SteveB
Well-known member
I fired up a SUB1 (one of the newer ones with the more normal looking black plastic pickguards) today and took it for a spin.
It was an HH model with tremolo, but the GC folks couldn't find the trem arm, naturally.
So I played it through a Marshall JCM2000 DSL and a 4x12 cab. It sounded really, really good! It played very nicely too in spite of the fact that it had some backbow and needed a truss rod tweak. It sounded nice and bluesy on the clean channel of the DSL using the middle and neck pickup positions. The bridge position yielded nice crisp notes in clean and overdriven scenarios.
I didn't mind the painted neck at all... it didn't affect my playing one bit. The neck feels a little chunky to me since I play a JP6. It felt a lot like the Axis neck shape to me, sorta like a fat 'C' shape. Even though it felt kinda fat, though, it also didn't really impact my playing negatively. I could noodle around quite comfortably on that mo fo.
The red (cinnamon?) finish on it looked great, and the switching and electronics were noiseless. I eventually got the GC dude to procure a trem arm, which was possibly the correct one, and I tried the whammy. It held tune pretty well.. a string or two went flat, but I think the strings weren't fully stretched yet.
The poor thing had an inch of dust in the curves of the horns, under the strings on the pickguard, and beneath the strings on the headstock. I would have walked out of there with it if they were including the gig bag, but they weren't, and I couldn't drive home and have it sliding all over the place in my van. (And I am not a gig bag guy anyway, so I wasn't about to pay money for a 3rd party one. I figured I'd buy a nice hardshell for it at a later date.)
It was an HH model with tremolo, but the GC folks couldn't find the trem arm, naturally.
So I played it through a Marshall JCM2000 DSL and a 4x12 cab. It sounded really, really good! It played very nicely too in spite of the fact that it had some backbow and needed a truss rod tweak. It sounded nice and bluesy on the clean channel of the DSL using the middle and neck pickup positions. The bridge position yielded nice crisp notes in clean and overdriven scenarios.
I didn't mind the painted neck at all... it didn't affect my playing one bit. The neck feels a little chunky to me since I play a JP6. It felt a lot like the Axis neck shape to me, sorta like a fat 'C' shape. Even though it felt kinda fat, though, it also didn't really impact my playing negatively. I could noodle around quite comfortably on that mo fo.
The red (cinnamon?) finish on it looked great, and the switching and electronics were noiseless. I eventually got the GC dude to procure a trem arm, which was possibly the correct one, and I tried the whammy. It held tune pretty well.. a string or two went flat, but I think the strings weren't fully stretched yet.
The poor thing had an inch of dust in the curves of the horns, under the strings on the pickguard, and beneath the strings on the headstock. I would have walked out of there with it if they were including the gig bag, but they weren't, and I couldn't drive home and have it sliding all over the place in my van. (And I am not a gig bag guy anyway, so I wasn't about to pay money for a 3rd party one. I figured I'd buy a nice hardshell for it at a later date.)
not as sweet as an Axis SS w/ MM90's but its pretty good
