« Yamaha RBX 775 »

I got this bass on e-bay for the absolute bargain price of £300!!! and it was only a few weeks old (don't worry genuin reason for sale). I wanted to upgrade from my ibanez gsr200(begginer) bass, and was looking at various basses around the £500 mark and then the RBX 775 which should be about £500 came up on e-nay for £300. Need I say any more!!!!

This is agreat guitar, Firstly it has two great active yamaha humbucker pick ups so there is absolutely no "noise" at all, You have to play string to know if the volume is on even at high volume through my 300w trace elliot amp! Any one who has every tryed a five string bass, will understand the benifits of a 35inch scale(the B string is not floppy at all), And my only other consern with moving to a 5 string was the width of the finger board but this is an absolute dream to play, I like to play a mixture af rock and funk jazz and the manuvourabilty on the figure board is great, it doesn't feel cumbersom like some 5 strings can. The available tone which you can get out of this guitar is great, especially the tone of slap and pop you can get, there is a three way pickup selctor for the 2 humbuckers and also a bass boost switch for the extra bit of bassists ego in the middle of a gig(good for soloing in jazz). And lets be honest I just looks gorgous!!!!(i have the silver one.)

Well this is hard, I absolutely love this bass, I'm not even on the "new bass high since I've had it for over 6 months now. My background is that I got this during my year out in which I was playing in a band touring around the UK and europe doing at least one full headline gig a week as well as playing smaller promotion gigs almost every weekday. so As you can see I've certainly put this baby through the works and I have no let downs!!! My only bad point might be that it has no built in eq which these active basses often have but since i use a trace elliot amp with 12band eq and compress etc this has not been a problem at all.

This is a very well built bass. As I said in the "don't likes" section I got this basses on my year out so it was moving from city to city every week making regular trips across the irish sea and it was as solid as it looks even after all those van packs. It has an alder wood neck and a beautifully smooth maple neck which allows easy movement up and down the 24 fret fingure board. The bridge has 5 individual saddles which are very easily set up for the perfect action and set-up. The active circitry on with the 2 humbuckers gives great tone and allows tone for all styles I've tryed from Heavy rock to trad jazz to church band. It is a great quality bass that also looks great (I'm not so keen on the bog standard precision looking basses and this one has lush contores with out going too far and looking stupid.

The bottom line is that this is great bass if it was stolen I would deffinitly replace it even if I was forced to pay full price!! However I would recomend looking at the Ibanez MQ aswell if your looking for a 5 string bass in the £500 price range as this is also a great bass(play before you choose). As you can tell form this review I love this bass and I can say that only bass I've ever played which I prefered was a £3500 original(pre gibson) Kramer which are way out of my price range. This is a very high quality bass that is half the price of most basses which it plays like, a deffinite 5/5.

http://www.yamaha-europe.com/yamaha_europe/uk/10_musical_instruments/30_guitars_basses_amps/70_bass_guitars/10_bass_guitars/20_rbx_basses/30_RBX775/index.html

This review was originally published on http://www.musicgearreview.com