Review : Ibanez SR400 Bass
As part of my ongoing process to find good products that provide excellent resources at fair prices and that will last a long time as a musician grows in his or her playing. I thought next to look at the electric bass space for a few reasons. Bass players tend not to fall into the gear trap like guitar players. After spending time with my friend Manny, who as listeners will know is a professional gigging and recording musician, I have a very good idea of how to select a bass and I also am a bass player who has bought and sold basses for decades, many of the buys being mistakes and the sells fixing my purchase mistakes. So I have a lot of personal experience.
Where To Start
As part of my goal to provide the best guidance, I have decided to go with a 4 string bass, instead of a 5 string or 6 string. This is what Manny recommends. He also recommends, as do I, going with a bass with passive electronics instead of active electronics. Active just adds a dependency on batteries and can get out of control pretty quick. I am very impressed by Yamaha’s basses in the $500 range, but when I expressed interest in doing a great intermediate bass, the good people at The Arts Music Store were united in picking an Ibanez product. I own an Ibanez 5 string multi-scale myself and it is a very nice bass indeed. Ryan went into the bass room and after consideration arranged to provide me with the pictured SR400 bass for this review. The photo does not do the beautiful Tropical Sea Floor finish justice. For 2024, Ibanez has dropped this beautiful colour in favour of a more generic amber burst, which is nice to be sure, but I like this finish better. If you like it too, The Arts Music Store has a couple available for sale at the time of this writing. The price tag on this particular model and colour is $769.99 CAD MAP. There are other models in the SR400 Standard family that sell for less.
Specs
Ibanez is one of the few makers who make it really simple to find out the specifications of their products and make them easy to understand.
The SR400 has a very comfortable and easy to grip neck made of 5 laminated pieces of maple and walnut. Contrary to common misunderstandings, laminated necks are actually stronger than one piece necks. In the SR400, the headstock is integral and not added after the fact. The neck is attached to the body with a standard 4 bolt design, but the attachment area, that we call the handshake, is nicely relieved and access to the upper frets is really simple. The fretboard is Jatoba and has 24 medium frets. Jatoba is an incredibly hard and dense wood from South and parts of Central America. It rings wonderfully. The neck width is like what would find on the well respected Fender Jazz bass, so having a narrower nut. This is a huge advantage for folks with smaller hands or shorter fingers. This makes this bass ideal for the younger player and would also suit a smaller female hand well. My daughter has smaller hands and she found it very comfortable. Medium frets mean a light fretting touch is all you need and if you do grip so hard as to press the strings into the fretboard the frets are not so tall as to push the note sharp.
The body is made of Nyatoh, a very common and well respected wood that grows in Asia. It’s reasonably light, but can vary as American Ash does. The Nyatoh body has a Quilted Maple top so the figuring is beautiful. Ibanez has used a deep rich gloss polyurethane as a top coat for durability..
The strings anchor at Ibanez’s Accu-cast B300 bridge. The factory gold finish looks great. Each string is individually adjustable for intonation and string height. This level of adjustment is very important in my opinion. The factory supplied strings are from D’Addario and are the EXL 165 set with gauges as noted, what we might call medium light. That Ibanez ships quality strings means that you may not need to change the strings when you first get your own. The tuning keys are very smooth and like the bridge and the knobs are finished in gold.
The pickups are what Ibanez calls PowerSpan Dual Coils. These are passive pickups and because they are of the dual coil or humbucking design are very quiet when you are not playing. However, unlike some humbucking bass pickups, these can still be nice and bright when you want them to be.
As the controls diagram shows there is a 3 way switch for the pickups. In the centre position, the pickups run in series as normal. In the up position, both pickups are tapped to behave as single coils in series. In the down position, you get the single coil with a power boost. This power boost requires the presence of a 9V battery in a box on the back. I understand why. When you tap a dual coil to single coil, the output of the pickup drops and Ibanez has provided the power tap to level out any volume loss. I am neither here nor there on this although I would prefer that there be no battery at all.
The tone controls are three separate knobs, for each of bass, middle and treble. They are regular tone controls that cover a specific part of the instrument’s frequency response. The bass, treble and middle knobs have centre detents. The master volume is close to the hand and I was impressed to discover that the high end does not vanish into the ether when you roll the volume off. The knob behind the master is the pickup balance knob and it has a centre detent as well.
