Got me one of these...

deano

I posted this in the Off Topic "What did you get for Christmas" thread but wanted to repost in here in case anyone hadn't seen it (not because I'm bragging - well I am - but because it is a NBD post and observation)...

One of these...

A Fret King Black Label Esprit Bass!
I wanted a bass and spent a few hours at the end of November going round a few guitar shops trying them out. I tries bases from £79 (a second hand Yamaha) up to £1500 (a Stingray) and thinking I can't tell any difference between these. The only one that stood out for me was the Fret King. It felt right and sounded great. But it was dearer than I wanted to spend on a first bass.
Anyway, my lovely, sneaky, wonderful, crafty wife only went and bought it for me. And kept it well hidden until Christmas morning!
So now I have a guitar that is too big and missing a couple of strings! How the hell do I play this thing?

Anyway, I also got a book on how to play the damned thing, and I was flicking through it and noticed to my horror that it wasn't in TAB!!! It was in musicians language with all sorts of squiggles, dots and funny shapes. The horror! The depth of man's inhumanity to man! I have also realise that bass transcriptions on the Electric Interweb (on BassChar for example) is also in musical notation.

It has taken me a little while to figure out why TAB isn't used when it is so popular for guitar. I believe it is because the bass plays a rhythm part and TAB doesn't show note length whereas proper, grown-up musical notation does. Is that right? Do you bass players sight-read music or do most of you muddle through with a bit of figuring out and rote learning?

axisus

An interesting looking bass, although not quite to my tastes personally. Lovely that your wife bought it for you, that would never happen to me in a million years - your wife buying me a bass. (jk - but my wife wouldn't)

I'm a lazy bass player, just give me the root notes and I'll play around that. I actually recommend that as a starting point, find a chord sheet to a song, load song on YouTube and play along with root notes

I have a book of bass tabs and a lot of it seems to be 3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-3-3-3-3-3-3-3 etc

I can read music score, but not on the fly with sight reading.

Funkfingers

Given the Thunderbird and Precision derived design, the Delano style pickup does seem a little incongruous - both visually and in terms of its sound. 

How well does the Fret-King balance on a strap? I suspect that a chunkier bridge might bring some improvement.

deano

Funkfingers said:

Given the Thunderbird and Precision derived design, the Delano style pickup does seem a little incongruous - both visually and in terms of its sound. 

How well does the Fret-King balance on a strap? I suspect that a chunkier bridge might bring some improvement.

Bear in mind it is my first bass so I have nothing to compare it to.

It is a little neck heavy. However I have only sat down with it and my arm seems to sit quite naturally in the vee-shape of the upper bout, with my thumb resting on top of the pickup. That seems to keep in balanced quite well.

The pickup is wired with something called a vari-coil control, which winds it from full humbucker to a single coil (the one with the double row of pole-pieces).

I love it. At the moment I'm just doing some home recording with it, and getting to know it.

Funkfingers

Vari-Coil is offered on a number of Trev Wilkinson designed guitars - where it makes some sense.

The Musicman Stingray pickup and the Delano on which the Fret-King pickup is based normally have their coils interconnected in parallel. Series mode tends to be loud and overbearing.

If your pickup has four conductor + shield output cable, it could be wired to a DP3T on/on/on switch to offer Jazz/Both/‘Ray