Basses at The Guitar Show - Fender and Cort content

[GrammeFriday]

Yesterday I took my guitar-playing son to the Guitar Show at New Bingley Hall in Birmingham. Not many basses there, as this was definitely focused on skinny-stringed things, but Fender (gawd bless em) had a good selection of their stuff to try out, so I spend a good while noodling at their stand while my son was drooling over the Strats and Teles.

Main thing to report is that I was absolutely bowled over by how good the Am Standard Precision V is. They had a 3TSB rosewood one on display, and I couldn't get over how fab it sounded. Of course it had that fat, rich sound, as you would expect, but I wasn’t expecting it to sound [i]that[/i] good, and I really wasn’t expecting the low B to be so kick-ass - really strong fundamental, and amazingly good power and sustain for a passive instrument. Fit and finish were rock solid, too, as you would expect for an Am Standard. I kept coming back to it for another go, and another, and another, as the day progressed, and never tired of it. The only downer was that there was no Squire VM Precision V to a/b it with, so I am now even more keen to try that out than I was before! Either way, I now have a bad case of GAS for one of these things.

As for the others that I tried out:

Am Standard Jaguar (4 string): Loved the looks (gloss black, white pick guard, rw board, white blocks, millions of little switches) but didn’t warm to the tone, either in active or passive mode. Nothing actually wrong with it, and it was certainly a lot more versatile than the P, but none of the sounds it made were anywhere near as nice, and overall I found it a bit, I dunno, ‘plasticky’ sounding. But I was listening to it on headphones, and maybe it might work better in a band mix, so perhaps best to reserve judgement, but it definitely didn’t speak to me yesterday.

Am Standard lined fretless Jazz (4 string) - same black and white livery, but I LOVED playing this - such an easy fretless to play, and the sound of the first few bars of ‘Portrait of Tracy’ (yes, I know, it’s as bad as playing Stairway to Heaven on a guitar in this context, but hey) still put a massive stupid grin on my face - stupid because of course it was going to do the Jaco sound - what else was it going to sound like? - but it’s still a rush to get ‘that’ sound in the headphones again. I guess it’s because I haven’t owned a jazz (fretted or fretless) for a while now, and hearing that tone again is like bumping into an old friend unexpectedly. Hey! Good to hear you again! Anyone considering getting one of these, I'd say don't hesitate - worth every penny.

Am Standard Dimension HH (4 string) - metallic blue, black pick guard, maple neck. This was the first Dimension I’d ever tried. I quite liked the looks, and wanted to like the sound, but was really disappointed by it - whatever I tried to do with the pickup and tone controls it just seemed to sound muddy and indistinct. I think I was expecting it to sound a bit more Stingrayish or something, but anyway, I didn’t warm to it at all and quickly put it back on its hanger and got the P down again instead. I will say that the neck felt really nice, though - apparently it is asymmetric, which may explain this (I love asymmetric necks). Sorry not to have more positive things to say about this one.

The only other bass I tried yesterday was a Cort A6 - I really liked this a lot. I’d heard from some posts on here that these are really good VFM and I would certainly agree with that - very nicely made, posh woods, lovely silky satin finish, nice neck through design, super clear Bartolini pickups and (I think also Bart) preamp. Also lighter than I had been led to expect - felt about the same weight as a Stingray 5 to me, and was beautifully balanced. What really interested me about this one, though, was two things - the scale length and the string spacing. Regarding the former, this one is a 34 but has a MASSIVE low B, so this bass has delivered the final blow to any belief that I used to have that 35 scale Bs are always better than 34s. It has everything to do with construction and really not a lot to do with scale length. As for string spacing, the Cort is really tight - much tighter than my MTD KZ6, which is 18” at the bridge. I found the Cort to be much easier to play from the point of view of finger stretching - it hardly feels any different to playing a 5 - but it was really difficult to slap on, whereas slapping on the MTD 6er is not a problem. So this also convinced me that 6ers are always going to have to force you to compromise one way or the other - which in turn has helped me to decide once and for all that the five-string bass is the best of all worlds, for me at least.

As for the guitars, my son and I both really liked the Fender Am Standard Tele and a mad purple PRS thing, but our best in show was a Schecter Hellraiser in blingy black cherry with Abalone inlays and binding, and some very evil sounding EMG pups - shred on! \m/

[Lozz196]

Good to hear that Fender are taking the low-end along to our 6 string friends.

[GrammeFriday]

Yes, very good - and others seemed to be missing a trick as there were plenty of bassists queueing up to try stuff out at the Fender stand.
The other thing that struck me was how enthusiastic and passionate the staff at the Fender stand all were about their stuff - very much at odds with the view you often hear about Fender being lazy, complacent and indifferent to their customer base.