Well first of all thanks a lot, as beeing the guy building these bass guitars, its a an honor to hear such good comments on it. I try to explain a little, how this bass guitar got started off. First we did the Firestar guitar, which went quite successful on the international market. We wanted to do a sibbling bass guitar to our existing line, and developed a bass guitar upon our guitar philosophy. That mainly consists of taking the best of the most desired worlds, and to merge it all together into one good new design.
Our Firestar design also lead to the decision to use a reversed headstock on a bass guitar, and the reason is indeed, that the attack of the string is totally different from a regular placement of tuners. Actually you need to get a longer section of the same string diameter to the same "E" like a shorter section. That alone gives a player another plucking feel. The low E-String gets some more room somehow, less chorus effect as heard on many longscale basses with regular tuner placement.
On our guitars we found out, it adds some more chordal vibes, as also some smoother bends on the treble strings. For Jimi Hendrix it turned out to have no other chance, and his sound is also based on that fact. The bass strings just have some more room to develop, maybe a bit looser feeling on the initial attack, but with more equal vibration. That is my experience. The tuning comfort is actually quite good to handle, though not easy to convince traditionalists.
Best, Frank
