NBD - PDN Unlined Fretless Bongo

[stu42]

It's alive!!! It was a fairly excruciating wait but the beauty has arrived. Needless to say, the sound is stellar and it's just so much more beautiful in person than in photos. Wow. I can dial it in to sound pretty much exactly like my regular Bongo 5H but, with the Piezo blended in with the humbucker, it can do extra stuff too including delivering some more thump on the bottom end and adding a little bit extra growly texture on the top end. Very cool. It was definitely worth the wait!! What an amazing instrument. Kudos to everyone back at the factory! Thanks so much for a fantastic offering.

 

[Benji Peterson]

Wow! What a beauty! Nice choice with the single H too!

 

[Smallmouth_Bass]

Nice bird's eye figuring and I like the waves in the fingerboard. Congrats on a nice bass!

 

[laneline]

Congrats that is stunning, heck of a pair of Bongos. All the best.

 

[keko]

Absolute fantastic!

 

[iamcatwarrior]

Nice bass! The single-pickup Bongo is king!

 

[OldManMusic]

What a beauty!

 

[KevinM]

Wow! That is nice.
Agreed, the piezo adds a certain power to the sound that I use when I want to really open up the tone.
Congrats.

 

[tunaman4u2]

Thats an awesome bass

 

[T28]

Very very nice. The PDN Bongos really came out looking fantastic!

 

[MadMatt]

OMG Stu... that took my breath away!!! Beautifull!!!

 

[Holdsg]

Suhweet

 

[ivbenaplayin]

Wow! That's a killer for sure... Congrats!

 

[nurnay]

Drool. If only I could play fretless.

 

[tunaman4u2]

I like coming to see the pictures every few hours, they are that spectacular ! I gotta sell my Reflex to grab one of these !

 

[MK Bass Weed]

Yeah..

 

[lefenton]

Beautiful!!! That is gorgeous! Congrats!

 

[stu42]

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!!

 

[drTStingray]

Ye gods - these things just get better and better. Jaw dropping beauty. Congrats and yes, I am jealous of all you PDN owners!!