Thanks guys!! Yeah, I'm really happy with it. Although I didn't notice it when I first picked it up from the store yesterday, I noticed when I got home that the neck really has a lot of flame-like figuring on it in addition to the generous birdseye which gives it a real 3-D effect under the right lights. Very cool.
Another thing that astounds me about this bass....and I recall Golem mentioning this a while back....with the regular slinky strings the fretless Bongo Hp has a tone that is amazingly similar to an acoustic upright bass - particularly when played a little further up the neck (above the 8th fret position or so). I figured this configuration would have a good fretless tone judging from the sound of my fretted Bongo H but I didn't imagine it would be *this* similar to an upright. And that's with or without the use of the Piezo. It kinda blew my mind when I first discovered that....gotta love it!
Just to clarify as well - and for all the tone geeks out there, like me, who always want to know "how does it sound?"....when I mentioned that the Bongo Hp can sound pretty much exactly the same as the Bongo H, that was a test I'd done when I first got the bass a couple of weeks ago. At that point a small mixup had been made with my order...or rather there were 24 tiny mixups. Yes...it arrived with a fretted neck. I'd played around with it for a couple of hours at that time just to see if the Mahogany changed the tone over my other Bongo and found that the two basses pretty much sounded the same with the EQ set flat. Of course, the 4-band gives you different variations on the tone compared to the 3-band but even then you can create similar effects if you want to. Curiously, the Hp, with the 4-band EQ is a fair bit quieter than my H with the 3-band EQ.
Anyway...So, after my brief test I left it back at the dealer and in the meantime the good folks at EBMM quickly fixed the issue and sent me this beautiful new unlined fretless neck as a replacement and I couldn't be happier!!
