The Right Leg Rest at Long Last!

I finally came across an eBay seller who was selling an original Steinberger USA leg rest. My 1985 XP bass now has the correct leg rest. Yay!

I'm going to try to be even more careful with it this time. These parts are just incredibly scarce and I'm all too aware that a young child can do a lot of damage in just a brief moment of inattention.

It came with aluminum inserts (not needed) and 7/16th Filister-head machine screws (pretty exotic and hard to find). Note, _machine_ screws, even though they are going into solid maple. They went in without too much difficulty, although a little flake of paint came off. But fortunately that spot is covered by the leg rest mount itself.

The main difference between these originals and the later ones used in the Spirits and Gibson-produced instruments seems to be the way the holes are drilled. The originals have a deeper carved-out hole that allows the entire head of the Filister screw to sit flush.

You can see an entry I wrote about the difficulties in finding and repairing these guitars here, The Steinberger Parts Dilemma. Here's a bit about the XP Bass. I am still hoping to one day get my hands on a matching XP guitar (not a Trans-Trem model, though; that's another parts nightmare I don't even want to contemplate!)

The Steinberger Parts Dilemma

Previously on this blog I've talked about my Steinberger basses and the difficulty in finding proper parts for them. Here are a few details on what I've learned in the hopes that it helps someone else.

The first thing to keep in mind is that there are many versions of the famed Steinberger bridge, and they tend to all be slightly incompatible in size and fasteners used to attach them to the bodies.

The older bridges that I've seen -- from the Newburgh-manufactured era -- use somewhat exotic and hard-to-find black "Filister head" screws: #6, 3/4" in length. I had to resort to trial and error, mail-ordering several different types until I found the correct screws to attach the 4-string bridge to an XQ-4 body.

Looking for a correct original replacement bridge? Good luck. You can probably find one for a Synapse, a Nashville-era instrument, or a Spirit, but bridges for Newburgh-made instruments are hard to come by.

I found out the hard way that the clever Steinberger "kick-stand" leg rest is functional, but has a rather critical design flaw: they are fragile. I made the mistake of putting my XP bass down on a bed leaving the "kick stand" unfolded, to attend to something, and turning my back on one of my children for just a moment. The instrument got pulled off the bed and onto the carpeted floor. With maple bodies, composite necks, light weight, and a 5-bolt neck attachment, these instruments aren't all that fragile, and the instrument itself would have suffered no damage at all. But the leg rest is essentially a little lever made out of rather thin aluminum, and it snapped off like a dry twig.

After I beat the child in question severely (KIDDING! I'm KIDDING!) Although I'm ashamed to admit that some angry yelling was involved... OK, I mean "after I calmed down," I thought OK, no big deal -- newer Steinbergers have the same leg rest, so I ought to be able to get a replacement, right? Er, not so much. The originals use "Filister head" machine screws. But not the longer Filister head wood screws like the ones that were used to attach the bridges. They are countersunk differently. The head shape and width is very important because they fit flush, so you don't snag your clothes on them. These screws use a 7/64" drive -- another somewhat rarely-seen dimension.

Left: Filister head machine-threaded screw that was used to attach the leg rest; right: Filister head wood screws that was used to attach the bridge (and which I did successfully find replacement parts for, but it wasn't easy).

By the way, if you ever need some of those Filister head wood screws on the right, to attach a Newburgh-era bridge to the body on something like an XQ-4 bass (and don't ask me exactly what other models they might have been used on), I have a whole bag of them now. Drop me a comment, and I'll mail you some, so you don't have to go through what I had to go through to find them.

Anyway, now that a short story has become hopelessly long, the screws weren't broken, so I thought I'd be able to reuse them, but I picked up a couple of replacement leg rests and the original screws don't fit. Fun, huh? (In other words, the "Licensed By" leg rests aren't quite the same as the originals.

I could go on a quest for machine screws that are the same in all other respects except the head, I suppose, but I know from my previous efforts how hard it can be to find exactly matching screws.

It leaves me wondering if it is possible to remove just the head part of the folding leg rest and swap it with the leg part of a newer one, or drill out the part a bit to accommodate the heads of the screws. It is possible, of course, to play without the leg rest: just put on a strap and stand. But my "use case" is to use this thing mostly in the studio while sitting at the computer. Maybe I will just leave it off and make the XP the bass I always play standing up. (In fact, that's just what I did for "Leaving Ann Arbor").

