Khruangbin bassist Laura Lee Ochoa has revealed that the signature model that Fender designed for her this year was modelled on a knock-off Fender Jazz that she had customised herself.
In a new interview with Guitar World, Ochoa explained how this came about. “When I started playing bass, I wanted a Fender, because that’s the cool brand,” she said. “It was the brand I always sort of idolised as somebody who wanted to be in a band but was never in a band.
Ochoa’s first bass was a Fender facsimile, though. “[It] is what I’ve been playing for the history of Khruangbin," she says. "It’s something that looked and felt like a Fender but was something I could afford at that point. And what’s so wild is that now I have a signature model, essentially based off of a knockoff Fender.”
Earlier this year Fender made history when, for the first time, they simultaneously released signature models for guitar and bass for members of the same band – Laura Lee and Khruangbin guitarist Mark Speer. Ochoa had said she wanted something user-friendly that a beginner could pick up quickly.
“I feel like it is something that a bass player who’s just starting out can really find themselves on,” she said. “The humbucker pickup allows you to play without having so much buzz as a beginner, which is a really difficult thing to kind of get around.”
Having a buzz-free tone is so important to Ochoa that her signature model actually comes complete with the little modification she’s made: “I shove foam in the bottom of where my strings are in the ashtray,” she explains. “It’s covered by the ashtray, so it looks cool and you can’t see the foam, but the foam is in there to even further make your tone nicer, and the sustain really nice, and the buzz even less.”
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