Thank you USPS and Fedex folks

[jbryant8159]

Yesterday was a very fun day for me. Fedex brought me my SX short scale P bass while I was at work. I've been wanting to try a shorty for some time now and figured at about a hundred bucks I could give it away if I didn't like it. I suffer a bit with arthritis in my wrists and shoulders and the long scales can get kinda painful after a while for me. Surprisingly this was probably the best built and setup guitar or bass I've gotten from Rondo. Action and intonation was really good. No loose pots or jacks. Dead straight neck with a decently cut plastic nut. Well, I tuned it up at the office and tried it out a bit unplugged. Hmmm, really floppy E string. Looks like a .095, too small for my tastes. This neck is really fast and easy to play. Put it back in the box and on my way home stopped at GC and picked up a set of .050-.105 D'addario Chromes. Once I got home I saw the mailman had brought me my lastest eBay aquisition too, but I had bigger things to take care of. Pulled the shorty out of the box and plugged it in and was really amazed at how decent it sounded. Good range of tone too, just using the tone control on the bass with the amp set flat. Well, within just a few minutes I knew the light roundwounds were not going to work for me so off they came. I had to widen the slot in the nut for the E and drill out the bridge hole a bit for the fatter string. The other 3 went on fine with the exception that I had to widen the slots on the bottom of the string tree a bit. Tuned that sucker up and WOW! I'm simply blown away. Awesome thump and you can even get a nice bit of sparkle with a strong approach or pick. Very cool and feels solid as a rock. No more Floppy E. I'd bet it could even handle drop D tuning well. I haven't set the intonation or action as of yet. I figured I'd give it a day or two to settle into place with the new string gauge. I'm still just stunned at how you can get a combination of fast, easy playing and good tone out of a tiny little thing like this.

 

The other little goodie I got was a Korg Ampworks modelling bass processor. Kinda meh. Real noisy little bastadge going into the amp. Pretty cool when using headphones. That's what I got it for anyways so I'm happy with that too. At about 45 bucks I aint gonna complain.