Today, I’m going to recommend a product NOT to purchase, unless you can really understand the purpose of it and are willing to ignore all of its faults.
A few weeks back, I picked up the Shredneck Low Rider 4-string bass neck. Mind you, I did not pay full price (thank God!), but got it off of eBay. This is a product for musicians to practice fretting and fingerpicking exercises when it is not convenience to have a regular bass guitar handy, such as at the office, waiting in a car, or other cramped situations (I dunno, doing a constitutional in the bathroom?). The Shredneck is about 18 inches long, has the four bass strings (Note: the company also makes 6-string guitar models) with a nut, bridge and tuners, and a fingerboard that consists of the first six frets of a full-scale 34-inch bass guitar neck.
Have you figured out the problem with this yet? Here it goes – the frets are set up as if this were a 34-inch neck, but the actual “neck” on this item is less than 18 inches. In short (no pun intended), the fretting of these strings will not match the note that is expected. For example, on a regular bass guitar, the frets are set up so that when you press your finger down on the fretboard, it will create the note intended according to the scale of the bass, be it 30- or 34-inch scale. On the low E string, if you press your finger down on the first fret, the F note will sound. The next fret will sound F#, the next fret will sound G, and so on.
However, because of the set-up on this Shredneck, fretting on the E string first fret creates a note somewhere between F# and G. The second fret creates a note somewhere around Bb. The same problem goes for all four of the strings. The fretwork on this product should have compensated for the scale length. Instead, you have some contraption that, when fretted, sound like some weird musical instrument that perhaps Mr. Spock would have played on Star Trek.
The Shredneck also puts normal-gauge bass guitar strings on the piece. The result is that the strings never stay in tune anyways, so even open strings never sound the same way twice. The tuning machines are decent, but if you should pluck a sting a bit hard, you can hear the pitch fluctuate. It sounds more like when you stretch out a rubber band and pluck it, then stretch it back and forth a little to get that wobbly sound.
There is very little positive about the Shredneck other than its portability. I surfed around on YouTube for some reviews of it, but there weren’t much, and most of them are a few years old. The selling point seems to be that you can practice fretting-hand work and finger picking. I would think that you can noodle around on something like this, but how can you tell if you are improving if the notes are not correct according to the fret? It seems unproductive. Even bassist Billy Sheehan, while trying to promote the Shredneck, admits that you shouldn’t listen to what you are doing on it (he introduces it at the beginning, but talks about it more about 3:00 in).
Looking around the internet, there are a few other products that are similar to the Shredneck but do a better job. In conclusion, pass on this!
Chew on it and comment.
Luegra 