The luthiers at Lakland are fans, too, and they’ve spent the better part of two years developing and refining the prototype they first introduced at Winter NAMM in 2012. Called the Decade 6, Lakland’s 6-stringer features the same short scale, narrow neck, and triple-pickup configuration as the 6-string bass most of us are familiar with—the Fender Bass VI. But Lakland also instituted a few changes that make the Decade 6 much more than a high-end clone.
The Low Down
Dressed in a striking candy-apple-red finish,
a faux tortoiseshell pickguard, and black
pickup covers, the 30 1/4"-scale Decade 6
is a thing of beauty. Our review bass has an
alder body, but ash and mahogany are also
available, as are several other finish options.
The Decade’s “Shorty J” maple neck has a
4-bolt joint, and it’s topped with an 18-fret
rosewood fretboard adorned with bird’s-eye-maple
dot inlays. Tuned one octave below
standard tuning, the .024–.084-gauge strings
are anchored by open-gear Hipshot tuners on
one end and a custom bridge on the other.
The three JP-90 pickups are made in-house by sister company Hanson Pickups, and they feature alnico 5 magnets for crisp highs and tight, warm lows. With outputs of 8.6k for the neck and middle pickups, and 9.6k for the bridge, they’re very close to vintage specs. While the 5-way blade switching is more akin to, say, a Fender Strat, the single volume and tone controls are similar to the Fender Bass VI. That said, I would have liked to have seen Lakland include a version of the Bass VI’s bass-cutoff slider (aka the strangle switch)—a fan favorite that expanded the versatility of Fender’s already-expressive instrument.
Ratings
Pros:
Rock-solid build. Off-the-charts playability.
Versatile—from tic-tac to more modern tones. Excellent definition
and note separation.
Cons:
Lows aren’t as deep as a 4-string. Could use traditional
“strangle” switch. Pricey.
Tones:
Playability/Ease of Use:
Build/Design:
Value:
Street:
$3,250
Company
lakland.com
Deep Thoughts
Plugging the Decade 6 into a Verellen
Meatsmoke tube bass head driving an Ampeg
Isovent combo cabinet, I started out the way
many 6-string bass fans would: I set the amp
with lowered mids, turned down the lows
slightly, pushed the treble, and palm-muted a
spaghetti-western bass line. The resulting tic-tac
tone was spot-on with the sound of cowboy
film soundtracks that Ennio Morricone
made famous in the ’60s, but with noticeably
more midrange muscle and bite. More traditional
bass parts had an extremely detailed
attack and upper midrange, with the thick,
rubbery response that short-scale basses are
known for. In fact, the tones were so full and
robust that, had I been blindfolded and listening
to someone else playing the Decade 6,
I would’ve been convinced they were playing
a traditional 4-string.
Each of the five pickup-switch positions offers a wealth of distinct tones, from the scooped midrange in positions two and four to the bolder mids and highs when soloing the bridge and the bowel-rattling subs from the middle and neck pickups. The instrument also handled overdriven tones with aplomb—a fact that should prove appetizing to players hungering for heavier sounds. Playing full chords through the Meatsmoke’s roaring overdrive channel yielded a monstrously powerful wall of sound that still managed to retain clarity. The note separation—while not as defined as an electric guitar’s—was light years beyond what most standard basses can produce. And this gives the Decade 6 unique abilities to add contrasting textures within songs, such as using overdriven broken chords and fuzzed-out melodic interludes above the 12th fret.
The Verdict
The Lakland Decade 6 is a marvelous
instrument that not only nails the time-honored
6-string bass tones of yesteryear,
but also has its own unique voice. It
combines the warm, syrupy lows of a traditional
4-string with the bright attack of
a P-90-equipped guitar. Though the low
end doesn’t quite reach the depths of a P- or
J-style bass, the tones are expansive enough
to cover a wealth of musical applications.
Everything about the Decade 6—from the
solid build to the even weight, attractive
looks, and knockout playability—is tailored
to near perfection. And then there’s the
huge fun factor.
Bassists who eschew picks or think the narrow string spacing is just for guitarists might be tempted to pass by this Lakland, but they’d be doing themselves a serious disservice. The Decade 6 brings the timeless tones of the 6-string bass to a new generation, and its superb quality alone deserves the attention of even the harshest skeptics.
Sought primarily by materials engineers for its high strength-to-weight ratio, carbon fiber typically finds its way into things like tent-poles, space shuttles, and speedboats. Because carbon fiber can handle the considerable loads from string tension and take a serious beating, too, it also makes for an extraordinarily resilient guitar-building material. And in the hands of a highly skilled luthier like Elkayam, carbon fiber can also possess a unique singing resonance and excellent responsiveness. Those properties are the soul of Viktorian’s hollow Grace Status.