The situation with bridge parts is worse. I wrote about the damaged bridge on my XQ-4 v1 bass. It got worse, such that the D string tuner no longer works at all. It was almost impossible to get the D string off, but it is now sitting here unplayable.

It needs more attention than I can give it, especially since the last thing I want to do is screw up an original Newburgh-era Steinberger bridge.

I went so far as to buy a replacement bridge, but it doesn't fit. The Nashville-era XQ-4 bridges aren't quite compatible. On the bright side, I suppose, I have a spare Nashville-era XQ-4 bridge that fits the white Steinberger, should that one ever become hopelessly damaged as well.

I asked Peekamoose Guitars in New York if I could send them the bridge to repair. I expected either a "yes" or "no" answer, or maybe a "no" with an explanatory note along the lines of "we only repair complete instruments." Instead I got back a surprisingly ranty note about how they have to test the instrument under playing conditions, saying that there "are some aspects of how components behave which cannot be replicated by substitute means. The only way to prove beyond any doubt the instrument's parts are working correctly for that instrument alone, is to test, measure and play it at the adjustment specs we know are dead on the money..."

Yeah. Erm, thanks for the lecture, but methinks thou dost protest too harshly. you could have just said that it isn't profitable enough for you to work on a part without being able to charge for a setup too. That, I can understand, and I don't really object to it -- luthiers deserve to get paid. But don't tell me a shop that does a whole lot of repair on Steinberger bridges couldn't fix a screwed-up tuning machine without my whole instrument. Luthiers tend to keep scratch bodies and necks around. They make little jigs and test apparatus all the time so they can do things more efficiently and easily without constantly putting the parts back on, or taking them off, the instruments in question. Hell, just attaching the bridge to the end of a two-by-four, with a nail at the other end to hook the string's ball end onto, would serve to establish whether a the tuning machine works smoothly under tension. It probably would take a luthier less time to make that jig than it did to write the e-mail I got in response. And I don't need them to do the setup. I enjoy doing that part myself.

I might still send it to them -- they've pretty much got the market on Steinberger repairs cornered at this point -- but that exchange left just a slightly bad taste in my mouth. And I've got to consider cost of shipping -- this is a heavy bass. This doesn't encourage me to ask them if they've got a replacement leg rest I can install on the XP bass. It's the kind of situation where I might hold on to it until the next time I'm actually in the neighborhood, maybe as part of a vacacion trip to the area, and see if I can drop it off in person.

I also attempted some minor superglue finish repair on the XQ-4, and it was a bit of a disaster. The instrument has a few spots of leprosy in addition to the broken bridge, where the repair is worse than the original ding. The superglue I used was not good stuff -- it dried yellowish, looking far worse than the superglue Stewart Macdonald sells for drop fills. It works really well for Dan Erlewine, and he explains and advocates for the technique in his book, but I'm clearly not him. And this isn't even my first attempt. My advice to you: don't try. If I do send it to Peekamoose I'll ask them if they can do anything about the finish. My expectation -- not a lot, but maybe some of the more egregious leprosy can be polished out a little.

There's one more thing -- both my Newburgh Steinberger basses came only with gig bags. I'd like to get hard cases for them. It's hard to find a hard case that will fit the small "Flying V" body of an XP bass. There are, though, companies that will take a tracing and a few measurements and build you a custom case that fits your instrument snugly. I might look into that.

Meanwhile, I'm still keeping an eye out on eBay for a matching Steinberger GP guitar, maybe an R-trem model without the Trans-Trem. These models are quite rare. They either don't come up, or they are extremely expensive, and I don't have a lot of money to put into the guitar collection at the moment. Maybe someday!

UPDATE: I finally got the right replacement leg rest! An eBay seller just happened to post one for sale, and my automatic search caught it for me. See: http://geekversusguitar.blogspot.com/2011/04/right-leg-rest-at-long-last.html

Ghoul Tide Guitars

I've mixed together most of the guitar tracks (Babicz 6-string acoustic and Adamas 12-string acoustic) I recorded for Joe "Covenant" Lamb's song hilarious and horrifying holiday-ish song Ghoul Tide. You can find it in the form of a little instrumental ditty on Bandcamp. There are also some bits of Logic MIDI instruments I used as placeholders the little Christmas song quotes.

