lowquality.net

My first decent bass was a black Jack­son Con­cert EX (with­out the shark­fin inlays or the bound fret­board). It was totally a heavy metal bass. I bought it as a step up from the Epi­phone P-Bass copy I had. I played that Jack­son bass for a really long time. So long, in fact, that it never even occurred to me to replace it and I ended up, instead, replac­ing every com­po­nent on the damn thing (by the time I retired it, it had Grover Tuners, a Leo Quan Bad Ass II bridge and active EMG P-J pickups).

Suf­fice to say, the Jack­son served me well, but I was about to go to col­lege and it was time to move up in the world. I did a lot of win­dow shop­ping in my favorite music stores, but I was still not see­ing the instru­ment I wanted. Through­out the 1990’s, it seemed that every­one in Hamp­ton Roads was play­ing “pre-Gibson” Tobias and Roscoe basses. That was the trend. Keith Roscoe makes great instru­ments but they’re just not for me; too flashy, too many damn knobs and not enough balls.

Fender’s new basses, adver­tised heav­ily in the “Daddy’s Home” cam­paign, were also nice, but just didn’t offer the level of crafts­man­ship I felt I deserved after pay­ing my dues on that Jack­son for all those years. For a while I was scop­ing out a Candy Apple Red 5-string Jazz Bass, but it just didn’t make me warm and fuzzy inside. I wanted some­thing top-notch but not con­structed with a dozen lam­i­nates and fif­teen kinds of wood. I wanted some­thing sim­ple, vin­tage in design, but built like a high-end bou­tique instrument.

Enter Sad­owsky Guitars.

I’d first seen Sadowsky’s ads in Bass Player mag­a­zine, and thought the basses looked awe­some; sim­ple Fender-style designs with impres­sive options like cus­tom sun­burst fin­ishes and fig­ured tops. They also had a Fea­tured Artists list that made my jaw drop: Will Lee, Chuck Rainey, Mar­cus Miller, Ver­dine White, Don Was, and Keith Richards??? Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to me that, when five or size A-List play­ers and pro­duc­ers use instru­ments made by a cer­tain man­u­fac­turer then that com­pany is doing some­thing right. Sad­owsky has way more than five or six A-List play­ers preach­ing their gospel, and they still don’t give these things away to any­one. Not even Keith Richards.

Like many young bassists of the 90’s, I was really into slap­ping and pop­ping and that mind­set affected my judg­ment at the time. I was pretty pos­i­tive I wanted a five string bass, but I was hav­ing a lot of trou­ble find­ing a five that “fit” because many of the basses I checked out were made with the strings very nar­rowly spaced. This made it dif­fi­cult for some­one with big hands to play com­fort­ably, espe­cially while thump­ing. Sad­owsky boasts a five string bass made with the string spac­ing of a four. This fea­ture def­i­nitely peaked my interest.

Sad­owsky also enticed me with their two-band active EQ cir­cuit. A lot of peo­ple pre­fer a three-band, but I can never get a good sound with a “mid” knob. A Jazz Bass, to me, has a built-in mid con­trol when you blend the bridge and neck pick­ups. That bridge pickup offers all the mids you need to cut through a mix and if you don’t believe me, lis­ten to any Jaco album. An extra knob just con­fuses things for me, how can I be get­ting the real sound of the bass if it’s going through all of these crazy elec­tron­ics? Pas­sive single-coil pick­ups and an active two-band EQ to boost the sig­nal a bit, seemed, to me, like the best of both worlds.

So, my deci­sion was made. I could get exactly what I wanted from Sad­owsky. I took some of the mea­ger sav­ings I had set aside for col­lege (hello, FAFSA!) and bought the most expen­sive school sup­ply ever: a Sad­owsky 5-string Stan­dard with a caramel sun­burst Swamp Ash body, and a Maple fret­board (“you’ll shoot your eye out, kid!”). Actu­ally, this is a very basic model, no carved top, no rare woods, no spe­cial specs or any­thing– exactly what I wanted. It’s a basic con­fig­u­ra­tion, but that piece of Ash sings. It is a nat­u­rally loud bass with a low-mid fre­quency honk, exag­ger­ated by the raw single-coil Jazz Bass pick­ups (they are totally noise­less when blended flat). It only weighs 9 pounds and is bal­anced per­fectly. The bass’ light weight has spoiled me; I can’t bring myself to buy another instru­ment that weighs too much more than that.

So here it is. It’s been my main bass since 1998; I’ve played every gig since and endured Berklee Col­lege of Music with this bass. Some­times it just feels like an extra arm or leg that I pull out of a gig bag and strap on. I guess that seems weird, but I can’t imag­ine being in the stu­dio or play­ing live with­out it. Ever since I bought this bass, I’ve been dream­ing about get­ting my next Sad­owsky, which hasn’t been in the cards lately, but the day will come.

I’m not the kind of player that likes to cod­dle and baby my instru­ments. It was made to be played. So, yeah, the neck’s fin­ish is wear­ing through, there’s dings and scratches all over it, but they are all mine. I know I paid a lot for it, but if I hang it on the wall and don’t play it but once a week because I am afraid some stu­pid drum­mer might throw a stick in the air with­out look­ing, or some drunk might spill beer on it, or a klutzy singer could knock it off its stand, then it would be spot­less, but also worth­less. That’s like a buy­ing a Fer­rari and not dri­ving it. You gotta drive it, man!!