I just purchased an Ibanez GSR200 from the local music shop, and absolutely love it. Although, this is what I am upgrading from: An old Johnson 4 string that I literally rescued from ending up in a dumpster, over ten years ago. It has been sitting, unused, in my basement ever since. There is a small crack in the head stock up around the e string tuner, and has a heck of a warped neck. I put new strings on it last month and started working scales as best as I could, until I was satisfied that bass playing was something that I was going to pursue. Today I took the plunge and purchased the Ibanez GSR200BK. It has a pair of active pickups, I guess you call them P&J's. The tones and playability right out of the store is great, and I won't have to mess with anything for quite a while. Maybe change the strings over to flatwounds, which are my personal preference. One thing that confused me was the description of “medium frets”. I am used to seeing descriptions such as “full sized”, “long scale”, “short scale”, etc. On my long scale Johnson bass, I can barely stretch between 3 and 5 on the e string. On the GSR200, I can easily make that stretch. I measured both necks, and they are both long scale, 34 inch necks. I made this purchase along with a good, soft case, and tuner, leaving the store for under $300.
Highly recommend this for some one like me, just starting out, and don't have long, piano player fingers.
Good choice, Ibanez make great guitars with a wide range of prices, the idea being get you hooked as a beginner and still have something better to offer you later on. Now if it's a 34“ scale, which it is, the distance between the frets is identical to any other 34”, the difference from your old bass could be the shape of the neck, there are different neck profiles, ‘C’ profile is a fairly flat curve, ‘D’ profile is a bit rounder and fatter, ‘A’ profile is a bit pointy etc. As for ‘Medium’ frets, this is a reference to the height and width of the actual fret, but medium is a bit vague when you consider that The Jim Dunlop Company have over 130 different sizes of fret wire. Fingerboard Radius is another area that affects playability, I find the larger the radius the flatter the fret board and easier to play.
BTW, Flatwounds are dull and don't sustain as long as Roundwounds which are bright but noisy as you move around the neck so it's a bit so a trade off. I remember Groundwounds from years ago which were Roundwounds ground flat to give the best of both worlds
My preference, due to Vienna sausage fingers and consequently having to move about on the fingerboard more than the ‘piano-fingered’ players, is also for flatwound and halfround strings (aka groundwound).
I forgot to mention that you should pay attention to string guage (e.g. 0.45 - .105) as well as scale. You'll want to make sure that the slots in your nut will accept the size of string. If not, your string will not slot down in the nut as it should (not good).
I bought a set of Rotosound Steve Harris flatwounds once, only to learn that the A and D strings were too thick for the nut on my P bass. The same thing can happen with nylon flatwounds, especially big, fat E strings. Cheers.
