selling them, basically because I didn't have a big enough amp to play with a band, wanted more guitar gear, didn't feel I was good enough at bass, or just wasn't playing bass as much. but I keep coming back to it. IDK.)

[Gunny]

Not easy to give an impartial opinion on this one. I own two short scale basses and 4 long scale. In the past I owned a Musicmaster short scale and replaced the guitar PUP with a bass PUP.
For gigs, the long scale instruments get more use than the short scale basses but from time to time I like switching it up. Going to use one of each at our next gig. I have big hands and reaching the frets on a 34" scale isn't an issue.

Try out one of each before buying and be sure you know which one is most fun to play - that's my advice

[losergeek]

There's lots of people on this board that gig with shortscales and they will definitely chip in. As for myself, I started with a Gretsch Junior Jet shortscale and had it for a couple years just messing around the house. Also, a bandmate gigged with it for about a year. Once I started playing bass fulltime it was 95% ok, but I did find that the notes from the low G and down didn't quite cut through the way I wanted. I actually changed the way I played to move those up an octive. I did this for about 6 months before switching to a jazz bass. I ended up selling the shortscale because I didn't think I'd ever use it again, but there are still occasions when it would be nice to have it at home for recording and more chord oriented stuff.

I guess the way I'd sum on shortscale vs fullscale is that you can definitely make a shortscale work fine, but it takes a decent amount of tweaking to get it perfect....whereas a full scale is much more of a plug and play situation where it sounds more even across the spectrum without much messing around.