G&L Tribute JB-2 - Shell Pink Review

Acceptable, but not as good as other Indonesian guitars

I shopped for a shell pink bass for nearly 2 years. I did not want a flea signature, and other than that the options are basically none. When this bass showed up I grabbed it right away, and I'm not unhappy with it.I can make a couple comments on it. First, I have a musicman sub stingray bass which very obviously is made in the same Indonesian factory. Some of the hardware is… read more identical, and some of the construction details are identical. The musicman sub however is a superior bass in terms of how it plays, the fretwork, the electronics, and some of the fit and finish. The musicman sub was $, which makes the G&L a poor value. If I didn't really want the shell pink, I wouldn't keep this G&L. Maybe my musicman is just a winner and I got lucky with it, but it plays perfectly and sounds great with no issues so that's my standard to judge by.The G&L has fret issues which I've been fixing. 9 frets were too high and had to be taken down and crowned. Prior to this the action had to be way higher than I like and was outside the range of adjustability. After lowering those frets, the action became adjustable by truss and saddles and it's not bad. All the frets required the ends to be filed and smoothed. New guitars will often have fret sprout, not a big deal but these frets were just not well finished to begin with.The electronics in the G&L are unusable, basically intolerable. The pickups sound good live with a band, mostly, but are a bit hot. It plays through a modeler and records terribly. It would be nice if I could just drop the volume but that pot is basically an on/off switch. The tone controls are eh. Not smooth in the range and really just ineffective. In order for me to play this bass much more I will have to swap the pickups and all electronics out. For reference, I use a mesa d800 head into Eden cabs or fender bassman neo cabs depending on where I am, and I practice into line 6 software and sony mdr 7506 phonesSo, I'm going to end up about $ and 10-15 hours work into this guitar and it will still likely play worse than my $ musicman. It's the pink I have to have so I'm not unhappy.I won't be looking at G&L tribute series for anything else though.

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