Until recently, I have never seen many Gibson basses in music stores and almost never anything older than 20 years vintage, but lately there have been a TON of them showing up locally. Guitar Satan has a Les Paul Special, a black Victory (with an awful crack at the neck joint), an EB-4 and even a couple of vintage Gretsch basses. On a recent trip to a shop in the trendy part of town, there were several, and I got to play a few that I have never encountered in the wild before. I LOVED the tone of both this
EB-3 and this
EB-4 but both of them had pathetic E strings. I expected it from the EB-4 (loved the long scale though), but even on EB-3 with the big Sidewinder, the tone was fat as hell, until the E string which was considerably weaker and thinner. My question: is that normal? I also played a Tele Bass and while the tone wasn't as nice, it had even output on all the strings. The test amp was a Phil Jones Briefcase, so it may be possible the big Gibson pickup was overloading the input and I was hearing the built in limiter? The Fender Bullet bass exhibited the same problem.
They also had quite a few really nice 70's imports for great prices. I finally got to try one of those 32" scale Electra Les Paul copies that seem to infest eBay- nice bass.