This song also features the Steinberger XQ-4 bass. The version I mixed for Bandcamp is my playing; my son Isaac also contributed a track, and Joe actually used a bit of both in the final song. You might be able to tell the bits apart because Isaac is used to playing an upright acoustic bass, and so plucks a lot more heavily (you can probably hear this even after volume leveling and compression are applied; I had to turn down the input levels for his parts because he was clipping the A/D converters!)

I'm finger-picking a 12-string on this track. It's a little rough! Also, apologies for my whistling nose. I haven't figured out how to record an acoustic guitar part into a mic without getting some breath noises. I guess I have to hold my breath when I'm sustaining a long note or chord and time my breaths with strums!

Herd Mentality, Part 2: the Second Dozen

13. A 4-string Steinberger XP bass. This one was featured in Guitar Pron 11.

14. A Steinberger XQ-4 version 1 bass. This one was featured in Guitar Pron 8.

15. A 5-string Steinberger Synapse fretless bass. I don't have any photos of this bass, although I have used it in a couple of my YouTube videos. I'll feature it in an upcoming installment of Guitar Pron. These discontinued basses are interesting but I don't actually recommend that anyone buy them.

There is another Steinberger bass -- the white Music Yo era XQ-4 version 2. This one was featured in Guitar Pron 3. However, I gave this one to my son, so it isn't officially part of my herd any more.

16. A Godin LGX-SA. This guitar was featured in Guitar Pron 2.

17. A Godin SA nylon-string. This one is on loan. I'll take some photos of it when I get it back.

18. An Adamas 12-string acoutic guitar. This guitar was featured in Guitar Pron 7.

19. An Ovation USA Elite with Tribal Flame finish. This one needs good pictures.

20. A Babicz Identity Jumbo. This guitar was featured in Guitar Pron 12.

21. An Ovation Applause tenor ukulele.

22. An Ovation Applause Soprano ukulele.

23. This one is not very photogenic; it is a Jag-Stang that I have horribly abused over the years, practicing my repair and upgrade skills. It turns out my luthier skills aren't so hot. It has a custom Warmoth neck with stainless steel frets, Gotoh vintage locking tuners, a 3rd-party pickguard, and upgraded Seymour Duncan pickups. However, it still needs a lot of assembly work, and so right now really is a parts guitar!

24. A Parker Fly Classic, which I haven't yet photographed.

It's possible I am forgetting one!

Update 11 Feb 2010

Oops, yep, I am. #25 is another Peavey Limited, this one an HB (dual humbucker) model, with a blue flame maple top. You can hear this guitar on this unused concept from Joe Covenant's song http://commonlisp.bandcamp.com/track/ghoul-tide-unused-guitar-idea. That's the neck pickup, with the tone pot rolled off just a bit.

Guitar Pron 11: Steinberger XP Bass

Up for your consideration today is a relatively rare Setinberger instrument from 1985, a P-series 4-string bass with passive, low-impedance EMG pickups (unlike most Steinberger pickup systems, these don't require a battery). They are the best-sounding bass pickups I've ever played, hands-down, usable over the whole tone range. I've been looking for one of these for a while. They are not as collectible as the all-synthetic L-series instruments -- this model has a small V-shaped wooden body -- but they definitely have that Steinberger tone and mojo. Steinberger made these with various styles of pickguards; one of the most common was a "pebbled" pickguard with a rough, textured finish and a white stripe around it. I actually like this all-black version best, although my camera always has trouble with reflective black instruments.


Unfortunately, Joshua pulled this bass off the bed only a week after I acquired it, and it fell on the floor. The only real damage was to the leg rest, which snapped off. These are fortunately replaceable, although original parts are getting harder to find; Music Yo and Gibson no longer sell parts for vintage Steinbergers.


I'm keeping my eye out for a matching P-series 6-string guitar. I'd love to have one of those. These instruments even had a brief film cameo; they are the guitars that Rufus (George Carlin) gives to Bill and Ted at the end of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.


I'll definitely be recording this bass as soon as I need a fretted bass part for a song!

Ghoul Tide

So, last week I worked on this track with my buddy Joe "Covenant" Lamb. Joe resides in Dundee, Scotland and we have never met in person, but we have wound up collaborating on music projects. I'm considering it sort of an apprenticeship in songwriting and recording -- he can write original songs, and I've never done it! It's good experience for me.

