What bass should I buy?

If you are interested with the bass guitar, love its sound, the feel, the groove and you want to purchase one so that you could start creating bass lines or just doing covers of the songs you like, and don't know anything about bass guitars yet, well i'm a long time bass player, and have a lot of experience in the whole bass sphere and i'm going to help you pick the perfect bass for you!

These are the steps, that I think are crucial for finding the ideal instrument for anybody:

1. First of all, you have to set yourself a pricerange. That is you should have a limit on how much money you're planing to spend on the instrument. I would advise not to pick the most expencive one, even if you have the money for it. The reason is, that if you're just a beginner and don't know if you're going to latch on to the instrument, you could waste a lot of money on an instrument you couldn't even use properly. It is better in the start to buy a mid priced bass 400-600$  (If you have a lot of disposable money), or if you're tight on the budget a cheap 100-200$ bass would suite you just fine. When you grasp the instrument and feel like you're ready to move up a notch, then you can think about a more expensive, advanced bass.  
2. The style. Just as buying anything, you pay attention to the design and choose the one, that is the most apealling to you visually, so as choosing a bass. Before buying anything, you should go to a musical instrument store (even if you're planing to buy it online) and try out some basses, just to get the feel of the model, the weight, colour, the shape of the body, to know if that perticular instrument is comfortable for you, and believe me, comfort is one of the most crucial things to pay attention to, if you want to play well.
3. I would advise anyone, if they're new to the whole bass scene, not to buy an unknown company bass, even if it looks great to you personaly, and choose a more known manufactorer, that has been in the buisiness a long time, has good feedback, has international stores, etc. The reason is this: A stable manufactorer is more lickely to provide a better quality instrument, than an unknown company, even if the instruments have same price, because known manufacturers have a lot more experiance in the making of instruments. And especialy if you're knew and don't know a lot about the specifics and electronics of the instrument, you could get easily mislead into buying a bad quality instrument.

These are my tips on buying your first bass guitar. I hope you have found this informative and i'm going to be posting more bass related material in the near future. Good luck!