A brief demo of the sound of the Sire Marcus Miller V7 Alder 2nd 5 string bass. Made in Indonesia.
The bass was recorded via PreSonus Studio 68c card directly into the OBS software without any effects, equalization, compression, normalisation or postprocessing. This is the most clean sound I was able to get directly from the instrument.
0:00-0:27 fingerstyle, both pickups, passive, tone 100%
0:27-0:44 fingerstyle, neck pickup, passive, tone 100%
0:45-1:08 fingerstyle, bridge pickup, passive, tone 100%
1:09-1:45 fingerstyle, both pickups, active, preamp EQ flat, tone 100%
1:45-2:02 fingerstyle, neck pickup, active, preamp QE flat, tone 100%
2:02-2:22 fingerstyle, bridge pickup, active, preamp QE flat, tone 100%
2:23-2:55 fingerstyle, both pickups, active, lower mids +preamp 20%, tone 100%
2:55-3:45 fingerstyle, pickups bridge 70%/neck 30%, active, lower mids +preamp 20%, treble -30%, tone 100%
3:46-4:12 slap, both pickups, active, preamp EQ flat, tone 100%
4:12-4:40 slap, both pickups, active, bass +20%, mids -20%, treble +20%, tone 100%
4:41-5:07 picked bass, both pickups, active, preamp EQ flat, tone 100%
4:41-5:23 picked bass, bridge 30%/neck 70%, active, preamp EQ flat, tone 100%
5:24-5:46 picked bass, bridge 80%/neck 20%, active, preamp EQ flat, tone 100%
5:47-6:10 chords, both pickups, active, preamp EQ flat, tone 100%
from 6:14 chromatic notes on all strings, open string sustain
Image gallery can be found under • Sire Marcus Miller V7 ...
Technical details and comments:
The alder is quite a big one, but ergonomic. Looks gorgeous in the burgundy gloss finish. The maple has an ebony fretboard with pearl block inlays and 20 frets. The back of the neck is matte which makes positioning of the left hand very smooth and fast.
The pickups sound pretty good to my ear. Neither of them is anemic when soloed. Surprisingly, there is inly little single coil hum when soloing the pickups.
The controls are as follows: Volume/Passive tone dual pot, Balance, Treble, Middle and Middle frequency sweep double pot, Bass, Active/Passive switch. The bass sounds well in the passive mode. The active EQ is actually pretty good, it is quite musical, has very low noise, and adds many useful characters. The B-string is decent and well defined for a 864 mm scale instrument. The bass has quite a long sustain.
I was positively impressed by the instrument, its sound and playability. There was a neck dive. However, you may notice on the videos that the G string is pretty much closer to the fingerboard edge than the B string. This is caused either by a mismatch in the assembly of the neck and body axes, or a wrong orientation of the heavy mass bridge. That is why I returned the bass to the store. The rest of the craftmanship was completely OK. With a better quality control it could have been a great bass.