Overall, compared to my usual basses, G&L L-1000s, both with rosewood boards, I felt the butter bass with its maple board sounded fuller on the upper registers. I don't spend a lot of time up there, as I always feel like my basses just lose a little body and vibrance when I do so, but the butter bass didn't seem to do that. Call it honeymoon phase or whatever, the butter P felt stout and strong when I played up high. The notes felt like they were singing; I can't really explain it.
I play with a pick in that band and everything felt and sounded great. I would flick the tone down on some of the more mellow tunes, and then dime it when going hard. The butter bass performed admirably.
Fast forward to last night, with yacht rock band rehearsal. We use IEMs and one guy does use a monitor speaker. I play through a Zoom B2Four multi-effects pedal and call up whatever patch I need for whatever song we do.
Much the same as with my indie rock band, the butter bass was wonderful to play. Everything sounded full and clear in my IEMs, and also sounded super tasty when I noodled around with them out (listening via my mate's monitor speaker). The bass sounded great in nearly all the songs we played, except for the brief (yikes) slapping I do in the song "Somebody's Baby." I may need to choose a different patch or hit a boost button or something. I felt like all the bottom end dropped out when I slapped.
I did raise the saddles a tiny bit prior to practice. Mainly because I'm a super heavy striker and I found I was getting a lot of noise. Even though I do play lighter with IEMs, eventually, I will go for it, so having a little more clearance works for me. I thought it played great, even better than the last rehearsal.
In between rehearsals, I did some more light recording. I took an old song that I played a '93 G&L SB-2 on, used fadr.com to create stems, imported it all into Audacity, and then used my Trace-Elliot GP12 Series 6 to feed my Scarlett Focusrite. Using the line out from the TE into the input jack of the Focusrite was a bit of a revelation. I turned OFF the "instrument" button on the Focusrite, thereby removing the boost it would otherwise give to the instrument's signal. This gave me room to increase the input gain on the Focusrite without blowing out my signal.
Overall, the TE performed great and feeding the butter bass signal into my PC was a lot of fun. I did compare the butter bass (Mojotone 70's clone PUPs) with my black bass (62 Custom Shop PUPs) again, and the reality is, they sound very similar to my untrained ears. The signal coming off the butter bass is hotter for sure, but adjusting my input when playing the black bass seemed to address that.
When I adjusted each bass track I recorded in the confines of the song, either one sounded really awesome, even with my super limited engineering skills. Both basses have rounds on them and both were full, aggressive and a pleasure to listen to.
Ultimately, it seems that it took me approximately $900 to realize that I already had a $400 P bass that would be really great for me. I was already starting to fall for the black bass, yes. But the butter bass had some upgrades, as well as that maple neck, that pushed it over the edge for me. I have no regrets in buying it. It is really making me appreciate the black bass though.
