Michael Kelly Club Custom AEB

Guitar Center (GC) gets a lot of (often well-deserved) gruff but this weekend things worked out pretty well - acutally very well.

Wanting to buy an acoustic electric bass, I checked out GC's "Clearance Sale" this weekend. Their inventory included instruments by Laguna, Michael Kelly, Dean, Ibanez and Fender. The best "deal" by far was on the only AEB included in the Clearance Sale - the Michael Kelly Club Custom - List $650, regularly $450 at GC, but marked down to $255! The darned thing played as easily as instruments costing three or four times as much and it sounded quite nice. Rosewood fingerboard, solid cedar top, burled ash back and sides with beautiful "fiddle back" patterns, nice inlay work around the sound hole - though they went cheap on the nut and bridge and, I think, the tuners. The neck was not "clubby" (pun intended), the action was nice (and improvable). Unplugged, it had a nice tone and a reasonable volume. Plugged-in, at the store, the Fishman electronics really sounded clean. When I got it home, however, and played it through my EA Micro 300 I was astounded! Though I bought the AEB for use when I did not want to take an amp along and also to be able to practice on a 34" scale bass, the plugged-in sound, through the EA amp/cabinet is really, really, clear and sweet and I am having a blast switching between my Birdsong and the Michael Kelly.

GC's Clearance Sale lasts through 1/31/09, if I remember correctly, and I do not know if the Club Custom is on sale at all of their stores. I am not a shill for either the store or the manufacturer but I thought that others might benefit from this information if they were looking for an AEB. If you are in Southern California, I know that, as of 04 January, there was one Club Custom left at the Northridge store and one at the Sherman Oaks store.