Well, Uwe's SilverBird arrived on Tuesday and I've done a little playing around with it so I can do a short review as per ordered by The Kollector. I will be passing this off to Joe (Chromium) on Friday so he can give it a more detailed description.
Anyhooo, the Bird has arrived! How is it, you ask? Well I'm glad you asked! Right out of the box it looks better than the pictures anyone has posted online! The burst isn't exactly a soft fade from the black to the silver, but it looks nice. The chrome really looks nice with the finish IMO, as well as the black pickguard. I think the white guard would have looked wrong on here, and I think that all black hardware wouldn't looked right either. The chrome just sort of makes it "pop" as tv designers like to say. The witch hat knobs with the silver tops look nice as well.
The finish seems nice and even, with a few minor flaws like you would expect from a Chinese made bass in this price range or like the Bach Birds finish. Nothing major to complain about tho. Hell, you can't get a perfect finish from Gibson so what am I complaining about? The finish on the neck feels a little odd to me, but not quite sure why. Maybe too slick? (My daughters Epi Dot Studio semiacoustic felt the same way)
The fret ends are all nice and smooth like they should be. Action is higher than Hell tho. Bridge will need to be lowered quite a bit for my taste (or anyone's taste I believe). Neck is wider than a Gibson, but not too fat or uncomfortable to me. If I keep my fretting hand in the proper position it's almost effortless to play. But I do prefer the narrower neck on the Gibson. I don't have large hands, but it's not hard to play this one. I think it will be a bit neck heavy with the usual Epi strap button location. I used a suede strap so it's neck didn't dive, it hung more or less level. I think with a slick strap you will have neck dive, but I think we all know how to remedy that at this point.
The only amp I have to try it on at the moment is a Crate BT25 (25 watts, 10in speaker) combo, so I plugged in with everything set flat, the knobs on the bass all set on 10. It sounds decent like that, but with my Hartke Bass Attack pedal set on the Bassman settings it sounded pretty good. The strings are too high above the pickups to really do the bass justice, but as is it sounds good to me. Plugging in my Gibson Bird (2001 model) with all settings the same, it shows that the pickups are not likley to be Gibson TB Plus. The Gibson speaks with much more authority, but it is also setup to my liking. I'm not good at describing tones, but you can tell the change between the bridge and neck pickup. Neck is fuller/bassier while the bridge is thinner/brighter. You can tell a change when you experiment with blending the pickups. Some have claimed in the past that some Epi T-birds pickups sounded identical whether you are using the bridge or neck soloed. That may be, but not in this case. When I turned the tone knob off, it sounded like crap to me. Everything sounded "wooly", and not in a good way. I'm not going to compare it to my LP Standard bass until I get to try it thru a real amp. This combo doesn't do the LP justice, so I don't think it's doing this bass (with it's current setup) justice.
Overall, I really like this bass. I think that with the proper setup and your favorite strings it will play great and sound good thru a decent amp, but sound great thru a good amp. The fit and finish are a good 9.5 out of 10. Playabliity out of the box, I'd say maybe a 7. Sound with the current setup I'd say 8. Overall a good first impression for me, but it would have been great if they took a little longer to set it up better at the factory. I was lucky to have placed the order thru Guitar Centers call center on a day when they were offering a 20% discount. So with the discount plus the added fee's the bass came out to just under $260 delivered. I think for the money it's a Hell of a deal! I may pick one up to convert to a sort of Fenderbird later on, but I'm still sort of torn between this and one of the T-bird Pro 4's.
I will try to post some pic's this evening, but I will ask Joe to do the same since he's a MUCH better photographer than I. More to come........
Uwe, if you don't mind I would like to remove the protective film from the pickguard. The heat from shipping has peeled it most of the way off, and it would look a little silly in the pictures. Your call of course because it's your bass. Thanks again for giving us the opportunity to work on this with you! I can't speak for Joe, but I'd prefer if you didn't run this under any black lights, if you know what I mean!!!