This is his entry for Song Fu 5, round 3. The challenge was to write a song that sounds like a holiday song, but which is not really about the holidays. Warning: it's kind of gruesome! Funny, but gruesome!

If you like it, consider donating to Joe, or buy some of his other tracks. (Voting for round 3 is over).

Joe plays guitar himself at an intermediate level (he says he can't play barre chords), but he is having painful problems with his shoulder, so was having a terrible time recording even a simple guitar part. He was kind enough to give me credit right in the song title itself.

On this song, I'm playing the Babicz acoustic, strummed and with some very simple finger-picking of the same chords, into one of the Rode NT-5 mics. I also gave Joe a very simple bass track, in which I'm playing the Steinberger XQ-4 v2, direct into the Apogee Ensemble. I also recorded my son Isaac (age 15) playing a bass line. Isaac's more of a bass player than I am, and plays upright acoustic bass in his high school jazz band, but he's not used to recording, and his timing was a little rough. Joe says for the final mix he used parts from both our tracks.

I laid down two tracks on the 12-string Adamas as well, strummed and finger-picked, and at least one of them is in there. And, finally, I transcribed Joe's demo into notes in Logic and had it play them using some virtual instruments. I think harp and glockenspiel are the ones that made it into the final mix. That was pretty tedious -- since I'm not much of a keyboard player, and my guitar synth is on loan, I started with my DX-7 but put in most of the notes by hand. MIDI note quantization in Logic is still a bit of a mystery to me.

Collaborating this way was a pain! Joe is 5 hours ahead of Michigan. We tried using Skype, and it worked once, but then on the second try Joe couldn't hear me, I could only hear him. We finally determined that Joe's tuner had malfunctioned, which meant that everything he had recorded was based on a concert A at 430 Hz, not 440. Joe's download speed was terrible. Then he changed his mind about the track tempo after I had recorded my parts twice. This all meant it took about three times longer and required three times more aggravation and retakes than it should have for such a simple part.

If we had been in the same studio we could have nailed all the tracks in an hour or two. At one point we were reduced to arguing about which beats the chorus chord changes should fall on by using _text messages_... talk about the blind leading the blind! I'm sorry to say that at one point I may have threatened to fly to Scotland and kick his rear end... sorry Joe! But I think all the pain was worth it. Next time, assuming we do this again, I hope we can figure out how to do it a lot more efficiently!

Guitar Pron 8: Steinberger XQ-4 Bass (v1)

The recession has hit musicians pretty hard and so I've had the opportunity to pick up some instruments on eBay recent at prices that would have been unheard of just a few months ago. I have long wanted to own an older Steinberger (ideally, one of the L-series basses and a P-series guitar), but they tend to go for crazy money. This one came along for a price that I thought was actually reasonable, though.


In a previous installment I reviewed a v2 XQ-4 made recently in the "Music Yo" era: see this blog entry.

This one is older; I don't have a precise date, but looking at serial numbers, it probably comes from around 1990. The Gibson buyout was in 1986, at least according to Wikipedia, which means this one was produced somewhere in that transitional period. I think the neck was likely made at the Newburgh plant, but I'm not entirely certain of that. I am certain that it is a "v1" Q-series instrument; the lines are a little different, the body is thicker and heavier (maple instead of swamp ash), and it has a few little design issues that were improved upon with the v2 design. It won't fit in a form-fitting case made for the v2 models.


But I'm also sure, after playing it, that it is a better instrument. It lacks the stacked HAZ Labs EQ, although the active EMGs do use one 9-volt battery. Some of the details feel a little off. When it arrived, the nylon strap peg on the butt end was broken. It sticks out a little differently than the pegs on the v2 model. Fortunately I happened to have some black locking tuning pegs that look very similar and which fit perfectly. I'm not enough of a purist to try to find originals, if the originals are flimsy.

It has some finish cracks, and a number of dings and scratches; the battery holder had come loose and was rattling around in the compartment. That's an easy fix. There's a cringe-worth little gash in the neck itself, but it doesn't affect the playability. The sound of this thing is unmistakeable, and fantastic.