As you can see from this Ibanez chart, the three tone controls have a decent amount of overlay, and the detent centre positions allow for boost or cut on each band. Some folks would prefer active electronics to make the band notch points parametric, but in practical terms this turns into option paralysis more times than not.
Initial Play Test
In my first play tests, I liked the variability of the pickups, certainly not one trick ponies. I use a number of bass amplifiers, bass amplifier / cabinet simulations as well as a bass DI box and I think it sounded good with all the options. I tend to be an Ampeg fan and it sounded brilliant through both the B15 and SVT amp/cab sims. My floor bass amps are from Traynor and Fender and the bass sounded great through both. However, when I am recording, my most common route as well as for practice is my EBS Microbass 3 DI box. The slap sample was recorded with this. It provides both a clean and a dirt channel and a really subtle compressor available that is similar to my long time favourite Ampeg Optical Bass Compressor. EBS amps are made in Sweden and can be a challenge to find in North America but I really like them a lot. You can hear them on many recordings, but I would refer anyone wanting to get a sense of them to listen to Jeff Beck’s Live at Ronnie Scott’s record with the amazing Tal Wilkenfeld on bass. Sorry, I digress.
The full scale length is very well laid out and doesn’t create a feeling of reaching to Mars to get to the first fret as happens with some full scale basses. In fact, it was so comfortable, I thought at first that it might be short scale. This makes the SR400 a great choice for players with smaller frames.
Out of the Box
I found that I needed to do more work on this bass straight out of the box than the S521 or RG470DX guitars that I have already reviewed, but much less work than the Jackson JS32 Rhoads. Nothing really awful, A guitar that ships from Indonesia in a cardboard box as this one did means months in a container at sea, and then sitting on a dock before being transported to a store. As I have noted before, I always recommend buying from a store the actually does a proper check on an instrument before you get it, and as always, I asked for a review unit that had NOT been inspected.
The neck was perfectly set up and the action was excellent out of the box. There were no high frets. I did find that the fingerboard was quite dry and had taken on the orangey colour that dried Jatoba can adopt. This also meant that there was some fret sprout on the treble side of the neck particularly between the 12th and 20th fret. This was easily rectified by me using a fret end file in a block. I also did two applications of Taylor Fretboard Conditioner allowing the product to sit for 15-20 minutes before buffing off. This brought the fingerboard back to a good level of care and also darkened the orangey colour to a more acceptable middle brown.
When I was loosening off the strings so I could work on the fret ends, I found that the strings were sticking in the nut slots. I had already measured the slot depths and found them to be excellent, so I used an inside file to gently open up the slot width. I also used some Nut Lube in the slots and that fixed all the string binding issues that had existed and made tuning more consistent. While the strings were held off the fretboard, I used a Stewmac Fret Stick to quickly remove any grime that had built up in shipping and storage.
These are all small things, but if not addressed would make for a less positive impression. This is why you should always shop with a proven guitar shop that will address these things, before you get the instrument. Be assured that there are stores I do not deal with because of their lack of attention or attempts to charge extra for what should be part of the initial sale.
Sample Recordings
This is a really nice bass to play. It’s pretty lightweight and those pickups are really versatile. I am a very poor slap and pop bass player, but I wanted to see if I could do so on this bass without all kinds of flapping strings and annoying buzz, so I plugged directly into the EBS Microbass 3 and ran that direct into my Clarett+ 8pre interface to Logic Pro. It sounded really decent to me, although I found the initial attack a bit spiky. I had not used the compressor in the EBS Microbass 3 so I added a buss with a Teletronix LA-3A compressor at a 50% feed and mixed that with the direct signal for this sample, before exporting as an MP3. Obviously, a better slap player would have done a better job, but I liked how easy it was to get that sound from the SR400.
While the first sample was recorded using the pickups in Humbucking mode, I wanted to give you folks a sense of the pickups in single coil boosted mode. So I plugged the bass directly into my Neural Quad Cortex and recorded the same riff with 4 different amps. No post processing was done on any of them, they are the profiles as used in the Quad Cortex. What I expect that you will discover is that this bass sounds great with a variety of amplifiers. The amps in use are:
Darkglass M
Ampeg SVT
MarkBass
Mesa Boogie Subway
It sounds wonderful in each, with each amp adding its own particular sound and characteristics.
