But I've gotten a couple new things over the past couple of days, both of which excite me greatly!
That being one of them. I hacked out the preamp and the old pickups. I'm going to try the X2N in both neck and bridge positions, but I figured I'd try bridge first and I'll see what happens. With a P pickup, this thing could ROAR. I love the feel/acoustic sound of this bass, but the old electronics didn't fit me or the way it sounded at all. So I'm fixing it. I don't give a damn how it looks, so this'll be a practice. I figure that if I have the X2N in the bridge and have one end butt up against the back of the preexisting route, I'll be able to comfortably fit in a Kahler trem eventually. And I think this bass would like a Kahler bridge very much. :mrgreen:
In the picture, I marked the outside of where the strings run over the body on the tape...and I'd rather have the pole pieces be a little wider, but since I got the pickup for free, I'm not complaining at all. It looks like it'd work closer to the neck just fine. It's hard to tell where the pole pieces end and the bobbin begins, but I think the photo shows it all nicely.
AND...this piece of heaven!!!
All the reviews I've read about this amp don't do it justice. They're good, but people seem sorta wishy washy about Mesa's 400+. They seem to expect, in almost every case, an Ampeg "SVT grind". And that just isn't there. People say it's a picky amp and that's true, it's very sensitive (especially the master knob
, but I expected that from previous vintage Mesa adventures). I guess you have to have the right mindset to want to work with it and it's capabilities (which are very diverse). Within 5 minutes of plugging it in, I had an edgy, clear, and ballsy sound...that screamed
ME!!! I haven't heard anything like it and I haven't heard anything that sounds more true to the "clean bass sound" I have in my head (probably from listening to all those Who records
).
Before I got this amp, I was beginning to want to drift away from having a graphic EQ. Sure, I really prefer to have a minimal amount of extra tone shaping knobs, but I knew that there were certain niches and settings that were supposed to sound good, but just didn't work when I tried them on my stuff. However, on this amp, it clicks right into place! Like the mid boost on the EQ. It just fits right in, now that the rest sounds not bad.
It's totally changed the way I see bass amps. It's a new standard in my mind. It's the sound that I love from all these guitar amps I've tried and loved. Doesn't mean that I don't want a Dual Rectifier to go by it one day!
And I can't describe the sound that I left it at last night, but the closest I can get to describing it is the little video that automatically plays on the mesa website. Maybe I'm just really suggestible...but that seems to definitely embody the "Mesa sound" in my mind...
So anyway, that's what's been happening. I just need to get a 500K pot, a 3 way switch, and an output jack. So I might hit up Guitar Satan and see if they have what I need so I don't have to wait for it to come in the mail.
Yarr...
