I bought a bass with rusty pickups without testing it. The guy I bought it from seemed like he knew it didn’t work so he threw me a t-shirt on the way out (probably as some moral compensation). Went home, plugged it in, no sound, bought pickups, swapped pickups, no sound, plugged in cable half-way, sound. I found out that this bass 1.) had bad pickups and 2.) had a improperly soldered line out. Already fixed the pickups and the line out was a polarity swap, so I fixed that just by swapping to a mono cable.

Next tale here is that abelton has a built in tuner so I jacked into my focusrite and went to tune up the provided strings.

I saw my E string was F so I naturally assumed that it was an octave lower (I had music playing so I wasn’t really “listening” to the strings). The second I turned it, snap, annnd I broke the E string. The rest of the strings ended up fine, I do have replacements but I was too anxious to get something recorded so I went hard with just ADG. (By hard I mean as hard as a 16 year-old who just picked up a bass).