NBD: Rondo Hadean 7 month wait modification

After seven months of waiting for my Rondo Hadean blue solid body bass that sat on the shelf of my luthier while he kept putting his celebrity clients ahead of me, I finally complained enough that he finished it. In his rush to get it done the last couple of weeks, he didn't do a great job, but he discounted it from $300 to $150, so I'm living with the shortcomings. Needless to say, I won't be going back to him. This, and the one I have out in Michigan that's taking over five months, prompted me to start doing my own modifying from now on, which I've done with the Tutmarc mod I posted recently.

The blue Rondo came back with a bad pickup, so I ordered another that arrived yesterday and is working very well. The new Kala steel wound nylon core strings are very noisy with the pickup. If it gets too annoying, I have a set of yellow Pahoehoe strings I can try. The tuners are the last chrome finished fat spool that Hipshot had, they found them in the back of their warehouse.

HI Mike - you may have covered this in an earlier post, but why switch to the steel wound strings? One of my favorite things about my Hadean bass is those giant plastic strings - I find them just fun to play.

Different sound. They sound very deep but still with a nice high end. I have them on my hadean also, just sits in a different place in the mix. I have pahoehoes on my kala 5 still but when the rounds come out I'm going to get them. Through a large PA the pahoehoes can get muddy. The b string is also very sticky.

greenie44 said:

HI Mike... why switch to the steel wound strings? One of my favorite things about my Hadean bass is those giant plastic strings - I find them just fun to play.

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Two reasons; 1) I put the Kala steel strings on my custom fretless acoustic bass uke that has a braided copper under saddle pickup and they sounded much better than I was expecting, 2) strictly looks, I wanted to keep the chrome theme going on the blue one since there's no silver or clear poly strings. I asked Owen at Road Toad if it was possible to get a clear or silvery Pahoehoe, he said yes, but his supplier requires a minimum order that makes other colors cost prohibitive. I do prefer the sound and feel of poly, so if I can't control how much string noise I get, I'll live with the bright yellow Pahoehoe (which would give it kind of a UCLA color scheme, my school).