Vintage instruments have a long experience building high quality affordable instruments. This brand covers everything from folk and classic instruments to aggressive modern designs. One of the reasons why these instruments perform so well is that the great instrument designer Trev Wilkinson is a part of the Vintage team.
When we decided to start offering these instruments, we chose to start with the amazing Icon range. This is a series of classic design instruments and come with a nice Relic finish. This just shows how popular Relic finishes are, and Vintage have hit the nail in the head by offering the first affordable relic series instruments.
The bass that you see here is the Jazz Bass version in the Icon series, and has been obviously based on Jaco Pastorius' bass.
Several cosmetic details reveal that the people at Vintage have paid close attention to all the details in Jaco's bass:
- Converted to fretless: when Jaco did this himself, the fingerboard wood chipped, and this has been recreated to some extent.
- Jaco removed the Stacked Vol/Tone controls from his 60's Jazz Bass and relaced them with the more standard Vol/Vol/Tone, but in a way that the Volume control closer to the strings is actually the Bridge pickup Volume.
- No pickguard, as if it had been removed. The holes are still there.
- Lots of scratches and dents, just like the original.
The good news is that this bass is not just about cosmetics: playability is superb, and the range of sounds is quite amazing for the price. Actually, this is one of the few basses that come with a Tone control that actually does something. Two single coil Wilkinson pickups reproduce Jaco's trademark sound, which is surprising for a bass in this price range. Instead of trying to give the bass a more broadband frequency response, there is a nice midrange to it that actually sounds "correct".
Of course, you may use this bass for a variety of styles, but the Jaco thing will always be obvious. If you are a Pastorius fan, you can do worse than get this bass and pay homage to the master with style.