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Has anyone regretted buying the Ray4?

Chrisk-K

Chrisk-K

Jan 20, 2010
6,012
7,258
Scottsdale, AZ
#1
I am very happy with my 3 MIA Fenders and don't need another bass, especially because my music room is almost full. However, I cannot stop thinking about the Ray 4 in Vintage Cream. VC is one of my top 5 favorite bass/guitar colors, and the Ray 4 in VC looks so sexy. And I can get one for less than $300. What I'm worried about is the neck. If the neck is not stable or if the truss rod doesn't work well, then I will try my best to suppress GAS...
 
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#3
The necks are fine.
The old preamps and pickups were less than desirable, but they've updated them, right?
Photo-Collage-1648678359727.jpg
 
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#8
I recently bought a Ray 5, HH, from G.C. For $289 ($450 elsewhere) new (supposedly) but had to wait for them to be in stock.

Anyways, I set it up as I do all my basses, and all good 'cept for...

when I press the first fret, I hear the second fret. Just for the heck of it I put two layers of blue tape over the first fret, and it plays fine. I can only guess that the first fret is too low. I'm not sure what to do about it, but maybe use something better than the blue tape and play it like that. :D
 
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#16
Yeah, I've definitely regretted buying my Ray4. Apart from a Squier Bronco it was probably my worst bass purchase ever.

I sold a real Stingray because it wasn't really my kind of tone and it was mostly gathering dust in my studio. After a while I thought it might be a good idea to have a Ray in the studio after all. I read all the decent reviews (mostly around here) and got a Ray4.

The fit and finish was more or less as expected in this price range. Let's just say it looks great from a distance... I expected a bass in this price range to need a bit of tweaking but this one was particularly poor. The setup was horrible and the fret ends looked like they had been cut with a chainsaw (as expected in this price range, no big deal).

Unfortunately the frets were also very uneven and needed a complete levelling/crowning. The nut slots were also way too high and needed filing (I made a new one out of bone instead). I repair guitars for a living so at least I could do all the work myself.

But it gets worse...

One of the saddle intonation screws had stripped threads out of the box. Only a small part of the threads were damaged so unfortunately I didn't notice this until I had sorted out all the other problems and changed the strings to a type that needed a very different setup/compensation. At this point it was obviously too late for a refund. The stripped screw turned out to be a nightmare because no-one seems to sell these screws separately. Apparantly intonation screws are not considered "replacement parts"... All the traditional hardware stores in my area have been replaced with huge chain stores that no longer sell single screws, only large packs. It actually turned out to be cheaper to order a complete Harley Benton Fender-style bridge, use one of the intonation screws and throw the rest of the bridge into the parts bin (I wasn't even sure if the screw would fit but luckily it did).

And then we get to the worst part...

The preamp (and/or possibly the pickup) was junk, and I really mean JUNK. The pickup seemed to overload the preamp. To avoid getting a nasty distorted signal when digging in I had to lower the pickup to the point where it sounded thin, horrible, anemic. I know some Ray4s of the past had a problem with too hot preamps but this shouldn't be one of those. I did at bit research before buying and the ones with the faulty preamps shouldn't still have been around at the time of purchase (May 2018 and mine was a new color for 2018 so definitely not old stock). The pickup/preamp didn't have a particularly great tone to begin with so I decided to replace them with a new pickup+preamp from Nordstrand rather than waste time on a warranty claim.

I guess I ended up paying more for replacement parts than for the bass itself. Luckily I could do all the work myself. If I add the cost of labour I could probably have gotten a Ray34 instead and had some spare change.

At least I ended up with a great instrument in the end, right? WRONG! It still has some slight fret buzz in certain areas of the neck, even though the frets are PERFECTLY levelled. This is something I normally only experience with cheap basses. The problems seems to be that it has a very uneven response along the neck with some areas resonating too strongly, causing the strings to vibrate with an unusually large amplitude (which leads to fret buzz). Some areas are very "dead" as well and I'm not talking about the typical dead spots in the usual positions. For example this bass sounds completely "dead" around the 10th-11th frets which is something I've never actually experienced before.

These basses generally get decent reviews so I guess I must have had extremely poor luck... but my advice would be to test it thoroughly before buying or at least get it from a store with a generous return policy.
 
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#20
jd56hawk said:
The necks are fine.
The old preamps and pickups were less than desirable, but they've updated them, right?
View attachment 4640786
Click to expand...

The preamp is decent, but the stock pickup is not for me: ceramic wired in series. I replaced it with an alnico pickup, and wired it in parallel. Much more to my liking.
 
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