Article by cheapbassguitars
Have you decided to take up playing a bass guitar? You have made a good decision.
There is now another decision that you have to make, and that's choosing your first bass guitar. This is important as your first bass guitar will decide whether you want to keep playing it or quit. Also, if you get a very bad bass guitar, you will develop wrong habits which will be hard to correct in the future.
My first advice is that you don't buy an expensive one. At the moment, you are not yet sure whether you want to keep playing bass or look for other instrument. If you happen to ditch playing bass guitar, buying an expensive one would be a waste of money. Furthermore, as a novice bass guitar player, you are not going to find much of a difference between a cheap one(but not extremely cheap) and an expensive one. Bassists begin to buy expensive bass guitar when they have played enough so that they know what kind of style and sound they like, and they choose a bass guitar according to that. If you want some reviews and prices on Cheap Bass Guitars, follow the link.
Secondly, please please do not buy one from the internet. If you want to buy a bass guitar or any other instrument, it is important that you actually hear how the instrument sounds. You read other people's reviews, who says that a specifc bass guitar sounds awesome, and you buy it blindly believing the reviewer. Just because the reviewer likes how it sounds doesn't mean that you will like it. You need to buy what YOU like.
Also, there's this thing with buying cheap bass guitars. Buying a cheap instrument is like buying a used car; there are often little problems that you can't see easily which will affect its performance. The bass guitars may have poor construction(buzzing frets etc), weak durability and faulty electronics. Buying a cheap bass guitar is like a gamble; sometimes you end up with a good one, sometimes a terrible one. WHICH IS WHY you should see and inspect the bass guitar for yourself to find any faults with it. You can't do this off the internet.
I'll just give a piece of advice on what brands to pick just in case you end up with some cheap unbranded crap, because good brands ensure you at least some amount of quality. Good cheap bass guitar brands are Squier, Cort, and Ibanez. If you buy a bass from any of this brands, you won't be dissatisfied. (Of course there are other good brands but for the sake of keeping my advice simple, I just mentioned 3)