How much thunderbird will £3k buy me?

[lowend1]

is a 60's bird more in my price range than a bicentennial?* are they the holy grail of T-birds?

The holy grail of T-Birds means different things to different people. For me, it's Uwe's "BuchholzBird", but I digress. A 60s reverse body is certainly the most valuable, all else being equal, but when I played one after having my Bicentennial for a few years, it was anticlimactic. What Mark said above about Bicentennials and amplifiers is true to some extent. Mine doesn't sound its best unless its connected to an old tube amp and turned up loud.

[wellREDman]

Thank you all,

an RD would fit the bill, I'm a Krist  Novoselic fan which helps,

plus the fact that for many years I thought that the bass that had first blown me away live (Craig Adams in the Mission) was a thunderbird, but it has since turned out to be an RD.

hmmm,

  wonders if 3k might get an RD and a second hand modern epi bird

[lowend1]

  wonders if 3k might get an RD and a second hand modern epi bird

Unlikely unless the RD market crashes...
https://reverb.com/marketplace?query=gibson%20RD%20bass

[uwe]

I love RDs, but compared to the iconic status of of Tbird, they are just some sort of weird-looking instrument. A TBird is a classic, an RD is cult, there is a difference. There has never been a substantial number of people interested in them. If value accrual is relevant to you, that needs to be taken into consideration. You want something rare, but you also want a relevant market to monetize the thing one day. Try buying a hot dog with the money from a rare and valuable bass nobody - alas! - wants.

RDs come from an era when Gibson's reputation was down in the dumps. To boot, there is hardly a name player associated with them. Most people played them only for a short while, mainly because they were curious about the electronics. Novoselic is the one great exception, but he already has (at least) one. And he in fact preferred the passive Standard which no one else cared for (unjustly so, I prefer the Standard to the Artist too).

[morrow]

I had an opportunity to pick up an RD Artist in Toronto for $800. In great shape , barely a mark on it. But I picked it up and it felt like the heaviest bass I had ever lifted. With a huge chunky fat neck.
So I passed
And I regret that now.

[uwe]

The RD has a special place in my heart and I really dig the shape. But weight and phat neck (not that I mind) as well as an unconventional look worked against its acceptance from day one. I started learning bass in 1977, the year the RDs came out. I was immediately taken by their look though they were totally out of my budget. But I longed for one. They even caused a little bit of a splash when they were first released, there was some initial interest. But woe did that die down fast. Within a few months, the Mafia of Fender Jazz (Jaco!) and Fender P players that held German bassdom in an iron grip only referred to the RDs as "tree trunks" and "boat anchors". Instead, the new - and incidentally also active - bass on the market you should look out for became the Stingray - that found favor due to its Leo Fender ties. It was very much an elitist thing, if you were to be deemed "serious" about your instrument, you had to play a Jazz, a P or a Stingray, nothing else. An Alembic would have been tolerated too, but nobody could afford one.

If a few name players had adopted the RD as their mainstay bass in the late 70ies/early 80ies (just imagine Jaco P or Stanley C picking one up and recording as well as gigging with it), things might have been different, but from my perspective the bass was doomed by 1978. A decade later, Novoselic only resurrected something that by then had been relegated to a pawn shop image.

And of course there is the weight test. Anybody picking up a TBird for the first time invariably always exclaims: "Wow, it's a lot lighter than it looks!" And anybody lugging an RD will always say: "Yup, heavy, just like I thought."