Ibanez GSRM20 Mikro Short-Scale Bass Guitar  

P and J pickups, decent hardware, light weight, smaller size and a very nice finish. 

Overall quality was impressive.

The setup as received was NOT good.  The pickups were set extremely high.   After lowering and balancing the pickups you could not adjust the bridge low enough before the screws bottomed out.   I had to shim the neck about .030" at the p/u side to properly set the action.  Now it plays great and has adjustablitity (bridge) in both directions.  The nut and truss rod settings were in the ballpark.

This is a very nice sounding bass and a good buy.  The variability you can get with both pickups is impressive and the neck action is fine.

It is a good choice for anyone who prefers a slightly smaller instrument. 

I purchased this bass for a friends daughter. 

I really like this bass but it needed a decent setup to be a "player".  Most guitars need to be tweaked which is sad because new players will not continue if the action sucks.  I see it all the time on Craigslist - "almost new guitar - played only a few times".  Most of the time, they are selling because the action was uncomfortable.

I would definitely buy this bass again but I would do so knowing it needed a proper setup.  To be fair, that goes for just about any guitar you buy nowadays.  I recently bought an expensive Taylor acoustic that sounded great but had lousy action from the factory.

Always figure on spending $50-$75 for someone to do a proper setup.  You will enjoy the instrument much, much more.

Best bass I've ever owned.

Love the short neck, don't have to stretch like I did on my Precision.

Excelent tone, nice that it has both Precision and Jazz pickups.

Perfect balance, not neck heavy.

About the same shape and length as my Strat, but slightly lighter in weight.

And last but not least the price. I can't beleive you can get so much quality for such a low price.

My son and I are very impressed with the playability and the sweetness of this Mikro Bass. We will have it professionally set up, and it will then be even better. It looks good, plays well, and sounds very good for a bass at this price.

pretty standard but its deffinatly a starter bass

i am amazed by the quality of this bass

its a great value for a first bass

i love this bass, its easy to play ive done every thing from fingering to slap and it holds up amazingly.

Can't give this more than a five because of the single master tone control.  With passive controls, if you're going to have dual volumes you really need dual tones - otherwise there is too much coupling between the volumes and tone control. So, for the benefit of saving the cost of one pot they severely handicapped the usefulness of the tone control.  This isn't unusual on low-end basses, but it still sucks.

On the plus side, the control cavity does appear to have been given a shot of shielding paint.

Some things (crappy cheap pots and jack) I expect in a low-end $180 instrument.  Other things (silly arsed saddle height adjusting screws that can't be backed out fully and body wood not as advertised) I am less forgiving of.  I had occasion to replace the jack a) because it went flakey the first time I stepped on the cord and b) because I wanted a locking jack because I sometimes step on the cord on stage.  I had to use my Dremel and hog the hole out for the larger Neutrik locking jack.  I'm not an expert on wood, but this is like no "mahogany" I've ever seen.  It is not even cherry (a good dense hardwood often substituted for mahogany).  It's too soft with very large grain to be any variant of mahogany I've ever heard of.  It MIGHT be poplar, but I wouldn't be too surprised if it's just plain white pine.  In fairness, Ibanez may have spec'd mahogany to the chinese factories, but if you don't keep them honest with frequent destructive product testing they WILL substitute cheaper materials.

It's actually a pretty good value even with the "warts" mentioned under quality.  It sounds better than I expected with nice tone and decent sustain.  However, if you are not capable of doing things like a mechanical setup and replacing pots etc. yourself then I wouldn't rate this above a "6."

I was very surprised to find that the nut slots were cut properly - something that almost never happens on instruments at the low end of the food chain and that is a pain in the backside to fix if you don't have nut files.  So, this bass was perfectly intonated at the first fret, something you don't often see on instruments costing two or three times what this one does.  On the other hand, the intonation at the 12th fret was fairly poor; it appeared that the saddles were never adjusted at the factory.

String height is not as low as I'd like and could only be lowered a little before buzzing set in on the inside strings and the adjusting screws ran out of travel on the outside strings.  At the lowest point I could set the action it was about 1/2mm higher than Ibanez claims to set at the factory, and about 1mm higher than I like.  Still, it's by no means bad enough to discourage a beginner.

Out of the box the bass was good enough not to discourage a beginner - something that can't be said of all instruments in this bottom-feeding price range.  With a bit of setup and tweaking and replacing the pots and jack it is good enough to gig with.  It can't hold a candle to my Groove Tools GT-5 but that cost over five times what this little puppy did.  Arthritis and carpal tunnel also limit my style pretty severely on the GT-5, which is why I bought a short-scale bass.