After reading lots of great reviews I decided to give this VERY cool looking bass a chance.
Out of the box it looked amazing! The finish was flawless, the fretboard looked great (if a little dry) and the combination of Sherwood Green with a mint pickguard looked really cool. On closer inspection the pickguard had a couple of minor flaws along the edge but apart from that it looked great. The neck pocket was really tight.
Then I started playing it, and even unplugged I realized something was wrong. The notes sounded weirdly disharmonic and kinda "thuddy". The intonation turned out to be WAY off. The saddles had to be moved almost 1 cm back. That's absolutely shocking! This should never have passed inspection, it was utterly useless out of the box.
It didn't exactly help that this type of bridge installed so far away from the edge of the body made it impossible to adjust the intonation with a normal screwdriver. I had to use a small, thin electrical screwdriver. With such a small screwdriver I had to be EXTREMELY careful not to strip the screw heads. Very poor design!
After roughly sorting out the intonation it was time to look at the rest of the setup.
The relief was almost spot on, I just had to loosen the truss rod a tiny bit. This is to be expected after transporting a bass from China.
The action was far too high though, mainly because the saddles were too high, but also because some of the nut slots were too high. The nut slot for the G-string was WAY too high. I lowered the saddles, filed the nut slots and made the final adjustments to the intonation.
The included hex wrench for the saddles was very poor quality and couldn't be used. It looked like it was actually the right size, but it wouldn't grab the saddle screws. When using a different 1.5 mm hex wrench everything worked fine. I guess the included hex wrench was just very poor quality.
After lowering the action to what I would call a "medium" setup, the bass played nicely. When I tried to adjust the action slightly lower, to my preferred setup, I got fret buzz due to a slightly high fret at the 11 fret. I guess the fretwork was "ok" but it can clearly benefit from leveling+crowning the frets, which I will definitely need to do when I find the time.
The fret ends were nice though, no complaints there.
The stock strings sounded surprisingly poor. I generally like Fender nickel plated steel roundwounds, but for some reason these ones didn't sound right. I decided to install Roto 66s instead. This also gave me a chance to oil the fretboard, which looks absolutely stunning now, every bit as beautiful as rosewood.
When removing the stock strings, three of the string ferrules fell out of the bass. Not very impressive.
With the strings removed it was also time to remove the protective plastic from the pickguard. This means loosening the pickup selector switch, jack socket and knobs/pots. The hex wrench size needed to loosen the knobs was not included.
After changing to Rotos the setup had to be tweaked slightly of course. The bass feels much better now, but it still has a kinda "cheap" feel to it. The unplugged tone is very poor. It's kinda dull and "hollow" sounding, with very poor sustain. There are very pronounced dead spots and generally a rather uneven response along the neck. But of course, an electric bass should be judged by it's electric tone.
Things sounded much better with the bass plugged in, although the sustain was still rather poor, and the attack of the notes came across as a bit "thuddy". It almost felt slightly muted. After testing the bass both through an amp and recording a couple of clips (straight to DI) I felt slightly underwhelmed. I'm not a huge fan of blending pickups or bridge pickups in general so for me it was all about the tone of the neck pickup. The neck pickup was a bit on the dark side for my taste. It can certainly provide a great rock tone when playing with a pick, but when playing fingerstyle I found it slightly too dark/muffled sounding and lacking articulation. It wasn't horrible, but I don't think I will be using this bass much for fingerstyle. I have yet to try it in a dense mix, or with a full band, but from what I've heard so far I have a feeling it won't "sit" in the mix the way I want it to when playing fingerstyle.
The tuners weren't the best either. It was difficult to tune the E-string precisely.
On the positive side I absolutely love the neck profile. It's very comfortable, but this will of course depend on personal taste.
Overall I have to say I'm slightly disappointed. It's not a bad instrument, but there are far better basses to be found in this price range, and the factory setup was laughable. It's a shame that big online dealer like Thomann just ship out the boxes without inspecting the instruments and giving them a decent setup. I hope this bass will grow on me now that I've sorted out most of the flaws.
To sum it up: Fenders and Squiers tend to be a bit overpriced in my opinion, and this model is no exception. If the factory setup hadn't been so abysmal I guess I would have felt better about it. To be fair, it DID get considerably better after a proper setup and a fresh set of strings, but many bass players don't have the skills to file the nut slots or level the frets. Out of the box it was a total mess.
It looks amazing though!
