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Geddy Jazz Poll - Resonance Question

Why is the Geddy Different

  • Thinner Neck

    Votes: 61 52.1%

  • Inferior Body Wood

    Votes: 7 6.0%

  • Badass Bridge

    Votes: 34 29.1%

  • Jazz Body Style

    Votes: 2 1.7%

  • User Error

    Votes: 29 24.8%
  • Total voters
    117
#21
Well, the Geddy neck is a good thing and a bad thing. Nice and slender and easy to play but being so thin, the truss rod struggles with the string tension.

The Geddy neck needs to be 1/4 sawn instead of flat sawn!

Over the years, I've had 2 Geddy's. The first one had a near maxed out truss rod and the second one DOES have a maxed out rod and that's using low tension rounds 95-40.

A great bass with a very weak neck!

I think that the BadAss is the reason for it's sound because other than that, mechanically there's nothing special about it. It's just a 70s style Jazz Bass!

The black body with the maple neck and black binding and fret dot markers looks pretty damn nice!

Weak neck! 1/4 sawn maple, PLEASE!
 
#24
DigitalMan said:
I'm finding the 29 user error votes pretty funny. Wonder what I'm doing wrong. :)
Click to expand...

Somethings to check:
- Is there a shim in the neck pocket? If you can get it setup to play well without a shim that can help. Make sure the neck is sitting snug and against the bottom of the neck pocket.
- If you have significant forward neck bow, try tightening the truss rod to get it close to flat. I find a tighter truss rod makes the neck feel more solid and you can get a better overall setup if the neck is just shy of being flat. That said, don't push it beyond where it stops turning and don't get a back-bow.
- Setup the action at the bridge a little higher - that is after checking and adjusting the neck relief (bow). Sometimes just a little higher action really wakes up a bass.
- Try using a little heavier set of strings. The increased tension can get more resonance from the bass.

I literally had a guy sell me a jazz bass for cheap as he said it sounded terrible and he could not lower the action any further as the saddles were already bottomed out. The neck relief definitely had a significant forward bow. So I adjusted the neck relief to the way I liked it, which led to the saddles needing to be raised as they no longer needed to be bottomed out to get a good action. Once I made those two adjustments the bass really opened up acoustically and even had better and lower action then when I got it from the guy. 5 minutes at no cost took a bad sounding and playing bass into a great bass.
 
#25
I would check this also, especially if you bought it used. It is very possible that the neck could have been loosened or removed to adjust the truss rod and not seated properly when screwed back on. The neck could easily be screwed in tight, but not make 100% contact in the pocket.
 
#27
So a little more info. I do my own setups. Geddy was bought new. No shim. Relief pretty much right at Fender spec. Action I'd call medium-low. Ric and P setup very similar.

I'm leaning toward neck as well. I'd love to replace if I could keep the same look, but am not aware of Fender selling necks with block inlays.

Otherwise, I might as well get an AmStd to go alongside - which isn't a bad idea now that I think about it.
 
#28
Could be a "dead" neck, essentially a piece of wood that is not so good at transmitting resonant freq. It's really hard to say...can obviously only guess at the culprit, but the neck is a good bet indeed. It's probably the most important deciding factor in acoustic resonance after the strings and bridge.

Can you notice if the neck is particularly light or heavy to some extreme?
 

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