First post here, love the forum.
A buddy of mine got a crappy wal-mart style "Silvertone" bass from a friend and gave it to me because he doesn't play. I'm busy trying to set it up for my liking at the moment. But I've run into a few problems.
First off, the neck has almost zero relief as the truss rod is tightened all the way pretty much, yet still the action is pretty high. Even with the saddles positioned as low as possible. I'm pretty sure this is just because it's a crappy neck. I adjusted it a bit and got to within playable distances and it's fine now. The only problem is now the tuning is all weird. I'm not sure but I think it might be this mythical creature that you all refer to as "intonation".
If I tune it standardly, either with harmonics or using the 5th fret, then the tuning is off when played in octaves. If I tune it using octaves (say open D & 7th G), then the tuning is off at the 5th fret. So I pretty much have zero idea what to do now. I'm strapped for cash and don't feel like paying a tech to deal with it at GC. Is this intonation problems? Saddles?
What should I do?
BTW I've searched around the forum and found some helpful tips but I felt I should phrase this question in my own words to better suit a possible answer.
Off Topic: For a Silvertone, this bass actually sounds very nice. It's passive but has two tones for adjusting between pickups and I can get some pretty nice tones out of it. I'd like to get this set up decently and pass it on to my niece. Plus it was free, and that always makes a guitar/bass sound better
