Intonation - What's going on here then?

[Guest MoJo]

In the last 23 years, I have acquired the necessary skills to set up my own basses, neck relief, saddle height and intonation don't normally pose a problem....until today.
My new strings arrived for my 'beater' P-bass, so after work, on they went. A quick tweak of the truss rod and adjustment of the saddles produced a reasonable action....on to the intonation.

Using my chromatic tuner, I first tuned to the harmonic at the twelfth fret then tried fretting at the fourteenth and nineteenth frets adjusting the saddle position to get an accurate scale length and this is what I've ended up with.



I've never seen the saddles in such an obscure pattern before. They're usually pretty close together in a gentle slope with the 'G' being the slightly shorter scale length and the 'E' being the longest.

Anyone seen this phenomena before or have ideas what's going on with this bass?

[The Burpster]

Its not unusual (sounds like a song!) to have one or two strings out the ordinary....

You may have a rogue set, but did you pre-stretch them as you put them on? (my guess is yes)

Also are they an odd set with not the usual guages? (have you measured them?)

only A and G look squiffy....

Does it sound ok?

[Guest MoJo]

I might try another set and see how that goes.

[The Burpster]

So what happened?

[Guest MoJo]

[quote name='The Burpster' post='197718' date='May 13 2008, 09:25 AM']So what happened?[/quote]

I bought a Jap Precision and lost interest in the beater. It now resides in parts in my shed.