Of a Piece
The Grace is cast in a single mold and is,
thus, entirely a one-piece instrument—a
nearly seamless guitar from headstock to
endpin. Once you get past the marvel
of the unibody construction, one of the
first details you notice is that the 22-fret neck has no truss rod. So how would
you intonate this thing? Well, according
to Viktorian, you probably won’t have
to—aside from minor adjustments on
the chrome Tune-o-matic-style bridge.
Needless to say, necks made of wood
are subject to all sorts of temperamental
changes due to humidity, temperature,
etc., and anyone who’s flown with a guitar
knows how frustrating it can be to
land and have to perform with slip-shod
intonation before a show. Theoretically,
the Grace sidesteps this hassle via sheer,
unshakable structural rigidity. When it
came my turn to test this premise, true to
form, the Status rang with perfect intonation
right out of the box, despite zigzagging
across the U.S. on its way to me and
spending who knows how many hours on
a delivery truck.
Aesthetically, the Grace Status is bold, to say the least, with a sunset orange, micro-sparkle finish. An exposed carbon fiber racing stripe runs the length of the guitar, revealing the fascinatingly attractive weave of the material. The body shape is modern and a bit irreverent and unconcerned with tradition, with hints of Telecaster and some of Guild’s more oddball designs from the ’70s.
Sporting dual Viktorian Modern Classic humbuckers, the Grace has a 5-way pickup selector that doubles as a coil tap at the second and fourth positions—a highly dynamic configuration that also lets you blend the ’buckers in the middle position. Interior electronics include new-old-stock paper-in-oil capacitors, Bourns Pro Audio pots, and cloth-covered wiring. A brass alloy nut caps the C-shaped neck, and the headstock—which looks like a mix of PRS and Rickenbacker elements—are adorned with tuners of Viktorian design.
Hollowbody at Heart
When you pick up a Grace, you immediately
notice how readily it conforms
to your body. The sharp, lower-body cut
rests comfortably on your leg if you’re a
sit-and-strum guy, but throwing a strap on
and slinging it over your shoulder reveals
more about how incredibly well balanced
this guitar is—and it’ll stay on an even keel
whether you’re holding the neck or not.
The Grace also weighs a little under 5.5
pounds, which borders on feather light for
any guitar, but especially for an electric.
Even before plugging the Grace into an amplifier, I noticed an extraordinary amount of resonance and sustain when playing chords or single notes. But these qualities are exponentially enhanced when you plug into a nice, clean amp like the silverface Fender Bassman used for this test. With this setup, first-position chords rang with a rather amazing, crystal-clear sustain.
Ratings
Pros:
Highly diverse range of tones. Extremely durable
construction with minimal maintenance required.
Cons:
Likely expensive to fix major damages due to
1-piece design.
Tones:
Playability/Ease of Use:
Build/Design:
Value:
Street:
$3,279
Company
viktorian.com
The Viktorian Modern Classic humbuckers are responsive to control input and interact with the body to generate beautifully uniform string-to-string output. The top end has plenty of bite, but there isn’t a trace of harshness whether you’re in humbucker or coil-tapped mode. It makes the Grace wonderfully responsive to a soft touch—this guitar will delight fingerpickers with how well it translates picking nuance.
Interestingly, the hollowbody-and-carbon-fiber combination is a sweet recipe for slide work. Dropped into open D tuning, the neck pickup whistled with potency and sustain of the sort that Ry Cooder would love. And a ceramic slide created a lonesome drawl that exceeded the sustain of just about everything short of an organ with its keys taped down.
The Grace handled the high-gain tones of an Orange OR50 very well, too. The pickups are hot but not at all screechy, and they exhibited great clarity through extreme tube saturation. That said, fans of the heaviest metal styles may find the Grace a little light on bottom-end girth—galloping palm mutes on the low E aren’t quite as weighty as what get from, say, a Les Paul. What it might lack in grunt, though, the Grace makes up for in versatility, especially given the extra tones you get via the coil taps. Rolling off the volume and splitting the neck pickup delivers a cool, Telecaster-like honk but with an almost Epiphone Casino-style resonance. The fourth position also delivers a killer snapping tone with a cut in the treble range that’s perfect for country or rockabilly picking on cleaner amplification.
The Verdict
At $3,279 street, the Viktorian Grace Status
is a bit pricey for many of us. Heck, with
that kind of money you could easily buy
three pretty nice guitars. But, if you’re looking for just one to cover a ton of ground, the Grace is a marvel. The construction
and attention to detail is top notch, and
the 1-piece, carbon-fiber design is not only
bulletproof and nearly maintenance free (how much is that peace of mind worth to you on the road?), and it all adds up to
an uncommonly responsive guitar with a
massive tonal scope. Players with strictly
old-school tastes probably need not apply,
but forward-looking players who appreciate
how the guitar can still evolve as an
instrument will thrill to this convergence of
design and performance.
