A week or two ago I took a drive north to pick up a bass I bought from the BC marketplace. I kept looking at it, passing it by, thinking about it, not thinking about it, continuing with my macrame antimacassars, essentially I was curious but not gassing. I sent a message asking if it was still available and the buying process began. Anyway, the seller was far enough away that after driving up I booked a hotel and we arranged to meet the next morning. On seeing the bass in the flesh so to speak, I was struck by how beautifully made it was, how light it was and yet I remained stoically underwhelmed by it. I paid up, put it on the back seat and set off home. Arriving back I stuck the bass in the rack and left it there to languish, I'm not sure I played it for a couple of days, when I finally did I was, again, just south of whelmed. Another bass bought on a whim that I'm going to lose money on I thought. A few days later I had a jam with a friend of mine, just some songs he's learning with his guitar tutor, some Beatles, Neil Young etc, I plugged the Acinonyx in and kind of forgot about it, and that's the whole point.
I have gassed after some lovely basses and, more often than not, I've bought them purely on the basis of aesthetics, not ergonomics, not sound/tone, and, I shouldn't be surprised should I? That a huge percentage of these basses didn't suit me or my needs, they simply satisfied my desire to own something a) because I could and b) because I liked the look of it. Rarely (if ever) did I take my needs as a band member into account. To be honest that was exactly what I did again with the Acinonyx, only this time I wasn't even sure I liked the look of it, after all, it's a funny looking f***er innit.
That whole point I was on about.
When I was rehearsing with it I forgot about the instrument, how it looks, how it feels, entirely, I just played it. It was supremely comfortable, ergonomically right for a change and, so comfortable, so 'right' that, well, we just got on. It has a limited range of tones and yet play it in a band setting and those tones are the right ones. Given my druthers I would never set my bass to any of those tones, which is obviously why I've never been satisfied with my tone! The Acinonyx doesn't give you room to fånny about tweaking stuff for ages until you tweak yourself into a sonic corner. I play through an FRFR powered speaker so I just set that to 'default' and then pressed a couple of these crazy buttons...
...I can't even remember which, and I forgot the bass and just played music. If you push all four pickup buttons down at the same time (easier said than done!) it switches the pickups into series mode.
Anyway, I'm no good at technical stuff, it was more how, for some reason, I was almost totally indifferent about this bass until I plugged it in and loved it. We are always looking for something perfect, exactly the right tone, exactly the right look, essentially we are looking for something that probably only exists in our heads and that no physical bass can actually live up to. Inevitably I'll buy a bass, clearly for all the wrong reasons, rush home, plug it in, declare it to be the best bass I've ever had and invariably sell it a fortnight later at a loss because there's a lot more stupid stuff going on in our heads psychologically than any of us is prepared to admit to. I should, at this point tell you all that the Acinonyx is the best thing since sliced Fodera but I'm going to stick with underwhelmed because underwhelming is clearly what I should have been looking for all this time, I'm not even going to say this is a keeper, I'm just going to stop typing and play it.
