It's Alive

The last few days have been so frustrating. The bass only needed another half hour or so, and it would "be" a bass - I just needed to finish the pilot holes in the neck, and bolt it together. FINALLY I found the time!!!!

It all bolted together without any real issues - but would it be aligned right? The only way to find out was to string it up. I just happened to have a set of rotosounds in the old pink box - seemed perfect, so on they went. While I was working I had iTunes on random play, and as the first string went on Merciless from the first Mr Big album kicked in... A Good Omen.

So? The strings line up on the neck perfectly!!!! I got the neck holes in exactly the right place!!!

With that done I added the string tree, and (even though I knew they'd have to come off  for tweaking) the knobs and bridge cover. The ripper and dragon sticker went on and we have an (almost) finished bass!!!

So how does it play? Well the action and intonation are exactly what you'd expect from a bass that's just been bolted together form parts - not even close, but the neck seems pretty true, so a good setup should sort things out. The neck feels fatter than I thought it would but it's nice having the almost bare wood. The body wood feels unfinished, even though it's thoroughly sealed. Plugging the two pickups into a two channel amp, and they sounded good. The EB is all bottom, and the P is thin and toppy (by comparison) which is great. Running the P through a random distortion pedal and the appeal of the dual system became instantly apparent. The P became this total lead sound, while the EB thundered underneath, with the option to roll between them as required - a pretty cool system, which will rock once I refine it a little.

Whats to do? Well setup is 90% of the work. I'm still missing a couple of stickers that I need to print myself, so they need to go on yet, but other than that we have an awesome bass...

edit: almost forgot - the top frets need scalloping.