LeCompte Electric Bass STSS-5

35" scale, (5) piece maple/neck w/wenge binding
Two piece poplar body
Bloodwood and osage orange top
Dual action truss rod
Gotoh lightweight tuners
ABM bridge, 18mm spacing
Bartolini jazz pickups
Bartolini 3.3 A/P 2 band preamp
Body finish - gloss polyester
Neck finish - satin polyurethane

Tone
When it comes down to it, the tone is the most important thing (obviously). The STSS-5 sounds amazing. It's got a full bodied and resonant tone that just growls, barks and thwacks. The jazz pickups compliment the instrument very well and while I was never a fan of poplar bodied instruments before, it works perfectly in this instrument. I'm amazed at the range of tones this thing has. The controls are Vol, Balance and then a concentric Tone/Bass knob. This is simple and works great. I thought I might miss having a mid control but I really don't think it's necessary on this instrument. Turning the bass up while on the bridge pickup, I can get a very Stingrayesque slap tone while turning the bass down a tad and on the neck pickup or with just a tad of bridge pickup thrown in, I can get a more modern slap sound ala Adam Nitti.

Turning the balance control just a hair towards the treble yields a very modern and growling fingerstyle sound. Playing around with the pickup balance along with sone fine adjustment with the tone controles can yield a range of fingerstyle tones such as the growly burpy jaco tone, the darker Willis tone, the Darryl Jones sound, Victor Bailey etc. Great fusion bass. I don't really play metal or grundge so I can't comment on it's tone within those genres but my guess is that there is not much this bass cannot do.

Build Quality
Build quality is superb. Fit and finish are wonderful. This instrument is so beautiful it could be a museum or art piece. Neck joint is tight and all the routing for the controls is tight and smooth. The wenge fingerboard binding is very well done and extremely beautiful against the maple neck and of course the osage orange and bloodwood accents on the body and matching headstock overlay contribute to a product which is as beautiful to look at as it is to play. I'm not such a big fan of "10" tops and furniture guitars. I have seen many instruments which look like fine furniture but sound sterile or are muddy or have other negative tonal artifacts due to the instrument being built strictly based on how the woods will look as opposed to how they'll sound. However, this bass is living proof that if designed properly and instrument can have the best of both worlds.

See Build quality

Handmade instrument. You talk directly to the luthier.

Just to give you some background info, I'm the author of "Sheets of Sound for Guitar" - www.sheetsofsound.net. I've been playing and teaching jazz/funk/fusion guitar and bass for over 25 years and have given improvisation lectures at jazz festivals have taught jazz guitar on the college level.'Nuff about that.

I recieved this instrument on 6/15/06. It's a fantastic sounding bass with a broad range of tones. It covers a lot of tonal territory from Jaco/Willis growling fingerstyle funk to Louis Johnson slap and a host of tones in between.

The maple fingerboard gives the bass some pop to the attack but turning the treble control down gives you a very smooth fingerstyle tone ala rosewood or pau ferro. The 35" scale contributes to a very resonant tone and a very articulate and defined low B string. The best Low B I have heard in a long time. It'll be interesting to compare it to my buddy's Sadowsky NY 5 string...It was setup with very low action and no buzzing. Just the way I like it.

The body style is a bit radical. Several folks have commented that it looks like George Jetson's bass. However, this is a method to the madness of the design. The long upper horn allows the bass to be balanced on a strap while the cutaway gives you perfect access to the upper frets. My particular approach to right hand technique is that I trail the thumb from string to string and keep my wrist straight instead of resting the forearm on the top of the bass ala Stanley Clarke and others. This causes many basses to be neck heavy for me. For example, I recently auditioned a Ken Smith 5 string which sounded wonderful but was a chore to keep the neck from diving because of that issue. I was originally concerned when I saw the pictures of this bass but Bud's design works perfectly here and the instrument balances great with no neck dive. Additionally, I'm able to get to the 24th fret without having to arch my left wrist. This is a tricky balance. I've noticed that 5 and 6 string basses typically fall into two categories:

Basses with great upper fret access that are neck heavy
Basses with limited upper fret access that are balanced
It's not just a matter of how deep the cutaway is. It's a balance of the neck body joint, where the upper strap horn is in relation to the nut, etc. If the upper strap button reaches past the 12th fret (towards the nut) it usually counteracts the big neck's tendency to dive but a drawback to that method is it then puts the upper frets further in towards your body so that to get to the upper frets you are angling your arm almost parallel to neck resulting in having to painfully arch your wrist. On the other side of the fence are the basses with a short upper horn. This moves the upper frets more to the left of your body allowing access but some of these instruments then have a problem with long stretches to get to the first fret and a tendency towards neck diving.

I'm happy to say that the LeCompte STSS-5 solves both of these problems by it's design.

Here's some links to pix:

http://www.jackzucker.com/images/lecompte/lec-stss5-04.jpg
http://www.jackzucker.com/images/lecompte/lec-stss5-01.jpg