Bass Lab – Fibenare Globe 5 (fretted)

The first thing everyone says when they see this bass is, “Wow, that’s beautiful!” It sure is; very beautiful. The wood combinations are warm, comfortable looking, and inviting. The fingerboard and pickup covers are in a striking striped padouk and even appear to be matching. The neck has nice flame maple with padouk and walnut stringers. The body is alder with a maple top showing beautiful figure. All that is wrapped in a lovely blue tint and high-gloss clear finish.

The bass balances its decent weight very well, standing or sitting. The instrument plays smoothly from bottom to the top of its range without obvious dead spots.

Electronics are apparently all in-house creations. The EQ points in the 3-band seem a bit unusual, although I found plenty of sounds I liked in the system. It sounds greats and one can find many excellent tones among the combinations of the pickups and their single-coil/series/parallel switches; more than enough combinations, really. The electronics are well-wired and well-shielded with copper foil. The parts that can be seen are of high quality.

The bridge and saddles are in-house built, an apparently based on the Steinberger bridge design. The keys are classic Gotoh®. The joinery is fantastic, the neck fit and all the construction details are quite good. The finish is thin and well-applied.

The truss rod isn’t providing too much movement, and under string tension, it remains flat with no tension. It’s not able to move into relief very far. At this point in the instrument’s life, these aren’t huge issues. Depending on how it settles, they could be.

This bass is fascinating. One of its best hidden advantages is the compound or conical radius built into the fingerboard. It starts quite round in the lower frets and flattens out as it goes up. This allows the player to do aggressive upper-register bending and still keep the action quite low.