EMG456

What a beauty that is. Also utterly iconic. Enjoy. Also, if you have gigs to play, it has to come out!

Haha, not been paying attention here- some other stuff on!! Yes, @fleabag, you are obviously correct but as you yourself point out, these units are described by their manufacturers as Trems - both this Kahler one and the ‘TransTrem’ fitted to one of my Steinbergers. Sometimes you just have to go with the flow.

Ha - I accept your curse, in the spirit I think it was intended. Oh and yeah, sorry about that! 😀

Nice one - I'm led to believe that the eq was an MXR unit integrated into the front of the bass. I suspect that if you're looking for an Odyssey, Edinburgh or Vancouver will be the locations most likely to turn one up!

Well, I bought this one from GuitarGuitar in Edinburgh but it came to them as part of a 50 instrument collection they purchased from a collector somewhere near Epsom. The collection included loads of interesting and unusual guitars and basses. It may well of course have gone to Epsom via Edinburgh - see below. I worked with Jimmy Grant in the mid '80s and this was where I originally came across the Odysseys. Jimmy liked the shop to have a selection of high-end instruments which were not readily available else where and he would often sell them on to other dealers, usually in England. He had brought Alembics in around that time also and always had a selection of Martin acoustics and the beautiful Gurian acoustics. When I started with Jimmy, there were just two Odyssey basses and one guitar left. The one I liked best was identical to the bass I have just bought and the other one was a less expensive one without the body and headstock binding and with slightly plainer timbers. They were both sold within a few months and I missed out as I was fixated on buying my first Steinberger at the time and was selling other basses to fund it.

Well you can't have this one I'm afraid. I'm in Scotland. Yep, seems rock solid even as a fixed bridge.

Mmmm… are you suggesting something fishy going on? 🤨

Sorry - I'm sure they're just as nice as they were before!

The unmodded ones were either the unloved ones or owned by players who had no interest in experimenting with different sounds etc. If you thought you were going to improve it in some way, you changed it. Everything was hacked! Or was that just me...?

Well my Antoria Precision has the serial no B772796 on the neckplate and I bought it new in 1978. It also has the mahogany blockboard body like your jazzes - you can tell by the black of the sunburst finish coming right down over the forearm cutaway so you don't see the body core. Great basses and completely identical to their Ibanez equivalents.

Well the Barts were perceived back in the day to be quite "dark" sounding pickups and they live up to that here. Passive, it's full, rounded and plummy. The neck pickup is indeed too much on its own for my personal tastes but both on together is a fantastic, tight sound. Bridge on its own is more Musicman than Jazz I would say - very usable. Switch to active and the two band eq can add that bite at the top end, add huge lows or indeed, make it all much more middley when both are rolled off - again reminiscent of an old Stingray 2eq circuit. Out of phase is extremely thin and honky as to be expected. Feel wise, there's a little bit too much relief on the neck at the moment for me- I'm just going to let it settle in for a few days before I start tweeking things- I've every confidence that it will fall into line when I do that. One thing I didn't recall from my previous Oddysey encounters was that the board is virtually flat- no radius. That's quite a trend now but not so much back then. Long sustain that you might expect from a well built, through-neck, maple bass.

That's a very good question to which I don't have the full answer yet.🙄 I was provided this helpful guide and I mostly concur except that the active treble (actually more like a high mid/ treble) is not broken but works fine. As per the guidance, the actual function of the mysterious switches 1 and 2 is as yet still unclear. It sounds great though, active or passive.

Good things come to those who wait - not much option if you're looking for one of these. And yes, that's a Kahler Trem! The bass has been modded over the years with the Kahler and a strange active circuit but you can still play it Passive as well and the active and passive each have their own volume control presumably so you can balance the two different sounds. All the work seems to have been done to a very high standard and the original wood working, timbers and finish are all excellent and surprisingly well preserved. It sounds and feels great and (IMO) looks fantastic so well chuffed with this one. I've only been looking for about 25 years!

Well, I suppose the fact that emg named themselves with my initials is indeed a coincidence. 😉

Well I liked it so thanks for that! And his other stuff's pretty good too. Maybe you need to listen to him with your eyes shut?

It may seem silly but a capo at the first or 2nd fret would give you a medium/ short scale bass on a standard scale neck without any irreversible modifications...

The consensus in the Steinberger community seems to be that it's mainly the pots that let the spirit instruments down. Apparently replacing the pots with good quality ones from the likes of CTS will make a noticeable improvement.

Above your budget but someone is selling a real Steinberger XQ5 for (I think) a very reasonable price. Different league to the Hohner or Washburn.

Go on - you know you want to...

Ah - if one piece I suspect the heat treatment may not do so well as I believe that the heat softens up the bond between neck and fingerboard allowing them to move slightly against each other. What could work is a refret using fret wire with a slightly thicker tang - the bit that goes into the fret slot. the cumulative effect of 20 frets with oversized tangs may be enough to bring the relief back down.

What he said. I used to believe that the heat treatment thing was just crazy urban myth but having tried it myself, it works. A couple of years back I bought a beat up Hayman 4040 which had a neck with huge s bend in it - pretty much beyond repair I reckoned so I managed to buy a replacement neck (Sheregold but the same really) from a friendly basschatter. That's good and the bass is nice but rather than chuck the original neck away, I decided to experiment. By a system of trial and error, I now have that neck straight apart from one little bend right at the heel end. I haven't taken the time to sort that last bit out but I will soon. I reckon that a luthier who unlike me actually knows what he is doing would be able to sort it out for you.

Just keep doing it - it'll all fall into place eventually.

Lovely.

I would still be playing the bass - I love it but... I should have stuck in at my piano lessons when I was 6 and I should have started on the Chapman Stick in the early 80s. If I had done these I might be quite good at them by now! Hey ho!