NBD!

[alantig]

No, not new bassist day, although I do have one of those...

It's new bass day!

My local dealer has an annual sale in March, and this year they had the Kingfisher listed at a great price. When I got there, whatever they had was gone. I was told to check back, they might be getting more in. I sent an e-mail a week or so later - none in stock. But my usual contact replied and said if I wanted to order one and pay before the end of March, I could have it for the sale price. So I did. And it came in on Thursday, but I couldn't pick it up until yesterday.

The listing was for the natural finish, but I was able to order it in scarlet red - seemed like a more interesting color to me!

There's a fair bit of figuring in the top, but the red is so hard to photograph.

The back is crazy good...

I haven't had a chance to plug it in yet because of the holiday and some other stuff (there's another thread coming in a few minutes...), so hopefully tom'w. But now I have a bass with humbuckers.

 

[László]

I need a bass and they have none of those in stores around me, as far as I know. So tone report needed.

 

[CoreyT]

Very nice, welcome to Club Kingfisher.

 

[veinbuster]

Nice.

 

[sergiodeblanc]

Bangin'!

 

[VHTStark]

Sweet! Congrats on the new bass!

 

[CoreyT]

Alan, have you tried it yet through an amp yet?
On regular guitars I prefer the bridge pickup as I like to play with high gain.
However on my Kingfisher I think the neck pickup sounds better and more clear than the bridge pickup.

Gotta love the neck through design too, very cool looking.

 

[JustRob]

Congrats Alan! Can't wait to hear what you think.

 

[watelessness]

Nice. My local pusher has one that is taunting me

 

[alantig]

I need a bass and they have none of those in stores around me, as far as I know. So tone report needed.

Alan, have you tried it yet through an amp yet?

I don't have a bass amp, so I only use it through modelers (that is the sound of Les tuning out...).

I only got to play around with it for 30-40 minutes, but I used it to record something right away. I'd forgotten that it was neck-through until I got it home - nice! And my guy said he set it up more like a guitar than a bass, so the action was lower. And it is - acoustically, it buzzes all over the place. I didn't really hear it when it was amped, but I need to give it a closer listen. Physically, it's pretty much what you'd expect from a PRS - plays as smooth as butter and is comfortable as all get-out. About the closest thing to a flaw I noticed is that the tone knob looks like it might not be perfectly straight. It's not rubbing against anything - you can't tell unless you look at it.

So, dial up the bass modeler in standalone mode and...nothing. It got signal in, but nothing coming out. I played with it for a minute or two and said screw it, went to Amplitube and pulled up the (same) bass modeling stuff through there.

Wow.

I'm not a bass player by any stretch - I have two cheap-ish basses with single-coil pups, and the humbuckers on this were a big part of what I was looking for to give me another sound to use. This thing was so much closer to the bass sound I've been looking for I couldn't believe it at first. Very rich and full sounding. I loved the neck pickup. There's a ton of tonal variety with just that pup and the tone knob. The bridge pup has a similar range, but with a bit of a nasty (good way) bite. I was really surprised at how well I could dial a biting attack in and out with just the tone knob. Plugged in, a minor flaw revealed itself - there's a point in the volume pots and to a slightly lesser degree in the tone pot where the change is no longer smooth but sharp and sudden. I suspect upgraded pots would take care of that, but that's for down the road.

I popped over to ProTools pretty much immediately and re-did the bass track for a Christmas song that I'm recording for my mother (a backing track for her to play with at her church - there is surprisingly little burning flesh when I do this stuff). The Kingfisher sat better in the mix pretty much right away - I merely moved the plug-in I used before over to a new track and used it as is. The bass part had a presence that seemed to be lacking in a lot of the stuff I've done before.

This is a good one for me.

One other thing - some time ago, I'd recorded something where I tuned the bass to drop D. Neither one of my other basses seemed to handle it well - the low D sounded more like a harmonic than a bass note. So I tried that right away with this beast. No issues at all - that low-end grunt was there in all its glory.

Me likey!!!