I’m super excited! I just picked up a 1995 Peavey Forum bass on Reverb – $325 shipped with a case. A little background – I’ve been wanting one of these for a while. Years ago, I found and played one in a local music store for roughly the same price ($275 and no case). For some reason, I immediately loved that Peavey Forum! At the time, I was not in the market for a new bass, but my nephew wanted one for his studio, so he bought it. Anyway, this Peavey Forum popped up on Reverb, so I figured, “Why not?”, and I bought it.

One one hand, the Peavey Forum is an underrated instrument. It has a lot of qualities that make it a solid, working bass. It’s made in USA, the chunky one-piece maple neck plays good, the big, fat humbucker and 2-band active EQ give it a real meat & potatoes tone that works for anything, and it’s built to withstand a fall out of the truck after someone forgets to close the tailgate after one too many pints of Pabst Blue Ribbon on a Saturday night at the local bar & grill. On the other hand, the Forum has a nondescript vibe that plagued some these 80’s and 90’s USA Peaveys. It seems like they were really just reacting to the whims of the market and producing safe instruments that were similar to other instruments out there. I know Peavey got into making neck-thrus and fancy top woods later in the decade, but even these more “high-quality” instruments weren’t breaking any new barriers in design. All that being said, I do have to give Peavey tremendous props – even though some of their designs weren’t necessarily groundbreaking, they did continue to make their own components, which it seems a lot of manufacturers were beginning to give up on at that point in time.

Oddly enough, I’ve come to recognize the influence that Peavey has had on my own instruments. I dismantled and copied a T40 pickup for my Uno bass, and the new Pistolera pickup is basically one of those T40 coils split in half. I’ve never been much of a collector of anything, but as of late, I’ve been feeling this desire to have a few of these “less desirable” instruments in my arsenal. As I’ve become a professional luthier, I’ve been more and more impressed with instruments built on a small budget than I am with more expensive basses. At this time, I have a running list of 6-7 basses that seem to be going for under $500 used.

My only complaint about this bass is that it has the super-lame Peavey “delta” logo. I would have loved to proudly rock this bass with the ugly-ass “lightning” logo.