I seemed to drop out of this thread just as it got to the interesting (i.e., off-topic) bits.
Forgive me if I've mentioned this before, but I once had the long-term loan (i.e., several years) of a 1959 Fender Telecaster bass. A truly delightful instrument that made even me - more a refugee from my 12-string than a proper bass player - sound good. Rare too: there were at that time only a pair of '59 Teles in Victoria, and this one much the better of the two. Perhaps just one now. (My friend moved to London and took his Fender with him.) Maple neck and power blue body, and that perfect weight and balance that only Fender guitars ever seem to achieve. Soft and gentle on the hands, a surprisingly high action, and so easy to play fast that one only wanted to play middling-slow and shape the beginning and the middle and the end of every note the way a trumpet player does.
The rest of my rig was simplicity itself: a Fender Super Six 100W guitar amp head (shorn of the six 10 inch speakers that were originally a part of it), a good 15 inch speaker, a crossover, and one of the 10 inch speakers from the Super Six in a box I made myself. No pedals, no FX, just nice fresh valves in the Fender head.
There is a delight to a truly fine instrument that is, perhaps, impossible to describe properly. It's commonplace, I guess, to say "it plays itself", but that is almost exactly what a really great instrument does: one stops being aware of the mechanics of it all, gives little or no thought to fingering or technique, just falls in love with the wonderful sounds that are happening without you, the musician, being particularly aware of how you are creating them.
That's true on one level, and yet on another level you are aware of what you're doing, of the techniques you are using. This awareness is quite different to the "normal" awareness one has of fingers and strings and sounds and intentions: it almost an "after the fact" thing, something that one is simply aware of and accepting of and thankful for, as opposed to the rather mechanistic willed and intellectualised effort that one puts into playing any ordinary instrument. I suppose the best analogy is that of good sex on the one hand, and actually making love on the other.
Indeed, now that I think of it, I would trade a night with all bar a very, very small number of the women I have known over the years for a one more golden night when the guys catch fire and the dance floor fills to the rolling thunder of my beautiful borrowed Telecaster bass.