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Product
Description
Electric 4-string bass guitar with pick guard, tobacco sunburst
finish. The BB424X features a bolt-on neck with an alder spline-joint body,
5-piece maple/nato neck and ceramic pickups.
The
Yamaha BB series is a legendary line of instruments with a killer pedigree. You
only need look to former Van Halen and current Chickenfoot bass player Michael
Anthony to hear how the BB has shaped rock, and continues to do so. The BB is
available in various different configurations (including an Anthony signature
model, the BB3000MA), but the BB424X is one of the more affordable entries to
the line-up.
TheBB424X features a smoothly sculpted solid alder body and a 5-ply
laminate neck. I like that the headstock face isn’t painted, so you can clearly
see the different woods even from the front. And that oversized Yamaha
headstock has got to be part of the reason for the BB’s legendarily powerful
sound – all that extra mass right where the strings join the neck leads to a
lot more resonance.
Product
Features
·
Legendary BB design
·
5-Piece maple/nato neck
·
Split and single blade pick-up
design
The
five-bolt neck joint is rounded for comfortable upper access to all 21 frets.
The fretboard is rosewood, with simple but classy oval inlays (compare them to
the BB3000MA’s hot chilli pepper inlays, which I assume is a nod to Anthony’s
love of chilli and not a tribute to his Chickenfoot bandmate, Red Hot Chili
Pepper Chad Smith). The neck feels a little bit indistinct, and although it’s
well-made, it’s perhaps the one indicator that this is a less costly bass. The
slightly sharp fretboard edges are a bit of a giveaway that this is an eastern
production-line bass.
The
pickups are a pair of custom Yamahas that look unlike anything else out there,
with a blade featuring a radius similar to the fretboard for nice even volume
from string to string even if you bend a note – which is something you’ll
probably want to do, since this bass feels rather soloing-friendly. The pickup
rings are rounded off, and while some players might find their thumb slipping a
bit when using it to anchor for fingerstyle playing, I found it pretty
comfortable.
Controls
are fairly simple: volume, tone, and a three-way pickup selector switch. It’s
much more common for basses to have a pair of volumes – one for each pickup –
and a tone control, but this more guitaristic layout gives you quicker access
to the bass’s sounds.
Another
particularly interesting feature is the 45 degree through-body stringing: flip
the bass over and you’ll see that the strings actually pass through the body at
a 45 degree angle before reaching the bridge. This is designed to reduce
stress, secure the string tension and improve the transmission of the string’s
vibrational energy.
TheBB424X is indeed a punchy, powerful-sounding bass. Even unplugged
it’s almost loud enough to at least use in a living room acoustic jam. Plugged
in, the same punch and power is evident, but can also be tamed by selecting the
front pickup and rolling back the tone a little. You can get some great
old-school R&B tones and some amazing, woody hard rock sounds, and although
it sounds great with fingers, a pick really allows all that chunky alder and
maple to resonate and kick some ass. Having played the really upper-end BB
series stuff before, I can say with confidence that this one really has the
right sound, vibe, feel and spirit. It’s amazing that this is a relatively
inexpensive bass.
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