Turner Renaissance Update: RS88 Re-Stringing Reviews 
5 / 5 based on 1 reviewsBass Palace [online] $1300 with gig bag,
strung with Thomastic Acousticore bronze
roundwounds [with nylon filament cores].
Parkway Music, Clifton Pk NY, $35 for
Rotosound RS88 extra long black nylon
covered steel core strings.
See other review for details, but it's the
very stringy acoustic tone that is the main
attraction of this bass.
I restrung it to get a stiffer, more normal
feeling string set under my right hand and
to have a flat wound set. The Acousticore
TIs it comes with are round wound.
The bass now sounds more like an upright
but less like itself [!?!] in that it has
less natural vibrato and string hum, but a
thicker, more "mwahh" fretless sound with
the possibility to have a "thumpy" attack
tone on demand. The TI strings were almost
"thump-proof", being too elastic and soft.
Anyway, I've now got the tone options just described, plus I can play much faster when
necessary because the strings now behave
normally under my right hand.
And speaking of right hand, this is a wide
[19mm] gage 5 string, which to me is very
important, setting it aside from the other
acoustic 5 strings I've tried [Carvin AC50
and a Washburn dreadnaught type].
I miss the ability of the elastic TIs to
handle various up- or down-tuning while
maintaining a fairly constant feel, not
floppier or tighter.
Please see other review. Briefly it's a
35" fretless bolt-on with an accoustic
body of very shallow depth, NO magnetic
pickups, and a piezo PU in the wooden
bridge. It has only 2 control knobs, no
switches etc. Think "shaker furniture".
I like this ax totally now. Although it's
designed around the Acousticore strings, I
hugely more prefer it with the black nylon
covered flatwound electic strings.
I could play this as my main ax. It's not
overly weird now, but still sounds unique.
The only headache left is finding a hard
case. It looks like it's gonna be $200
for a custom built empty box into which
the bass-in-gig-bag goes altogether.
Golem rated this unit
on
2003-11-18.
