Been playing the Mikro and noticing the D/5th definitely sounds “off” like… boomy, thuddy/thumpy, etc compared to the other strings. Either it’s too thicc or that partial wrap around the tuning peg is f’ing with it. Le sigh. I’ll have to pester Stringjoy for another and hopefully they don’t try to jack with me about putting it on such a small bass. MFers I went with it using your stated length to the taper
I suppose it could potentially be a nut issue since the nut is cut for a thicc’er string. It’s not buzzing or seeming too low or anything. Intonates a little weird, too, it seems, like I’ll play 2nd and 3rd fret and second guess myself on pitch for a moment.
Unsure how to approach Stringjoy. I could try another .110 and get one for free, or get another single + shipping. I guess I’ll find out when I deal with customer service. They just released a strap which will look really good with my old Strat and its new reclaimed wood pickguard, though, so since I wanted that anyway, shipping for one string loses its sting (har har)
Nope. What I did discover is the neck pickup is not a Happy Camper
No adjustments made it happy. It was distorting slightly sometimes and killing the tone (f that word tone, it’s overused lol) sound. Turned it down all the way and just used the bridge, mostly fixed the issue. I still think I want to try a .105 there now, though, just to see.
I plan to replace them with some cheap actives from Guitar Fetish so I’m not going to even bother going to look for solder joints, etc.
I forgot to mention, when I had all the strings off, at the right angle I could see lines where the paint had settled or likely wasn’t thicc enough to show it’s a three piece body of some sort XD (or the sanding off the glue lines was done poorly) I plan to sand the gloss off and make it satin/matte anyway. Definitely not going to sand it all back lol, it probably looks Not Great beneath that black.
It’s also definitely not me being crazy. My fingers don’t smell after playing these nickel strings a lot. Those Cobalts are smelly.
Brief experimentation: Dropped the 5th string down to a C made it feel a little better for plucking and acoustically it seemed to sound a little better. I’ll have to try it through the amp tomorrow when people aren’t sleeping but that kinda supports my too thicc theory a little. I even got it further down to B and it was playable (it came with a .130 that felt kinda meh XD ). A was a bit floppy, my reasoning for trying it at all was ADADF but I think I’d like DADFA better.
The .110 didn’t feel worse than Ibanez’s .130 was what I was saying. I just randomly tried it since it was only half a step lower than the C I’d already tuned to. The .110 was originally for tuning to D since it had already had a .105 for its 4th/E string.
This is all telling me that the tension of the Stringjoys is overall much higher than whatever strings Ibanez is using, which also have silver ball ends like most strings on Ali Express. I’ve also seen reports that the strings Ibanez sells for the Mikro are very different to the strings it ships with, so who knows…
I love the Boomers too. They sounded great on my ESP, but for some reason they sound extremely weird on the Ray. I ended up putting LaBella flats on the Ray and it sounds great.
Goes back to my bass/pickup/string theory and why I now keep all those. Misc string sets cause you never know what will or wont work with what until you try. Sadly, takes a lot of $, time and energy to find out.
As an experiment, I’m going to throw my EXL-165s on the Ray and see how those sound. If I don’t like it, I’ll just go back to the LaBella flats and stay there.
Wow @John_E , the EXL165s sound great on the Ray! How strange it is that the Bass Boomers sound so good on the ESP, and then sound like crap on the Ray.
Probably because pickups are voiced differently, electronics differences, etc if I was to wildly speculate. Meanwhile some musicians will blindly use the same strings on every instrument they own. More power to them and I bet the consistent feel is great.
I adore GHS Boomers on a J bass using a pick. That was the sound of my first bass and years of playing on it/them. I don’t like them a ton for finger plucking with the humbuckers and preamp on my Stiletto Extreme. They’re just okay. I wish I still had that crappy bass XD
As I discover GHS sells single strings off their website. But their shorties are 32.75" taper so for me that would be a no-go mostly. Though they do offer a .120 and .107, the .107 is nicely between a .105 and .110 and I have the 5th tuned to a D on my Mikro right now. Hell, Stringjoy didn’t even give me the 32" winding they claimed, either, it was 32.75" or so and I made it work XD Smallest shorty Boomer is .045 though.
On a somewhat similar but different tone topic, did you give up on the advantage? of the zero fret mod? How did your opinion ultimately settle on that one?
When you stop and think about it it makes you wonder why all manufacturers don’t just include it in their manufacturing process. Material cost seems negligible.
I think there are some manufacturers that do this. My Gold Tone Banjo came standard with a Zero Fret.
Played the SRC6 tonight, and it’s been a long while. It was massively out of tune XD
The E string is really bothering me on it, I thought I liked it at first, but it’s just… so… rich-sounding. Fretted notes don’t sound nearly the same as the open notes; I don’t know if this is a tension vs gauge vs scale length issue or what. I like all the other strings okay though. So I’m thinking of making A the lowest string and basically turning it into a piccolo or tenor bass or something. I’m not sure, yet. I might swap back on a EXL156 set I have laying around and see how the .084 E sounds vs the Stringjoy .090; Right now the E just sounds very different from the others in a way I’m not enjoying. Playing with the pickup blend and EQ helps some; the strings are pretty new, though, as I haven’t played it much since restringing it. I dunno, we’ll see. I really like the upper register of the instrument, hence thinking of stringing it up higher.
A to A won’t work; well, it would have a plain string on top and that’d just be weird… or 7lbs more tension than the string before it… G to G works with a wound .018 on top… I dunno, not making hasty decisions.
