Well, Andy dropped that silverburst Tbird with me before he left on vacation. I spent some time with it today, and thought I'd post a few thoughts, pics, and sounds.
I've never played one of the bolt-on Epis before. Its a nice bass! That chunky neck is actually starting to grow on me.
It arrived with very little done in the setup department, but I guess that's expected at this price (the nice setup job on those Bachs really surprised me). The strings were probably 3/4" off the fingerboard at the top fret, there was way too much relief in the neck, and it hadn't been intonated. One twist of the bridge studs (with the strings loose) caused them to raise right up out of the body. I've never had this happen before, but I know some of you have. I slid them out, built up the holes with a bit of CA glue, and pressed 'em back in when it dried - they seem to be holding steady now.
I had to set the bridge all the way down to get the action to a more playable height. I'd say it has medium action now, and the neck would probably need to be shimmed to get it any lower:
About a quarter turn on the truss rod got the relief in better shape. There are two frets (10th and 18th) that seem to be too low and cause the G string (only) to bottom out. It looks like the adjacent frets are seated well, so they might just need to be filed down & polished in those spots to fix this. I had a similar problem on that Elitist that I had, and that seemed to do the trick. I'll leave that be- don't want to get too crazy with Uwe's new bass
I roughed the intonation in using my crappy little tuner, but that could benefit from a bit more attention too.
Anyway- despite having to wrestle with the setup a bit, its a great player. I don't think the pickups are TB+ (which I think is what everyone suspects anyway). They don't sound like it to me, and when I was fixing the bridge studs I pulled the bridge pickup for a quick peek:
The USA TB+ pickups in the Elitist looked different underneath (wish I had a pic), and they were sealed in epoxy.
I'm not very good at describing the sound either, other than to say it sounds more "Fenderish" and less "Tbirdish" to me (my point of reference being the 76, Elitist, and Andy's late-model TB IV). That's not a bad thing, just different.
I made a quick recording to demonstrate a couple of the sounds. I did some "bass karaoke"! I took a excerpts from two songs, and did some stuff in Cubase to wipe out the original bass part from the recording - so what you'll hear is me playing the Epi over the top of it.
In honor of the bass' soon-to-be homeland, I chose a chart-topping track from everyone's favorite krautrock band Kraan to demo the basic sound of the bass.
The neck pickup is on full, bridge pickup is rolled off just a bit, and the tone is wide open. The second part of the clip features fingerstyle playing over a Meters song. Andy mentioned that the sound of the bass with the tone rolled off gets really diffuse and wooly-sounding. Well I found that just using the bridge pickup with the tone rolled off all the way gives a nice, focused R&B/funk kind of tone - so that's what I did here.
Enjoy!
