St. Blues King Blues Bass

by Matt O’Donnell
Managing Editor

One of the really cool booths we checked out repeatedly at this year’s Summer NAMM here in Nashville was St. Blues Guitar Workshop. St. Blues exists just a little distance away in Memphis, TN and was originally founded in 1983. After a 17 year hiatus from instrument making, Tom Keckler got the company back on the road and has been making fine, reasonably priced instruments ever since.

The heart of our matter here is the King Blues bass. This beautiful vintage-styled 4 string was certainly worthy of everything that St. Blues has come to be known for. Look, feel, and sound are all monster features of this instrument.

The St. Blues King Blues Bass

The bass is constructed out of a two-piece ash body with a contoured back and top. The top even has a sexy little white binding around the whole shape to give it an extra touch of class. The body is set up for a string through body configuration, although the bridge on our review model also had the option of stringing it through the bridge. The neck is available as either a single piece of hard rock maple or an Indian Rosewood fretboard. St. Blues also clearly pays a high amount of attention to detail as well, shunning popular parts manufacturers in favor of their own custom brass hardtail bridge and a custom set of pickups.

Said pickups are set in the PJ configuration, and I don’t know about you, but I find a good bass with a PJ setup hard to find. Both pickups responded well when it was played through a Roland Bass Cube 100 amplifier, playing really really warm on the P, and plenty of bite on the J.

This bass got its on-the-job use as part of a gig with Nashville based singer-songwriter, Reed Turner. The band features a kicking’ drummer, as well as two very forward guitars. The King Blues had absolutely no problem cutting through the mix without being too harsh at all. I swapped out the stock stainless steel strings with a set of my trusty Curt Mangan nickel strings, and I got fantastic agility response out of the bass. One interesting thing I noticed is that I couldn’t seem to play stupid wrong notes, as the large size frets had my hands make sure they knew where the notes were when I wasn’t looking. I was also surprised when I realized I had made the amateur mistake of not wrapping my cord around, which was almost a problem when I stepped on it. Luckily, the jack on the King Blues was really tight and sturdy, and the cable didn’t even come CLOSE to falling out.

With a retail price point of $969 US dollars, this is definitely a prime candidate for anyone looking to upgrade from their first bass into something more serious., or someone who’s just plain sick of the same old Fender clones out there. For a company who is just coming back into the market, this professional level bass is no doubt soon to be in the hands of important people. When I hear a great record, then read that the bassist was working a King Blues; trust me, I won’t be surprised. Not one bit.