New/used Pulcinella Level 5

I just bought a Pulcinella Level 5 from Matt Pulcinella. It was his own bass for the past few years, transparent white, birdseye maple/ash. It has passive Aero pickups in wood covers. It arrived yesterday. UPS had managed to punch two holes in the box, but the bass and case are fine.

It’s a very nice bass. I put Schaller straplock buttons on it, and lowered the action a bit, and it plays and sounds great. The balance on a strap is terrific, as advertised, and it weighs about 8 lbs. Nice pieces of wood!

And it has the sound I was looking for – nothing like single-coils. FWIW, my usual rig is an Avalon U5 + Stewart World 1.2 + pair of 1x12 cabs (either Bergantino or Epifani), and the Level 5 with Thomastik jazz flats sounds plenty punchy through this rig.

I have been playing since 1968, and have only had active basses for the past 3 or 4 years. I’m going to keep an active bass around (Lakland 55-01 w/Sadowsky preamp), but I really only play one bass at a time, so the Level 5 is what I’ll be using 99% of the time.

I have a couple of gigs this weekend and am looking forward to them and will report back.

 

Hey, Zulu, sorry - but not that sorry!

I will report back on Monday about the sound of the pickups after I have played it for a while.

 

After playing a couple of gigs this weekend, I am very happy with this bass. The guys in the band yesterday oohed and aahed at the finish and the birds-eye fretboard. More importantly, the drummer (who also plays a little bass) oohed and aahed at the tone.

Single coil pickups have a certain “punch” to the sound that, IMHO, you can’t get any other way. The Aero pickups certainly have that punch, and they also have a big, well-rounded tone. The one downside of passive pickups is the limited maximum output if you are used to an active setup. I had to turn my amp up by about 10 dB when using the Level 5 as compared to my Lakland-with-Sadowsky.

It’s hard to do comparisons of pickups unless everything else is the same, so I can’t really compare the Aero’s to other pickups, except to say they sound about as good as I have ever heard from single coils. The other basses I have around include a ’69 Precision, ’99 Mexi-Jazz, MTD Beast 5 wenge/poplar, and the aforementioned Lakland 55-01 w/Sadowsky. On Friday I used the Mexi-Jazz and the Level 5 sounds quite like the Jazz, except a little more high-end punch (which you might expect from the maple/ash Level 5 vs. the rosewood/alder of the Jazz) and a lot more bottom (which IMHO most 5 strings have compared to 4 strings due not only to the obvious presence of the B string but also because of the more massive neck).

My favorite-sounding bass up until now has been the MTD Beast 5. It has nice Bartolini single-coils in it, with exposed pole-pieces that are arranged in an arc that keeps the pole-to-string distance more constant. I played this for about a year until it was apparent that the asymmetrical neck was, alas, wreaking havoc with my fretting hand. The Beast also has a long reach out to the end of the neck. I can’t do a direct comparison between Beast and Level 5, since I have “place holder” strings on the Beast and my favorite TI Jazz Flats on the Level 5. But I am at least as happy with the Level 5 tone as I was with the Beast, which I mean as a true compliment.

I got the Lakland for the skinnier neck profile and shorter reach. The preamp that comes with the 55-01 was OK, but I put a Sadowsky preamp in it and like it a lot. This bass has a well-broken-in set of TI flats on it, and sounds very smooth, not a lot of twang or punch. I cut the nut down a little, since the frets on the 55-01 are so small, and set the action really low, so it’s not a “dig in” bass any more, but it works great for a big, smooth sound for the folk and Celtic that I sometimes play. The Sadowsky preamp works well for me – adding a touch of low end can really round out the sound at low to medium volumes.

Comment on tone controls – I tend to find a tone I like, and leave the bass set that way, and do tone modifications with the amp. I also tend to leave dual pickups set evenly to minimize hum; then set the neck pickup about as close to the strings as I can and back the bridge pickup down a little lower. My knob settings for the Level 5 so far are to leave the tone controls all the way to treble and the balance control even. I also found that backing the tone control for the neck just a bit smooths the tone out a bit for low-to-medium volumes.

Last comment – Matt knows what he is doing with setup. I lowered the bridge settings on all the strings initially, as the setup seemed high compared to what I was used to on the Lakland. After playing for a while, I moved the setup back up a bit, especially on the B and E strings so they wouldn’t rattle when digging in around the 3rd or 4th fret. So my setup is pretty close to what Matt did – kudos to him.