1963 Vox Bassmaster
British-built Vox bass guitar

The Vox Bassmaster bass was a short scale (30"), two-pickup bass, with very simple controls: one volume and one tone. This one has a laminate wood body, sycamore neck and rosewood fretboard with dot inlays. Early Vox literature describes the body as 'lightweight hardwood', and for some basses (see this 1965 Vox Basmaster) Vox used mahogany, although there are examples using other one-piece wood bodies, maybe sycamore?

The Sunburst finish on this bass is quite unusual, especially for an early lower end bass. Red is by far the most commonly seen colour, and along with white the only finish listed in Vox literature.

The bolt-on neck is very thin; width at the nut is 1 5/16", and was supplied by a local British furniture manufacturer, G-plan. Although a truss rod was fitted it was not adjustable.

Note the jack plug is side-mounted, another early feature. A year or so later they were positioned on the front, next to the tone control. This would originally have been a coaxial input, but like most Vox's this has been swapped for a standard guitar jack.

Typical to early British made Vox's, it has the Green Vox logo, model name and 'JMI Dartford Kent' (JMI = Jennings Musical Industries). Sometimes the Vox logo itself is a different decal to the model name, though not in this instance.

The laminate body of this bass is clearly visible in the unfinished neck pocket. Some middle period Vox's (generally the later British built ones) had dates, or other markings stamped in ink here, although not in this case. Another feature obvious in this picture is the single-ply white pickguard. Most Vox Bassmasters have the three-ply white/black/white guard, with a wide central layer (see this 1965 Vox Bassmaster for comparison).

The body itself is really very simple; the two pickup routes and the control route are three almost identical rounded rectangles - in fact they are all a little different, three different widths, and the control route is a little deeper than the pickup routes.

The early laminate body Vox instruments had far less countoured edges than the solid wood ones, as can be seen here (click to enlarge). The bass on top is the 1963, the bass below is a 1965 Vox Bassmaster. This rounded profile was just one example of how Vox got better at making guitars as the decade progressed.

The Bassmaster bass is less of a a Fender-like than other early Vox guitars, but is still nothing like the Phantom and Mark (tear-drop) basses that Vox were producing at the time. This is a very light bass, weighing in at just kg.

The compensating bridge is a simple stamped metal design, with a lightweight Vox emblazoned cover. This simple design was most likely copied from the Fender Precision that Jennings were distributing at the time, and appeared on a lot of solid body Vox basses.

The Bassmaster was equipped with two Vox chrome covered single coil pickups. These Vox pickup casings were often marked with the same Vox logo as on the bridge cover, though not in this instance. The pickups themselves were a fairly simple single-coil design.

Like most other features of this bass, the circuitry employed was pretty simple. The two pickups are wired to the 250k logarithmic volume pot, with a 250k linear tone pot. It is a popular misconception that only the earliest Vox instruments had coaxial input jacks, but this is not the case. It seems lower end British instruments had them fitted at least until 1966, when production of the majority of Vox guitars moved to Italy. This jack was moved from the side of the guitar to the scratchplate (see this 1965 Vox Basmaster) in 1964(?)

Summary