Latest addition to the collection – an Ibanez SR506BM 6-string bass. Here’s a stock picture – mine’s a lot darker and has a stained finish rather than oiled. Next project is to sand it down and oil it up!
My 5-string BTB is a heavy beast and the 35” scale was a bit of a stretch at times so I really needed something more manoeuvrable. Got this pre-loved 6-string on my birthday. It’s very light despite the mahogany body, and has an extremely thin neck made of 5 pieces of wenge and bubinga. Neck profile is almost rectangular and takes a little getting used to. Scale is “only” 34″ and you can feel the difference in string tension, but it’s not a bad thing.
Pickups are factory-fitted Bartolini MK-1’s with Bartolini active 3-band EQ. The un-amped sound is bright and piano-like, and plugged in with the EQ flat you get a clear, deep growling tone – classic Bartolini. Interestingly a frequency response graph shows a slight treble dip with all control set flat. Bass control gives thunderous lows, middle cut produces the classic slap sound in an instant (though not as deep a cut as expected) but middle boost gives a volume boost as well as a solid thick tone. Handy for solos maybe, but a bit of a pain otherwise as you have to keep adjusting the volume. Treble does a fair job of brightening or… darkening(?) but isn’t quite in the right place to bring out the sparkle of the strings – something I could easily do with the sweepable mid on the BTB. Mind you the current strings are a little dead. The current model SR506 has a mid frequency switch that switches between 400 and 800Hz, plus a battery box. This one has neither.
This bass is extremely playable. Initial setup had a high-ish action due to the previous owner’s love of detuning down a full tone, but that was promptly dealt to. The neck is really stiff and helps produce clear, tight and sustained tones on the B string on most frets. The BTB would start to get dull around the 5th fret but the SR is clear all the way.
String spacing is 16.5mm which some say is too tight for slapping but I find it just fine. With the BTB’s full width spacing I always found myself reaching for the D string and missing it so the tighter string spacing is a bonus.