If you take a look at the top-selling basses
these days, you’ll find endless variations of
the Leo Fender designs, plus some imported
originals created to catch the eye of younger
players wanting to emulate their favorite bass
superstars. To find a bass that has escaped
CNC-machine cloning, you’ll need to travel
beyond the mom-and-pop and big-box music
stores to a bass boutique where the prices
zoom up quickly beyond the two thousand
dollar mark—and the attention to detail in
design and build increases accordingly. These
two Elrick basses fall into that category.
screwdriver-style
Allen wrench for
adjusting the bridge
saddles.
On the back of the
body, there is a deeply sculpted cutaway to
comfortably accommodate better access
up the neck. The neck heel is ergonomically
sculpted to match, avoiding the usual cliff-and-stair joint of this bass’s classic ancestor. The
headstock departs from the classic as well,
angling back to avoid the use of string trees.
The Bartolini J-style pickups added further to
the toned-down look, since they don’t have
exposed pole-pieces. Sonically, these pickups
allow a pretty serious range of tones, from
warm, modern and smooth to snappy, aggressive and bright. Tapping the top of the bass, I
heard a bit of “spring ping” from the bridge
pickup, where the springs supporting a
pickup produce a little sound of their
own—nothing major, but a small disappointment nonetheless.
ELRICK
Expat Series New Jazz Standard and Platinum Series e-volution Single-Cut 5 BY DAN BERKOWITZ
These basses are clearly not for every player—
both because of their price and their sound—
but if you’re hankering for a bass beyond the
ordinary, you might soon hear them calling to
you in the soft breezes of the night.
Expat Series New Jazz Standard
The New Jazz Standard (NJS) takes a long-standing design in the bass world—a contoured body and sleek neck with a pair of
single-coil pickups—and brings it into the new
millennium. Built in the Czech Republic from
all US components, it closely replicates the
dimensions of the hand-carved Elrick model
built in Chicago.
The NJS is elegantly understated, with a
piano-black lacquer finish on an alder body
topped off with black knobs and a satin silver Hipshot bridge. The 24-fret, three-piece
neck is likewise understated. Its quarter-sawn
maple fingerboard eschews position markers,
providing only petite black dots on the fingerboard edge. The veneer-capped headstock
is equally simple, with a conventional shape
and no adornment other than a small, round
Elrick “e” toward the end, along with the satin
Hipshot tuners. Elrick adds a modern innovation to the build with a deep bolt-on neck that
uses six screws and runs clear through to the
neck pickup. Like the old school, though, the
truss rod access is through the neck heel end,
except that the truss rod nut can be reached
without any disassembly. Thoughtfully, Elrick
includes a ball-end, t-handle Allen wrench
among the in-case goodies, along with a
The Bartolini NTMBF electronics
provide for three bands of cut-and-
boost EQ, with an alternative EQ
center on the midrange knob via
a push-pull switch. In a similar way,
the volume knob can be pulled up
to bypass the electronics, although
doing so cuts out all but the volume
and blend pots. This would be useful
in a dead-battery emergency mid set,
but the preamp really adds life to the
bass—I would imagine playing in
active mode all the time.
With the EQ set flat, this is a
fairly neutral sounding instrument—more polite than the
classic version—letting the
player bring out his own
voice rather than trying to
modify a pre-existing voice
distinctive to a specific design.
I generally found that favoring
one pickup or the other via the
blend pot brought out some
