Finally yielded to GAS, a crappy week at work and the belief that buying new gear will automatically make me a better player combined with that blasted internet thing where you can buy stuff by clicking a button.... Anyway, I'm now the happy owner of a black CV Bass VI. It arrived yesterday so this really is an early days view. It should be noted that I've never played or even handled any other Bass VI of any kind so I can't make any reasonable comparisons to other incarnations and this is a 'what I think of it' rather than 'how it compares' post. I'm a guitar player, my total previous experience playing bass is about 45 minutes so I'm coming at this from a guitarists perspective. Bass players will have a very different view.
An initial inspection showed no flaws to the finish, the paint is excellent and everything fits well, no gaps. The tort pickguard is OK, I've heard that it's an improvement from the VM version but I wouldn't say it's exceptional and is very 2D, there's a tiny bit of 3D going on but not much. I don't feel the need to replace it though. The thing that did worry me was the fretboard, all of the official Squier images show it as being dried out dog poo brown and mine was no exception. On closer inspection it was really dry, a quick application of lemon oil immediately darkened it up to the extent that from a short distance it's indistinguishable from my rosewood fretboard JM. Close up the grain is clearly different but you need to get pretty close to see it. Fretwork is good, no high spots but the truss rod probably needs a small tweak to take a little bit of the curve out.
The bridge is definitely different to the VM version, all of the images I've seen show height adjustable saddles on the VM, the CV doesn't have adjustment on the saddles. It's not a high quality item, the saddle finish is a bit rough and all the saddles are fairly crudely grooved to accept the G string (the E, A, D sit on top and the B and E are sloppy fits) and whilst I can get it intonated it's 'only just'. The bridge measures 20mm wide, I think Staytrem will still be doing good business on these as I don't think the CV's bridge can be hailed as a complete success. The trem arm and spigot thing is standard Squier fare although the arm is a much better fit in the hole than my JMJM which was really loose. It's borderline whether I change it for a Staytrem unit but as I'm going to do the bridge I'll probably do the arm as well, I prefer the look of the Staytrem curve over the Squire angled arm. The trem arrived with almost no spring compression, I've wound it up a bit and that's improved tuning stability but my JMJM took a bit of use before it settled, I suspect it's a case of all contact surfaces bedding in. I did fit an original Fender spring in the JM which did make the trem feel a little more pleasing to use, it's a better made spring and at £6 isn't a big deal so will probably do the same again. The action feels nice, about 5/64th at 12 fret on bass E and 3/64 for treble E out of the box. Might raise it a little to accommodate the floppy E which does slap around a bit but I'm probably going to get a set of la Bella's once I have a few more miles on the clock. Experience has taught me to wait, sometimes different feels bad until you've got used to it and it's no longer different.
Not opened it up to look at the electrics yet but plan to replace it all with CTS (I'll stick with 1megs), Switchcraft, orange drops and vintage wire at some point. I'll probably copper tape the internals whilst I'm at it although I'm not getting any mains cycle buzz even with 240v dimmer lights in the room so it might already have some kind of shielding in place.
So now the playing
It arrived about 2 hours before my regular Saturday afternoon guitar lesson which due to the Xmas break was a 2 hour session rather than hour slot this week. This gave me the opportunity to hear it being played by someone with genuine ability, which I don't have. A couple of hours playing really isn't enough to form strong opinions but this is where I'm at, and the 2nd opinion of my tutor has helped dispel any anticipation bias.
Ergonomically it's very nice to play. I play a JM most of the time and my tutor plays a Strat and we both felt very at home with the neck shape, the 30inch scale took no time to acclimatise to. We both have rosewood fretboards on almost all of our guitars, the Indian Laurel didn't feel any different to play. Acoustically the VI has nice resonance, stripping the paint off and refinishing with nitro would no doubt be better but it was 'lively'. Plugged in we noted that there's not a huge amount of difference between the pickups, the bridge had a little more grind and the neck was a little more nasal but nothing like the difference on a guitar, the middle was the most pleasing and will probably be permanently on regardless of what other PU's are selected. I'll play with PU heights at some point to see what happens. The bass strangle did drop out a little of the low end but not as much as we expected We couldn't be bothered to set up his bass amp and were going through a guitar amp so the difference may be more obvious on an amp more suited to low ends. It's likely I'll use the strangle set to 'on' 99.9% of the time.
Delay, chorus and reverb delivered a very Robert Smith sound, we didn't nail it but a bit more time twiddling pedal and amp dials and I think we'd be very close. Ability and style will be the last bit. If you want to sound like the Cure you need to consider buying one. Dream pop and many 80's indie band sounds are within reach which covers 90% of why I wanted this instrument, so it's not going back to the store.
Then we cranked up the gain
Not good at first, for single note bass lines it was fine (but lacked the balls of a true bass) but playing chords near the nut was just way too muddy. Get past the 5th or 6th fret though and chords start to blossom with very different harmonics to anything we'd played previously. Once we twigged this and adapted how we played things improved and heavy riffs were great. We found that you DO need to use volume and tone controls when the gain starts to pile on to get the best tone, you can't just leave them at 10. Over the 2 hours there was a constant handing back and forth of the VI as we both tried different things. As we were packing up at the end of the lesson we were talking about bands as we always do and I was introduced to Type O Negative, a band I've never come across and has a grunge/ambient/shoegaze vibe with a chunk of metal added. In particular the song we tubed was 'in praise of Bacchus'. We mooted the tuning and decided it was probably B standard. We joked that the strings would fall off the guitar if you down tuned that far with anything lighter than 13's when it occurred to me that we could capo the VI. Capo fitted at 7th fret and yes, it worked. The tone was somewhat different (in a surprisingly good space pop metal way) but it worked very well within the song. It's got us thinking about other tunes that are down tuned to the point where 11's would flop about too much that are now potentially within our reach with a capo. I'm fairly sure Josh Homme plays predominantly in C natural so might have a look at some QOTSA over the Xmas break. You probably wouldn't gig with a capo but for home playing it has real potential.
The view of my tutor is that at £349 this is a very well made guitar bass type thing, he thought it was probably double that. He gets to see a wide variety of guitars from real cheap to a couple of students with custom shops so I think he's probably well qualified to comment on quality. His view (he also teaches bass) was that in the 'is it a guitar or is it a bass' dilemma it sits in the guitar area, it can do bass but it's 75% guitar sort of, but the tone is neither guitar or bass, it's quite unique. Bear in mind that this was genuinely out of the box, other than oiling the fret board and tuning it there was no other work done so is 100% representative of how it arrived and not what it could be. It still had the tag on it, it's never been played, don't look at it, no, don't point, stop it. Yes, we did actually do the scene during the lesson. A bucket load of fun to play with an unusual tonality I think I'll have to spend time with it to discover the possibilities as well as the boundaries. All things considered the guitar is well made, good value and sounds great but it does need a better bridge and possibly la Bella's. It's very playable as it comes but a further £150 will improve it.
Anyway, that's my 2p worth. Other's views may differ because they don't have my Squier VI and they don't have my ears either. Bending the strings yesterday has made my finger tips hurt this morning
Monty
