Gotta say the BaCHbird is simply stunning 
Thanks, Mark. I have a gig on the 9th- can't wait for its maiden voyage!
How do you like the Roland Bass guitar Synth?
Its very nice, and in that Ibanez Musician vein in terms of sound and quality. The wings are ash, the neck thru is largely maple, the pickup is single coil in the MM spot, and it has a 2-band active EQ setup that is actually pretty nice- punchy, without being too muddy or too brittle. The neck is a little chunky- maybe a bit like an Epi Tbird's neck, but with a volute. Plays wonderfully. I left the flats on it just for something different, since I mostly use rounds.
Actually, the only reason I have it is because I got it for 275 shipped with HSC - just couldn't pass that up ('cause I'm a geek for this kinda stuff
). There was a dedicated floor unit that they made for that bass that I still don't have, and frankly its getting harder to justify stuff like that now that I've built the modular. I'd rather just add on to that these days. That thing has a couple of "instrument interfaces" that facilitate control of the synth from a signal source, so if I wanted to do any synth bass stuff that'd be one way to get there.
This generation of the Roland guitar and bass synths used the actual signal from the hex (or quad, in the case of the bass) pickup and shaped it using compression and clipping/distortion to create the synth waveform. Range of sounds is limited, but they track incredibly well - because there's no pitch-to-voltage/MIDI conversion going on. Even the ones that do those types of conversions have the potential to perform well, but tend to require a bit of adjustment to the setup and to your playing (note this is the same guitar as mine, but its been retrofitted with a newer Axon pitch-to-MIDI converter):
'Course it helps that he plays much better than I do!
