Bass Blog: New Gear Day! Sire V7 Review

Hi Steemians,

Today was the day I had been anticipating for nearly two weeks, my brand new Sire Marcus Miller V7 finally arrived in the mail. For those of you who don't know the Sire V7 is a bass guitar created from the collaboration of bass legend, Marcus Miller, and Sire, a Californian bass guitar manufacturer who outsource their manufacture to Indonesia. Now I know what you are all thinking. "How can a cheap Indonesian built bass be any good". Well here I am to find out if all the hype around this guitar has been warranted.

Packaging

I ordered from Thomann as they are the only traders who stock the Sire V7 that is of easy access to me. Delivery was as specified and packaging was very good. It was double boxed with plenty of air cushions and Styrofoam. Once getting into the basses box it was wrapped in a Styrofoam sheet and the control panel had a foam block protecting it. Everything was in perfect order.

Initial Thoughts

The finish on this bass is incredible. For only £380 the finish is flawless, glossy coated body plus a glossed neck and head stock with no imperfections that can be seen. While taking it out of the packaging the first thing that I noticed was how thin the neck was. The neck at the first fret is one of the thinnest I have ever seen being around an inch an a half in width. Plugging in for the first time was exciting until finding that the person who had set it up had done an incredibly rushed job. The neck was far too flat meaning the lowest frets had buzz and the bridge had some hap-hazard string height work done not to mention the intonation being quite a way out. Luckily it was a quick twenty minute job to sort it out with the supplied hex keys. I will be making a post in the near future talking about how to set your bass up properly with regards to these issues.

Build Quality

Surprisingly the build quality is nearly perfect considering the bass was manufactured in Indonesia. The neck pocket is tight, all screws are threaded properly and are flush, the bridge is high mass and solid, the tuners seem stable (we will see after a week of playing) and impressively the stock nut is bone. I have only two small negative quality remarks which would be the active/passive switch seems a little cheap and loose to touch and the jack input seems to be slightly soft. Both of these things are pretty common with cheaper basses and to upgrade would cost mere pennies for the parts and a little bit of soldering know how. All in all the quality is amazing for a bass of this price.

The Sound

Of course the most important part of any instrument is the sound. In the past I have played original Fender Jazz basses including top end american deluxe variants and I can honestly say the sound is absolutely comparable to the point in which the standard listener would not be able to tell the difference. The Eq section has a Master volume stacked with a master tone and also a pickup blend knob, all of which work as they should, the neck pickup is jazzy with a touch of growl and the bridge pickup is bright and perfect for slapping. The active part of the EQ, which only works when the active switch is turned on, contains a treble, mid boost/cut stacked with frequency and a bass control all of which work perfectly and can be pushed to extreme measures allowing a lot of versatility in the tones and of course genres that can be played with this bass. Keep an eye on this blog as I will be uploading some covers at a later date using this bass.

Feel free to drop any questions in the comments and I will do my best to answer!