I've been toying with getting a Bass Guitar for a while now, and got to play around with a few different models at different stores this weekend.  First at St. John's Music in the Lang Tannery Building.  I just wanted to see what the store was like, but the staff was super friendly and helpful, and before I knew it I was trying out Bass guitars in a practice room hooked up to a big amp.  This store had a good variety of instruments, and I even found a Bass twin to my T-Bucket Fender Acoustic-Electric.  Nothing really screamed "Buy me!" though, so I left with nothing more than a book of guitar tab (Pink Floyd - Echoes)

The next day, while scoping out potential deals at Best Buy prior to their Reward Zone invite-only sale, I once again found myself trying out Bass guitars.

Since my budget was small I was able to eliminate a lot of different guitars from contention right away, but I learned through trying a bunch of them what I liked and didn't like.  Beyond basic aesthetics, I seemed to need a fair amount of clearance between the fret board and the strings or else I got excessive vibration noise.  I also seemed to prefer the sound from single/split pickups instead of dual coil humbuckers.  Some guitars had clear deep tones, while others had a surprising amount of string noise.

In the end, I picked up a Fender Squier Jaguar Bass from Best Buy (pre-empting the sale by getting the sales guy to apply the same discount).  There are an astounding number of YouTube videos for this guitar.  Here's one review: http://youtu.be/N5U_dO9jZtM.  It's the normal long neck model (the first one in the review).

Here's a quick little sample of the guitar using Garageband on the iPad with iRig.  iRig seems to introduce a lot of hiss that I haven't figured out how to remove yet.  It isn't there when the guitar is hooked up to a real amp.