squeezer Posted December 14, 2013 Share Posted December 14, 2013 (edited) Picked this black ex-demo one up from Bass Direct last week as an early Xmas present, cost a grand with Thomastik Jazz Flats fitted: [url="http://www.bassdirect.co.uk/bass_guitar_specialists/Lightwave_SL5_FL.html"]http://www.bassdirec...ave_SL5_FL.html[/url] Now I've spent most of today setting it up to my taste (nut height, neck relief, intonation, string heights, optical pickup heights, string volumes) it plays like a dream, and sounds *fantastic*... :-) Sustain is incredibly long, and you can get a massive range of sounds out of it -- including one more like a super-clean acoustic bass (but with no body resonance boom!) than anything electric I've ever heard. I wasn't intending to buy a fretless since I've only ever played fretted, I went there to try a fretted one but fell in love with the fretless sound, and it really isn't so difficult to play in tune. Setting up the optical pickups is not difficult at all, and it's got things that a conventional bass hasn't got like individual volume adjustments on each string which makes it easy to get perfect balance between them. There's both more fundamental (especially on the low strings, the B is excellent) and more top end than magnetic pickups, a lovely clean sound with that gorgeous fretless "mwah" on top when you want it. Another plus point is it's very quiet and almost totally immune to noise pickup -- I'm sitting at my PC and if I'm playing my Ibanez SR505 I have to be very careful where to sit or it picks up buzzes and whistles from the PC (even with humbucking pickups), I can put the Lightwave right next to the PC with no noise at all. Being rather different to a conventional bass I guess it's a "Marmite" instrument, so I guess it's a good job I'm a Marmite fan :-) And it and the Phil Jones Flightcase could have been made for each other... Edited December 14, 2013 by squeezer Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Owen Posted December 14, 2013 Share Posted December 14, 2013 Good job! I have always fancied trying one of those. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JapanAxe Posted December 14, 2013 Share Posted December 14, 2013 Wow! How have I missed these? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
squeezer Posted December 15, 2013 Author Share Posted December 15, 2013 [quote name='JapanAxe' timestamp='1387044347' post='2307760'] Wow! How have I missed these? [/quote] I guess because there are not many on the UK? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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