Gretsch G6072

Features:

Body Double Cutaway
Neck 3-Piece Maple
Back, Top, & Sides Laminated Maple Body, 17" Wide, 2" Deep
Bridge Rosewood-Based Adjustable 4-Saddle Bridge
Frets 20
Pickups 2 FilterTronTM Pickups
Scale 34" (864mm)
Case G6268 Deluxe Hardshell Case
Tone switch, Kill Switch, Pickup selector switch, master volume, individual Pickup volumes. Finish is Poly, gretsch calls it Shaded sunburst or something similar. I wish it had an individual tone knob as opposed to the switch, it offers no treble (top), no effect (middle), half the treble (lower). Ducking one point here. Also volume knobs have no effect until you get to 1/8 turn from full volume. The neck is a lot less chunky than my jack casady but fuller than my Rumblefish PJ, it's taper is like a gibson though.

The tone of this bass unplugged is loud enough to play without an amp in your room for practice (almost as much as an acoustic bass with low projection). I think that the tone is somewhere between a Hofner and a Fender. It has the boom of a Hofner with the bite of a fender. But it has more defenition. The bass is very lively and responsive to dynamics. It sounds as if a fender had a floating bridge on an archtop bass, but it has more sustain than a hofner but much less than my jack casady bass. The notes are very full and clear. When playing higher than the 17th fret the notes tend to not have the same bloom and sustain as the rest of the fretboard. I attribute that to the floating bridge. It doesn't really favor high up on the neck Peter Hook type of playing, but it can't be beat for groove playing like Air's La Femme D'argent. Also it's really good for old school punk.
A word about the pickups. When I first got this bass I realized that it has filtertron pickups for guitar six screw bobbins, so I thougth I would upgrade to the TV Jones thundertrons. My main concern was that since the TV Jones have twice the output and "thunderous bass" it would be too much, as it already has good bass response. They were supposed to make me a neck pickups with pole pieces instead of the bars since the position of the neck pickup which translates into greater clarity. Apparently it is still in development and they wouldn't be able to send it for about six months so I canceled the order. Honestly I don't think that this bass needs the pickups change unless you want more output. Just to give an idea, I couldn't overdrive the input of my mesa walkabout even with the drive on 10. If I want OD I just run it with my Hematoma bass OD. One thing though with this bass is that it feeds back pretty easily so if you are going to have it really loud you should probably stand very very far from your amp.

Set was was pretty good, although I lowered the action quite a bit. The pickups are standard Gretsch where you have to either put shims or remove shims from the cavities to adjust their height. This is another thing that the TV Jones pickups provide is adjustable pole pieces but for 250.00 plus shipping a set for adjustible pole pieces and twice the output it seems a bit too expensive for me. This is the first bass that I bought that had no flaws on it. Everything was as it should be.

I think it should withstand live playing, as long as you treat the instrument with care. It seems to be less rugged than my jack casady,probably because it is a real hollow body. The strap buttons are solid although only time will tell.

I wrote Gretsch an email asking about the pickups and the bridge and never got a response, since they are owned by fender you can take a guess as to why they didn't resond.

Been playing for 15 years. I've had about 10 basses from 70's P-bass, G&L L2000, Univox Rick copy, Fender Sting bass. I currenly own a Jaguar bass with DarkStar picukps, a Jack casady with Gibson pickup, a reverend PJ and this bass. This is by far the best bass I have ever had or played. My only wish is that it would have more sustain and seem more durable. But if it did have more sustain then the notes probably wouldn't bloom as they do.