Good To Go Kit
When getting started or even upgrading, there is often more to the success than just the bass, so I have decided to include a Good To Go recommendation kit. For this bass, here’s my kit list.
Ibanez SR400
Either a bass amp of reasonable solid state power greater than 50 watts for home, jams and small gigs, or a Bass DI box that goes straight to the PA. If an amp, the Ampeg Rocket 50, Fender Rumble 40 or MarkBass CMB121 are good choices. In physical amps, I personally like MarkBass and Ampeg, but note that they have very different sounds. Of course for portability a Spark Mini or Spark GO are unbeatable for sound and flexibility. If you decide to go with a DI box, this was done with basses long before guitarists started doing it. There are many out there but I will always lead with the EBS Microbass 3, and Manny recommends the newer Ampeg SGT-DI unit that emulates both an Ampeg B15 and Ampeg SVT and adds the Ampeg Super Grit Technology for a more driven sound. I have not had the chance to use this device but I trust Manny’s judgement. I like the drive side of the EBS Microbass 3 for the times I want a bit of preamp overdrive.
High quality cable - 20ft or less. Good cables last and are quiet. Cheap cables are a horror show. Consult your sales professional for their recommendation but I like cables from Pig Hog, Ernie Ball, Digiflex and D’Addario. Avoid coiled cables, they look cool to some but are noise factories.
Gig Bag - Hard cases are terrific until you actually want to take them anywhere. Unless you are in a band on the road, in which case a regular hard case won’t do the job, a well padded gig bag is ideal. In my experience, the Profile or house name bags are better built with more functionality than the guitar maker’s bag. Many basses these days do not include a gig bag. Make sure that there are pockets for your tuner, any tools that came with the guitar, like the truss rod wrench, a set of spare strings, and a string winder / trimmer.
Bass Stand - Hercules make the best stands but you can often get a house brand that will hold the guitar when it is not in its case and you are not holding it. Just make sure that whatever you choose if the hanger type extends long enough to handle the standard 34” bass scale length.
Bass Strap - Every bass needs a strap and every player, even sitting should use a strap. Gravity always works and a strap will save your guitar at some point. Lots of choices. Avoid fabric straps where the edges are sharp which hurts, Seat belt material is cheap, but the edges can be rough. I recommend real leather that has suede on the inside, which helps rein in instruments that are neck heavy. I do not like the fake leather or “vegan” straps as they are hot and sticky vinyl and develop an “interesting” aroma. My favourite straps come from Walker and Williams. I prefer a wider strap for a bass.
Tuner - No bass is complete without a tuner that goes with it all the time. Pedal tuners are great, but every player needs an in case tuner, and the Snark tuners are hard to beat. I prefer the cheaper models that take clock batteries as for the difference in price to the rechargeable unit, you can order a sheet of batteries from Amazon, or you may find a card of them in the shop from D’Addario priced very low.
String Changing Tool - The D’Addario Bass tools are great. One tool has a string winder and a bass string cutter. Every bassist needs this as every bassist should learn to change his or her own strings. It’s not hard, and that quality guitar shop might even offer a free session on how to do string changes efficiently that you can attend live. Also, there will be about a zillion YouTube videos on the subject.
Wrap Up
The SR400 is a really nice bass. While it needs a 9V for the Power Tap boost capability, the pickups are at least passive which I prefer. There are a variety of different finishes available in the family, separated by Ibanez’s usual incomprehensible model number schemes. Pick the finish you like and away you go. It sounds great for a variety of different styles and despite its full scale length is easy to handle, even for folks with smaller frames.
The no longer available Tropical Sea finish in the review model is gorgeous, but there are others available. While the bass was very good out of the box, I will always recommend buying from a credible store that goes over the instrument fully before it gets shipped to you. The minor things that I found would be resolved before you see it. If you are in Canada, consider shopping with The Arts Music Store as they ship Canada wide, if you cannot go to the physical store. If you are in the United States, please contact my friend James Ridings at Sweetwater.
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