I’m a long term fan of short scale bass. It’s smaller, lighter and the shorter scale length just fits my asian hand better. My first bass was an early 2000 Ampeg AMB1 bass, bought the bass when I was like 17 years old with my first part-time salary. As my bass adventure goes throughout the years, knowing how a bass should sounded like, it became more difficult to find a short scale that delivers the same tonal quality as their full size brothers. And while I’m more financially stable compare to my teenager days, and how much more precise people are building musical instruments now. We’re in a very great era where there are some fun short scale basses that actually play and sound great. It was first the Stingray short scale, and now I have a chance to test drive this Fender Mustang bass.
Background
Here’s comes the baby of the family, 30” inch scale length, slim body, mini split coil pickups then the additional bridge pickup
Specs
- Alder body
- Maple neck
- Rosewood Fingerboard
- Urethane finish
- Stock mini split coil on the neck and the single coil bridge pickup
- controls are: Vol / Vol / Tone
- 19mm string spacing
Playability:
Smaller body shape needs a little time to get used to. This bass is overall well balance, easy to play. The neck feel like a solid P bass neck, not necessary slim and that amount of maple does give a tight low mid punch. Build quality is top notch. A few tweak out brings this bass back to life.
Sound
The 2 pickups are springily hot. They’re not very delicate sounding which doesn’t really matter as it’s a low fidelity instrument. I’ve had this one strung with daddario half round string. It has tons of low-mid grawl and ball . 60s style wood combination, pillow like bottom end. This little guy surely roars.
Thoughts
We’re in a very lucky era where manufactures are building their products in fine precision and details, unlike the old day people didn’t seem to give a crap about things. Expectation are definitely very high as business is also getting more critical for them . All these expectations adds up to quality product like this guy . It’s surely a serious gigging bass, that’s on par with any boutique brand out there in the market.
Gallery
Video