Ibanez EHB1505 Bass Guitar – Dragon Eye

Pros:
Great tones!
Versatile
Well balanced, lightweight and comfortable while standing or sitting.
Play-ability

Cons:
Some construction/quality control issues

For the past 11 years my main bass has been a MusicMan 5 HH but the older I get the more that 11 pound bass has been killing my back! So I went on the search for a lighter more comfortable bass, which is something that seems to have become more popular lately. I settled on the Ibanez EHB 1505 because of a combination of price, features and online reviews. As far as tone, comfort and play-ability this thing knocks it out of the park! Those Nordstrand Big Splits sound great! Full range sound from highs to lows and everything in between, and in combination with the onboard preamp that has the variable mid control I can get a very wide range of tones, from Fender-ish P and J tones when in passive mode to aggressive metal or smooth boutique tones when in active mode. I have been playing bass for over a quarter of a century and I have never owned or played a bass that could make the range of tones this thing can, it’s like twisting a couple knobs and having a completely different bass! As far as comfort, I don’t have a way to accurately measure its weight but it is MUCH lighter than my Stingray, balances well on a strap, and I can stand thru long rehearsals without my back hurting. The lack of headstock feels weird at first but is easy to get used to. Without that weight at the end of the neck the center of mass is shifted more to the center of your body, which makes a bigger difference than what you would think. The feel of the neck is very different than my Stingray but didn’t take me long to adjust to and I find there are some things that are easier to play on it. Overall this bass is simply the most comfortable easy to play bass I have ever laid my hands on.

Now for the bad… First off, when the bass arrived I noticed right away that the concentric bass and treble controls were stuck together and turned as one. This was easy to fix on my own, especially with the included Allen wrench, one of which perfectly fit the screws for the plastic knobs. It does concern me a little though that I paid $1600 for this bass and there was a QC card with three signatures, which means three people checked this bass out and completely missed this obvious issue. Oh well, no biggie. Easy fix! Second, the burl poplar top is stunningly beautiful in person but it is very thin, and since the body is chambered I’m a little concerned that it won’t take a very hard impact to break it. I can tap my finger across the top and tell exactly where the body is chambered and the thin sound is not very reassuring. Hopefully this will never be an issue but I thought it worth mentioning, especially since a big part of the premium you are paying for over the EHB 1000 series is the more exotic woods and finish. Finally, the biggest issue I ran into was after two weeks of owning this bass one of the coils in the neck pickup stopped working. Each of these pickups has two coils, one that covers the B and E string and another that covers the rest of the strings, I was suddenly not getting any tone out of the B and E strings on the neck pickup. So I contacted Ibanez support and they had me ship the bass out to their repair facility in Bensalem, Pa. Fortunately this repair facility is roughly a two hour drive from my house so standard FedEx ground got it there overnight. The faulty pickup was replaced and shipped back to be the next day, altogether I was without it for only 3 days. Ibanez fixed it for free and sent me an RMA label so I didn’t have to pay for the shipping. When I got the bass back everything worked as it should but the setup they did after replacing the pickup wasn’t the greatest. The action was really high, uneven and the intonation was way off on a couple of the strings. The factory set up it came with was absolutely perfect so it was disappointing to have that perfect setup butchered so badly by their repair center, but I was not about to send it back again so I spent 30 minutes and set it up myself to where it was when I first got it.

Bottom line, with its versatile tone and overall comfort I would recommend this bass to anyone like me that is experiencing back pain when playing bass. In fact, I’d recommend it to anyone that just wants a versatile, great sounding and comfortable bass that doesn’t mind something a bit non-traditional. Just be prepared to possibly deal with some minor issues.