This June, Fender made history by simultaneously releasing a signature electric guitar and bass for two members of the same band, dropping signature models for Khruangbin's genre-blending guitarist Mark Speer and bassist Laura Lee Ochoa.
For Ochoa, her signature model was designed after the knockoff Fender Jazz Bass that she has been wielding since the very start of her musical journey.
“When I started playing bass, I wanted a Fender, because that’s the cool brand,” she says in the new issue of Guitar World. “It was the brand I always sort of idolized as somebody who wanted to be in a band but was never in a band.
“Mark helped me get my first bass, which was a knockoff Fender, which is what I’ve been playing for the history of Khruangbin. 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.”
One of Ochoa's key considerations for this model was to release something user-friendly that even a beginner could start ripping on right away.
“I feel like it is something that a bass player who’s just starting out can really find themselves on,” she asserts. “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.”
She’s so steadfast on a buzz-free tone that the signature bass also comes fully equipped with a little trick that Ochoa has used throughout the years.
“I shove foam in the bottom of where my strings are in the ashtray,” she discloses. “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.”
As for her bandmate Mark Speer, the guitarist recently revealed he's only played one single guitar for over two decades.
For more from Khruangbin, plus new interviews with Kiki Wong and Billy Corgan, pick up issue 595 of Guitar World from Magazines Direct.
