Gibson Midtown Signature Bass

[BryanMichael]

Any thoughts or opinions about the Gibson Midtown Signature bass?

[WRGKMC]

I like Semihollow Basses myself. I haven't played that one in particular but the hollow build should be allot lighter then a solid.

My shoulder can handle the heavy basses any more. I have a curved spine from nearly 50 years of playing so the lighter the better.

 

The Pickups and bridge are from an SG bass on that one. The Large pup will produce a good tone for that bass. The mini Humbucker at the bridge is not so hot from my experience. I played an SG for about 5 years. The neck was really and the neck pup gave nice beef but that darn mini HP sounded thin as hell in comparison to the neck and didn't mix with the neck very well. I really don't know why Gibson didn't switch to using matching pickups. It would have had a much better tone and sounded better through a much greater variety of basses.

 

I got buy with it OK. I'd dial the neck up fill and brought the bridge pup up in volume till I got just enough to blend but the pot was pretty touchy. Between Below 8 on the knob you couldn't hear the bridge and 8.5 was too much so all your tone tweaks happened within about one notch on the knob. Maybe they fized that issue with different pots. The SG I played was a 60's version and I'm not sire all the controls were original.

 

I suggest you try the bass if you can. The new ones may have fixed the pup balance problem so it may be a non issue. Gibson's aren't cheap and you want to be sure it does what you want it to.

[Anderton]

I borrowed one to sample because I just loved the way it could give a completely different timbre from the EB5 and Thunderbird (which I also sampled). Because I was sampling with the pickup volumes up full, I didn't check the interaction but will do so and post the results here.

[BryanMichael]

Craig, did you mean "sampling" as in, creating a VST or Kontakt patch or "sampling" as in try it out for a weekend?

:-)