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Guitars stuff

Bass Upgrade

I have had my bass for a few years now. It is a Squier Classic Vibe 70’s Jazz Bass. For Christmas, my lovely children got me a new bridge a Hipshot Kickass bridge.

She’s a beaut Clark
It’s thiccc compared to the stock bridge.

The build quality and chonkiness of this bridge are impressive. It is not a bent piece of sheet metal like the original bridge, it seems to be machined (or cast) out of a decent chunk of steel. I weighed both bridges on my kitchen scale. The OG bridge is 101 grams and the Kickass is 234 grams.

While I had the strings off, I decided to chase down a couple buzzy frets.

I used a tool to find some high spots and used a black sharpie to mark the locations.

The high spots were minimal, so they cleaned up real quick with a file. Then I polished them up real nice and shiny.

Nice and shiny 😁

The bridge was a bolt on replacement. The intonation was almost dead on right out of the box.

Bridge installed. This bridge uses the same hex key US Fender saddles use. I reused the screws from the OG bridge.
Strings on

I ordered and received the steel saddles. They are suuuper easy to install; just loosen the set screw on the front of the saddle carrier with teh same hex key used to adjust saddle height and swap them out.

Steel saddles to replace the brass ones
Loosen the string, then lossen the screw hiding in this hole
All strung up with steel saddles and some Rotosound strings

I like the sound of the bass with the steel saddles the best (it has a brighter sound). I especially like it better with the new strings. I recorded 4 demos of me playing some bass parts with the different configurations;

  • OG bridge, old strings,
  • new bridge with brass saddles and old strings
  • new bridge with steel saddles and old strings
  • new bridge with steel saddles and new strings

I played a snippet of a few things in each demo Sunshine of Your Love (pick & no-pick), Seven Nation Army (pick & no-pick), The Trooper (fingers cuz pick is blasphemy). The video below has the sound demos. If you watch the video on youtube you can use the chapters to skip around and compare one section to another.