This is my attempt to recreate my very first bass, a "Montaya", as well as one of my first ventures into 'modding'. These SX's are great instruments. For 109 bucks you get an alder body with a beautiful 3-tone sunburst, a decent neck, functional bridge & tuners, and a flawless finish. What you don't get is any kind of useable pickups or strings. On this one, I installed a USA Fender pickup, my favorite d'Addario strings, and gave it a careful fret dressing and setup. I also added the tortoise pickguard, rosewood thumbrest, and ashtray for the looks only. At the time, I was going purely from memory, but I later found a picture of the original, and I got it dead right.

SX is often known as Essex, because most search engines, including this one, will reject the two-letter term. Try it. SX calls this model bass an "Ursa". They seem to call all their Fender-style basses Ursa. These basses were sold exclusively by Rondo Music.

This is the only picture I have of the Montaya. It was a pretty crappy instrument, heavy plywood body, non-humbucking pickup, or maybe not properly grounded. I must be about 16 in this picture.

The upgrades to the SX cost more than the instrument, the project kind of spiraled out of control, but the point was that it started out as a cheapie. The stock SX played ok, but sounded awful, which was mainly due to the strings. That's the world's easiest upgrade, you have to figure on doing that on any new instrument. For 99 109 bucks, you also don't get a factory setup, but then, you don't get that for a thousand bucks from Gibson either.

The Montaya had a plywood body and probably the world's only non-humbucking Precision pickup. I don't recall much more about it, not even what it cost, except that I got rid of it after I got the Ric in high school, and regretted that ever after. The upgraded SX compares very favorably with my MIJ Precision, in fact, blindfolded, I doubt you could tell the difference. It is a worlds better instrument than the Montaya. With all the upgrades and a careful setup, this is actually a quite good instrument. It mostly hangs on the wall as a decoration.

No kidding, with eyes closed, it is hard to tell these two apart, they sound and feel like twins, and that is a superb MIJ that was given to me by a very happy vintage guitar dealer that I did some work for.

The fit and finish on this SX is better than a Mexican Fender, let alone a Squier. Replace a few cheap parts with good ones, and you have a great instrument. All hail Rondo Music !!!

From The Rondo website:

https://www.rondomusic.com/

Unfortunately, the $100 special is discontinued. There are a few other choices, but the prices have gone up quite a bit. On the other hand, the new models look gorgeous, and at the new higher price point, I suspect Rondo has switched production from China to Korea, which would be a big improvement. That said, this Chinese one is a surprisingly nice guitar.