While the instrument with the Moses Graphite neck sounds nice, and has some punch to it, it also can be described as sounding a little "warmer" -- more like a wooden-necked bass. Apparently that was a deliberate design decision and the Moses Graphite necks are "tuned" to provide a woodier tone. There's nothing very natural-sounding about the old-school Steinberger tone. It's metallic; it doesn't sound at all like wood. "Harsh" is not too strong a word, but you could also call it "pure." EQ it down, and it could make a decent jazz bass; pop a string, and you've got Dave Stewart playing a crazy funk bass line in a Eurythmics tune. The sounds it makes are absolutely iconic, and I grew up with them, so they are also nostalgic. My bass playing is not really good enough to do this thing justice, but I'll have to make a recording, just to show it off. There's just something different, and fascinating, about these instruments.


The bridge on this thing feels a little more solid, even though it lacks the steel insets of the V2 instrument. It has a neat down-tuning feature: an adjustable lever that can be popped up to lower the E string down to a D. I'm not sure I will use it much, since changing just one string like this screws up the scale patterns in my head, but it may find a use. Impressively, the string stays perfectly in tune.

The only thing I really am unhappy with is that this instrument didn't come with a hard-shell case; it came with only a flimsy gig bag. Since it's relatively heavy, that's just not adequate; a lot of the dings on the instrument, and the broken strap peg, could have no doubt been avoided with a good case.. So I will be keeping an eye out for one, either a case made for this model or one I can adapt to fit it.


However, I also feel pretty certain this thing won't be staying in its case very much. That's the real reason that all the "vintage" Steinberger basses you see for sale are so beat up. The owners just couldn't keep their hands off of them!

Update 17 Dec 2009

Ed Roman writes of this model that it has excellent tone, but is not balanced very well. He's correct -- the body is awkwardly heavy. It wouldn't be my first choice to wear on a strap for a live show. However, the Nashville v2 XQ-4 I have has the opposite problem -- the body is too light compared to the neck. There probably exists somewhere an XQ-4 with a Steinberger Blend neck, HAZ Labs EQ, and a swamp ash body that is just right; I'm keeping an eye out for it.

He also says they have a "horrible appearance (my opinion)," and, well -- yeah, the combination of some sharp edges together with some rounded edges make it a little weird looking; the "design language" is inconsistent.

I've done a little recording of this thing and it sounds fantastic. The active pickups do push out quite a bit of voltage, though -- the difference in voltage between a light pluck and a hard string pull is huge. I have to be careful not to clip the input to my Apogee Ensemble. My son plays upright acoustic bass, and has larger hands than I do. I had the input level set perfectly for my playing, but when I handed it to him to play, he plucked the strings much harder, and the levels were blowing out all over the place! I am still planning on trying some kind of active direct box such as the Radial JDV Mark 3, which lets me select the exact loading for different kinds of pickups.

I have just completed a "Buy it Now" on an XP-4 bass, and it should be arriving soon. The P series were a short-lived model with small "flying V" shaped wooden bodies and Steinberger Blend necks. Per Mr. Roman again, these "sound great" because of the wooden body -- better, he claims, than the L series. I have 3 days approval to decide if I want to return this instrument for a refund, so I will be examining and testing it very thoroughly. I would also love to find a P-series guitar with the S-trem (a hard tail, which I'd really prefer, apparently was never offered).

I'm not really interested in the Trans Trem -- I'd probably waste way too much time fiddling with it, trying to get it to work perfectly in tune. Since I am very picky about tuning, it would probably frustrate me no end. It's an intriguing invention but, to my mind, just slightly impractical in implementation; some versions seem to work better than others, and they all seem to require a lot of maintenance.

I am also scratching my head and pondering whether I want to try to acquire an L series (all-composite "boat oar") Steinberger, if I can find a good one at a great price. They are considered the most collectible of the bunch and were tending to go for crazy money, although the current economy has apparently created a buyer's market for guitars of all kinds. It gets at the question of exactly what I am doing. Some of my instruments are for playing and recording, and some are for investing. Would I buy a "boat oar" instrument strictly to invest in, knowing that it isn't going to be one of my personal favorites? I guess it depends on how much confidence I put in my own taste and judgment!

