Status shuts their doors

[ezbass]

53 minutes ago, bassfan said:

Such a comfy bass to play and sounds awesome. 

There is something to be said for taking a break from your number 1 bass and then coming back to it. I’ve recently done the very same thing with my custom Maruszczyk, you forget why they were your number 1 in the first place and then it’s a case of, “Wow! Oh yeah!” when you return.

 

Only ever played a Status once (a secondhand S2, I think, in the Bass Cellar in Denmark St), I remember it being pretty damned good.

[Kiwi]

On 22/03/2025 at 19:49, crazycloud said:

Experience.

Me too.  It's not theory.

[martthebass]

20 minutes ago, Kiwi said:

Me too.  It's not theory.

Often wondered what factors are at play. I had an early Streamline, with its basic 2 band EQ I didn’t find it brittle sounding at all and could get some quite warm tones from it. My CW1 despite it having an alder body seems far more hifi to me.

[LeftyJ]

This "overengineering" can be quite apparent in wooden necks too, and the difference can be quite substantial. I've had 4 and 5 string versions of several of my basses, and despite sharing the exact same specs in terms of woods, electronics and construction, they always sounded different: the 5-strings have always sounded tighter and slightly harsher, without the warmth that the 4-strings exhibited. The only difference was in the neck, which was always more rigid (and just simply contained more wood) than the 4-string counterparts.

 

My graphite necks are actually the exception here, because the necks on my Status S2 Classic 4 and 5 are more or less "hollow" shells.

 

It was most apparent in my Ibanez ATK's, of which I've had two ATK300 4-strings and one ATK305 5-string (and at one point I've had a second 305 at home that was passing through, so I could compare them). The 5-string necks were much more rigid and those 5-strings lacked the beef of the 4-strings and had more brittle top end than the 4-strings despite being 100% identical in every other way. 

Edited Monday at 16:06 by LeftyJ

[crazycloud]

9 hours ago, Kiwi said:

It's not theory.

No, it's just opinion.

[itu]

1 hour ago, crazycloud said:

No, it's just opinion.

How about experience?

[Kiwi]

15 hours ago, martthebass said:

Often wondered what factors are at play. I had an early Streamline, with its basic 2 band EQ I didn’t find it brittle sounding at all and could get some quite warm tones from it. My CW1 despite it having an alder body seems far more hifi to me.

When I had a conversation with Rob Green about this specific characteristic, after he had done some work on a Modulus bass for me,  he told me the fingerboard had quite a big impact on the rigidity and sound.  Ken Smith also mentioned the same thing to me in a separate conversation and explained this is why they use such thick slabs of ebony for the fingerboard.  He wants the necks to be just rigid enough for the mid range warmth which is so characteristic of his instruments.  It was an idea also inspired by the upright basses that he collects. 

[martthebass]

4 hours ago, Kiwi said:

When I had a conversation with Rob Green about this specific characteristic, after he had done some work on a Modulus bass for me,  he told me the fingerboard had quite a big impact on the rigidity and sound.  Ken Smith also mentioned the same thing to me in a separate conversation and explained this is why they use such thick slabs of ebony for the fingerboard.  He wants the necks to be just rigid enough for the mid range warmth which is so characteristic of his instruments.  It was an idea also inspired by the upright basses that he collects. 

That’s interesting. When I worked in R&D, I did a lot of work on phenol formaldehyde resin systems (aka Bakerlite - I assume the main component of ritchlite) and the levels of the catalyst, resol and novalak made a big impact on the modulus of the cured resin. I guess Rob did a lot of work getting the mix right to achieve the properties he wanted for the overall sound.

[Kiwi]

3 hours ago, martthebass said:

That’s interesting. When I worked in R&D, I did a lot of work on phenol formaldehyde resin systems (aka Bakerlite - I assume the main component of ritchlite) and the levels of the catalyst, resol and novalak made a big impact on the modulus of the cured resin. I guess Rob did a lot of work getting the mix right to achieve the properties he wanted for the overall sound.

Legend has it that when Geoff Gould was focussing on setting Modulus up around 1983, he left oversight of the neck production to someone else and they got the mixing of the phenolic resin (aka Bakerlite) wrong.  This affected his agreement with Alembic and impacted on the necks made for Musicman as well.  It's also affected all the 90's Quantum basses I've owned by Modulus but not the other models (Sonic Hammer, Flea).   And also every one of the four Cutlass basses I've had featured overly flexible necks (but I know earlier ones are OK).

 

Rob has done a huge amount of R&D on his necks, and his basses still sound like Status basses even when the electronics are completely replaced.   So the sound is very much in the necks.

[Russ]

5 hours ago, martthebass said:

That’s interesting. When I worked in R&D, I did a lot of work on phenol formaldehyde resin systems (aka Bakerlite - I assume the main component of ritchlite) and the levels of the catalyst, resol and novalak made a big impact on the modulus of the cured resin. I guess Rob did a lot of work getting the mix right to achieve the properties he wanted for the overall sound.

Richlite is basically made of paper - it's multiple layers of paper impregnated with phenolic resin and baked under high pressure. It's sturdy stuff that's somewhere in between a wood fingerboard an a pure phenolic one. 

[martthebass]

25 minutes ago, Russ said:

Richlite is basically made of paper - it's multiple layers of paper impregnated with phenolic resin and baked under high pressure. It's sturdy stuff that's somewhere in between a wood fingerboard an a pure phenolic one. 

Is the fingerboard on the graphite necks this composite or is it just a slab of phenolic?  It's blacker than black on my CW-1 so can't tell; there dosen't seem to be any surface features so to speak.

[LeftyJ]

28 minutes ago, Russ said:

Richlite is basically made of paper - it's multiple layers of paper impregnated with phenolic resin and baked under high pressure. It's sturdy stuff that's somewhere in between a wood fingerboard an a pure phenolic one. 

 

The boards on my Status basses are too - you can clearly see the layers thanks to the fingerboard radius. This is my 2012 S2 Classic 5, after applying a little WD40:

 

 

 

Edited yesterday at 12:48 by LeftyJ

[eude]

4 hours ago, LeftyJ said:

 

The boards on my Status basses are too - you can clearly see the layers thanks to the fingerboard radius. This is my 2012 S2 Classic 5, after applying a little WD40:

 

 

 

Does that mean that a flat board would just be a solid colour?

[LeftyJ]

5 hours ago, eude said:

Does that mean that a flat board would just be a solid colour?

Probably! Sanding a radius exposes these layers, but I recon you'd only see the top one if it was perfectly flat. Although I expect a little sanding will always be applied to properly level it after carving it to the right thickness. Unless the laminates are manufactured to extremely high tolerances, and come out exactly right.