Jim Hanks
Well-known member
This is my second bass. The first is the Gold Tone ME-Bass that I immediately replaced the stock Aquila Thunderguts strings with the La Bella flat wounds. This is a good bass but I wanted to try a standard U-Bass for comparison. After looking for a couple of weeks on talkbass.com and reverb.com, I spotted this on eBay for a reasonable price and went for it.
The story is that Kala used it as a demo for a NAMM show. How it came into the possession of Texas Guitar Ranch is not told, but sometimes it's best not to ask questions to which you don't really need to hear the answer. At any rate, it arrived in very good condition, setup seems just fine, and seems to perform flawlessly, so I have no reason to doubt this origin story.
It is strung with Pahoehoe Dreads which feel a *lot* different than the flats and slightly different than the standard Pahoehoes I've tried in music stores - a little smoother perhaps? I don't know if it is the shorter scale (21" vs 23") or the lower tension, but the Kala seems noticeably easier to fret than the GT. I've only played it a few minutes so far, but it seems like a keeper. I had gotten in a set of Thunder Reds strings just as I found the Kala, so I held off putting them on the GT. I think I'll keep the Dreads on the Kala for now and eventually put the Reds on the GT.
Hopefully I can do a sound sample over the weekend. From my few minutes tonight playing direct into Reason, it seems the sound greatly benefits from some simple processing like a couple of EQ notches to reduce finger noise, high and low pass filters, compression, and amp sim. I've heard some YouTube samples of U-Basses plugged straight into an amp where the sound really didn't make me want to play a U-Bass, but I'm convinced some decent tones are possible with a little bit of extra effort.
By the way, doesn't it seem like a lot of wraps on this A string? Do I need to do something about that?
A couple of more pics here: https://imgur.com/a/6EsHJjN
The story is that Kala used it as a demo for a NAMM show. How it came into the possession of Texas Guitar Ranch is not told, but sometimes it's best not to ask questions to which you don't really need to hear the answer. At any rate, it arrived in very good condition, setup seems just fine, and seems to perform flawlessly, so I have no reason to doubt this origin story.
It is strung with Pahoehoe Dreads which feel a *lot* different than the flats and slightly different than the standard Pahoehoes I've tried in music stores - a little smoother perhaps? I don't know if it is the shorter scale (21" vs 23") or the lower tension, but the Kala seems noticeably easier to fret than the GT. I've only played it a few minutes so far, but it seems like a keeper. I had gotten in a set of Thunder Reds strings just as I found the Kala, so I held off putting them on the GT. I think I'll keep the Dreads on the Kala for now and eventually put the Reds on the GT.
Hopefully I can do a sound sample over the weekend. From my few minutes tonight playing direct into Reason, it seems the sound greatly benefits from some simple processing like a couple of EQ notches to reduce finger noise, high and low pass filters, compression, and amp sim. I've heard some YouTube samples of U-Basses plugged straight into an amp where the sound really didn't make me want to play a U-Bass, but I'm convinced some decent tones are possible with a little bit of extra effort.
By the way, doesn't it seem like a lot of wraps on this A string? Do I need to do something about that?
A couple of more pics here: https://imgur.com/a/6EsHJjN