Update 22 Dec 2009

The P-series instrument has not arrived yet, but last night I tried to change the strings on this XQ bad boy. I discovered that the bridge has suffered some abuse. The D-string tuner seems to be missing a spring and possibly some little spacers; the knurled knob grinds right up against the bridge and has chewed a semicircle of exposed aluminum. The threaded rod for that tuner may be slightly bent; it turns much harder than the others. The E string tuner, which has the detuning mechanism, also seems like it may be missing a spring, and the knob was not staying put on the threaded rod but coming right off the end. It took me some time and a lot of aggravation to figure out how to expand the tuner and get the knob clamped back on. The E string tuner had 3 little spacers so I borrowed one to put on the D string tuner, which helps a little, but I have no idea if that how it was originally put together. It's an ingenious design, but a little fiddly, which is the same complaint I've read about the transposing tremolo. The jaws apparently have a tendency to break, and the saddle blocks have a tendency to wear badly and cut the strings.

My best guess is that a previous owner (perhaps the guy who sold it to me, perhaps someone else) took it apart and some springs, and maybe some spacers as well, went flying. I discovered myself that the tiny spacers are awfully easy to lose.

I also discovered that two of the four screws that mount the bridge to the guitar body were missing. I can't imagine why, since the screw holes in the body are not stripped, and those screws seem pretty important. Did someone cannibalize this instrument to repair another one?

Anyway, I called Ed Roman guitars. They have the 4-string DB bridges in stock, but they want $240 for one. I'll have to think that over. This one works, but not as well as it should. It might be wise to get a replacement bridge now, while they are still available. New-old stock Steinberger parts are getting scarce; Music Yo no longer sells parts from their stockpile.

Anyway, Ed Roman Guitars told me they don't have screws that match mine. The screws are an odd shape, wood screws with a high, rounded head, and black. Once again, screws are the bane of my existence as a hobbyist luthier. I'll have to go screw-hunting once more; if I find some screws that are close, maybe I'll just paint them black.

Update 08 Feb 2009

The P-series bass arrived just before Christmas -- see photos here. I decided not to make the same mistake I did with this one, so I had a new set of strings ready for it, and changed them to verify that the bridge worked as expected. It did -- the new instrument is in great shape. The P-series bass sounds fantastic. The passive EMG pickups were only used in those instruments, and a relatively small number of P-series basses were made.

The v1 XQ-4 is still disassembled. I have found screws that will work to mount the bridge to the body -- they are rather exotic "Fillister head" black wood screws. Your local hardware store is very unlikely to carry these. The originals were Philips drive, but I couldn't find exact matches anywhere. The ones I finally ordered are slotted for hex (Allen) drive. The important thing is that they fit the bridge and the existing screw holes in the body perfectly! There must be a story behind Steinberger's use of such an exotic fastener.

I just sent Peekamoose guitars a note asking if I could send them the bridge to rebuild, without shipping the entire bass. I'd rather not buy a new-old stock part, since then I'd be left with a slightly damaged bridge that I couldn't sell. I'd really prefer to get the original parts working properly. We'll see what they say. If I have to pay to ship this very heavy bass both ways, it might be more cost-effective just to buy that new-old stock bridge.

Guitar Pron 3: Steinberger XQ-4 Bass (v2)

Today's instrument is a Steinberger bass.


This is not an earlier Steinberger with a Newburgh-manufactured neck; it is a more modern instrument, probably built only a few years ago, while Gibson was marketing Steinbergers via the "Music Yo" web site.

It is a pretty good-sounding instrument, but it is not quite up to the standards of the older Steinberger instruments.

Or, to put it a little bit more cynically, since Ned Steinberger no longer has veto power over which instruments get his name stamped on them, Gibson can ship any kind of crap and try to capitalize on the reputation that Steinberger instruments once enjoyed, due to the incredible amount of hand work and attention to detail that went into their construction.


The neck was made by Moses Graphite. It has a matte finish and seems to be graphite (yes, you could write with it). The older Steinberger necks were molded out of fiberglass resin with various formulations of carbon fiber and what-not, and had a shiny finish.

Note that the Newburgh instruments were stamped "N," and the Tennessee instruments were marked "TN." Until recently, that is, when Gibson started re-using "N." This confused me; based on my research online, I thought I was buying an instrument with a Newburgh-made neck.

And, of course, that confusion is exactly the point. Gibson should be ashamed.

The headless bass is for those poor bassists who were circumcised. Unlike the older Seinberger necks, this one has an adjustable truss rod. This model requires strings with double ball ends.