Unlike a lot of acoustic amps, the Humphrey’s control array isn’t cluttered with parametric EQ knobs, pads, or effects. In fact, any half-wit barbarian rocker who can figure out a Twin Reverb is likely to be at ease operating the Espresso 15. Knobs include input volume (or gain), master volume, treble, mid, and bass, and two small toggles activate a horn tweeter and a bright circuit. The control layout isn’t the only aspect of the Espresso 15’s construction that would be as familiar to an electric player as an acoustic specialist: The tube selection wouldn’t be out of place in a small electric-guitar combo amp—it includes the power section’s dual EL84s, two 12AU7 preamp tubes, and a 5Y3 rectifier tube. Perhaps the one area where the Espresso has something significantly in common with other acoustic amps is its driver—it’s loaded with a light, 10" neodymium-magnet speaker.
True Colors
Acoustic amps can be confusing tools for
the uninitiated, primarily because they’re
sensitive and prone to feedback. But that’s
less the fault of the amp than an inevitable
trade off that comes from balancing output
and the natural resonance of an acoustic’s
hollow body. But the Espresso 15, apart
from a tendency to have a strong resonance in the low end if you’re not judicious with
the bass control, is very forgiving and good
sounds are easy to get.
With a Martin D-18 outfitted with a passive L.R. Baggs M1 magnetic soundhole pickup and a Martin 00-15 with an active L.R. Baggs Element at the opposite end of the lead, the Espresso tended to sound most natural with the tweeter horn on, the bright switch off, and all three EQ controls down in the lower half of their range. And it’s wonderful that some of the finest sounds are available down this far in the EQ controls’ ranges, leaving lots of room to tailor your sound to a room, song arrangement, or band.
The best analogy or corollary for the Espresso 15’s sonic signature is a high-end tube stereo amplifier, which uses the headroom and warmth of tubes to reproduce the signal from a recorded source. The warm fidelity that you associate with audiophile hi-fi gear is something you hear very clearly in the Espresso 15. It’s not necessarily a transparent amp (a quality that’s of subjective worth anyway, depending on how you play), but it definitely retains the vocal essence of a given guitar.
Turning the horn off enables you to play it safe with regard to feedback. The tone becomes more concise, though you’ll lose a little bit of range, too. Strummers will likely want to keep the bright switch off because, although the amp definitely has the headroom to handle high end without feeding back—and it is way more forgiving than many solid-state models under similar circumstances—it can sound brash with heavy strumming. But the world of extra headroom you get by disengaging the bright switch and manipulating the very effective treble control gives you flexibility enough to create a cool strumming tone.
Running the D-18 through a few fingerstyle workouts and employing a gentle touch yielded sweet, soft, and bell-like clarity that made the Humphrey and magnetic pickups seem like a very natural match—enabling everything from a pure, distinct dread tone to muscular, husky, and crystalline sounds to rounder, mellower Gábor Szab—-style jazz tones when you manipulate the tone controls.
Ratings
Pros:
Looks so good! Superbly built. Fascinating and fantastic balance of color and transparency.
Cons:
Price might be a bit rich for some.
Tones:
Playability/Ease of Use:
Build/Design:
Value:
Street:
$2,795 street ($3,235 as configured here with balanced line out and matching stand)
Company
humphreyamps.com
Tuning down to double drop D and running through a propulsive take on Neil Young’s “The Loner” found the Humphrey willing and able to generate ample low end with a heavy but cool compression—and not a hint of bottom-end feedback.
My smaller, all-mahogany 00-15, with its more concise and bell-like sound, was the better match for generating true acoustic detail. In intimate settings—the kind you’d get in a coffee house, small club, or gallery—the Humphrey imparted a beguiling sense of dimension and space, adding soft contours to the undersaddle pickup’s output without trimming harmonic content.
The Verdict
With looks that would be at home in a
fine design retrospective at the Whitney
Museum of American Art in New York,
the Humphrey Espresso 15 is as close to an
heirloom-level piece of gear you’re going to
get—at least on the amplification side of
the equation. Some of that design elegance
translates into ease of operation, particularly
if you’re an electric-minded player—for the Espresso just isn’t much different than a
blackface Fender. It’s only the sensitivity of
the controls that takes some getting used to,
like any acoustic amp.
It’s the sound of the Espresso, however, that tips it from the category of a looker to a performer. Acoustic players who treasure absolute transparency above all may not savor the subtle mood and shading that the Humphrey and its tube complement add to just about every guitar. But apart from that trace of color, it retains and enhances the essential voice of every acoustic you put out in front. A lot of open-minded players will savor the Humphrey’s capacity to expand their guitar’s vocabulary in subtle ways. And no matter how lightly or heavily you use the Humphrey to color your sound, you’ll look unquestionably dashing with it onstage. In fact, we’d guess the only hassle that comes with owning the Humphrey is having to upgrade your wardrobe. I mean, you wouldn’t take the Rolls out for a spin in sweatpants, would you?
Watch our video demo: