I've owned lots of basses. This time I decided to be a bit smarter. I live in Chicago and my bass was made in Italy this year.. In June and July. I decided to leave my bass inside and keep the humidity at 45% and then let it down to 40% to let the bass acclimate. So this last week I played it on it's first two gigs. It's a very frightening crap shoot to commision a new bass. I have majorly lucked out. I just changed to a new set of Spiros and really haven't vaguely fine tuned it. This bass is MUCH more than I had hoped for. Imagine the ass-kicking low end of a Hawkes Panormo ( like Buster's bass ) with a darker timbre of an Italian or English basss. With a very easy, fast response. I'm not saying that tonally it competes with a great Italian or English bass. But I'm confident that it will grow into that with time. (maybe somebody else's lifetime!) But the basic components are there. And with newer Spiros. I've never played a new bass that I've seen more potential. There are other new makers like Dan Hachez and David Wiebe that make basses that are more jaw droppingly beautiful in terms of detail work, and that sound great. But I don't really think that they play or sound better. And they cost about $35,000. And they are probably worth it. But Luciano's basses cost about $13 or $14 thousand and are an amazing value. And he is the nicest cat you could ever deal with. By the way, he uses Poplar that comes from the same locations as a lot of the poplar used by some of the great 18th and 19th century makers. I know how difficult it is affording a good bass these days. I thought that the Golia bass would be better than the $5 to $8 thousand Chinese or Romanian basses and not as good as the typical contemporary basses that start at over $20k. Fortunately I was wrong.