With EMG pickups, two 9-volt batteries, and HAZ Labs active EQ circuitry, It is a very nice-sounding instrument. The tone settings are very usable and musical. However, I am not all that impressed with the construction of the neck. If you look closely, you can see that some of the slots to hold the fret tangs are cut crooked. This means that a small number of the frets above the 12th are audibly out of tune; in other words, I can get the intonation pretty well perfect everywhere, with my Peterson virtual strobe tuner, except for those frets. That's a pretty glaring quality control gaffe. If I had bought it new at full price and it showed up like this, I would have returned it.

Come to think of it, I have a lot of respect for Moses Graphite (I've been very impressed by the Chapman Stick bodies they manufactured for Stick Enterprises). And I doubt they did the fret work.

This particular incarnation of the Steinberger bridge design uses (I think) steel string saddles on height-adjustable aluminum blocks, which ride on two diagonally-mounted set screws, and are not actually attached to the bridge. If you remove the strings and loosen one set screw, you can remove all the blocks to adjust them. They are wobbly, though, balanced on their diagonally-mounted screws, and don't really stand up on their own.

I found this to be an irritating and fiddly arrangement because tuning to intonate the strings causes the blocks to move, and only the string pressure keeps them in place during this process. When you get them where you want them, push them into as square and upright a position as you can, hold them that way, and tighten the set screw, and it clamps all the blocks together. But since you've just positioned all the blocks so that they aren't aligned with each other, that seems a little precarious, like trying to pick up a horizontal row of cubes that aren't quite lined up with each other by squeezing the ones on the end.

Unfortunately I think this fiddly bridge design is Ned's, not Gibson's, although I don't know all the incarnations of the Steinberger bridge in detail. In other words, I'm not sure the older instruments are any easier to work with. And they all tend to have the well-known problem with the tuner jaws. There's an eBay seller that will sell you stainless steel replacement jaws, but they seem awfully expensive at $35 per string.

This instrument also has a zero fret -- which can help with intonation -- although since the strings rest right on the zero fret, bending and tuning them seem to be leading to a zero fret that is quickly developing notches, while the rest of the frets are still in good shape.


With the very light neck and the tuners at the bridge, the instrument is very well-balanced. The basswood body is also very light for a bass body, and the curved body carve makes it very comfortable to play for extended periods of time. Although from what I hear, the bodies are made overseas. And there were some paint flaws that indicate, again, that Gibson's quality control is just not quite what one would expect from an instrument bearing the Steinberger name.

Given these issues, I can't whole-heartedly recommend this instrument, unless you can get it for a really good price. It remains unclear how long I'll keep it. I'm keeping an eye out for an older Steinberger, if I can find one at a price I can stomach. And I'm very hesitant to try one of the newer ZT-3 guitars, or a Synapse Trans-scale guitar.

I have another Steinberger bass -- a fretless "Synapse" model -- which I will show you in a future entry. It is a very different, and quite decent, instrument, but has some of the same attention-to-detail issues that make it frustrating attempting to deal with the "modern" Steinbergers.

Update

I have another instrument now, which is one of the "version 1" Q basses. This gives me an interesting opportunity to directly compare and contrast the two instruments. The quick summary is that my son now has custody of this instrument and I'm playing the older one. Here is the full article. According to Steinberger World (an unofficial fan site with a lot of information on the older instruments), this bass is a "version 2" member of the Q series -- one of the later ones, from the Music Yo (around 2003-2007) years, around 2003-2007. There also exist "version 2" instruments made after Gibson purchased Steinberger, maybe between 1995 and 1998 or so; I'd like to see one of those someday, although I've read that during those transitional years, quality had a tendency to vary more than it did during the pre-Gibson Newburgh years.

Update 22 Dec 2009

I've had the opportunity to work with my "version 1" XQ bass a little bit, and I can verify that although the bridge design in the old model is similar, it has some features that make it much nicer to work with. For one thing, the cubical string saddle blocks are attached to the bridge using an interesting angled bolt that. It's one of Ned's little imaginative design touches. You don't have to balance them on two separate screws to adjust the block height. That makes it far easier and less fiddly to adjust the intonation. The down side of the older DB bridge on that instrument is that it is lacking the steel inserts, which was a design improvement to make the saddles more durable. There is an entire evolutionary series of Steinberger bridges; it is a subject that warms the obsessive-compulsive heart of a geek like me, but I will spare you. Unfortunately, I also found that the bridge on my older XQ has suffered some abuse. I'll go into more detail over on the post about that bass.