Michael Kelly: Custom Coll Element 5 Bass Guitar

The Custom Collection Element 5 bass was designed for players who prefer a modernized take on a classic. The basic body lines might look familiar, but the MK designers took liberties to enhance comfortand playability. You can select from three different top woods, each accented with black hardware. What makes this bass special is far deeper than the striking appearance. We carefully selected each detail and spec to deliver agreat bass for stage or studio. The impact of a bridge on the performance of a bass guitar is something that people too often underestimate. In fact, the bridge is key to many aspects of tone and we gave it the full respect thatitdeserved. You will see that we used a solid molded bridge with tight slots for each fully-adjustable saddle, a big enhancement on its own. We, however, took that further. Below that bridge is an aluminum tone block. We add thathidden block to add sustain and attack. Since it is aluminum, it does not add weight to the bass, but has a similar sonic impact to using a heavy bridge. We call this bridge-and-internal-block combination the MK Stealth AttackBridge System. The pickups, controls, and electronics are another area where we did extensive testing and enhancements to get a great result. The pickups were developed specifically for the MK Element bass line by Rockfield andthey have an over-wound classic pickup sonic performance. We blend that with our newly-developed Element Active Circuit that has been carefully tweaked to provide a modern sonic profile. Also key to our design was allowingexcellent user customization potential using the onboard controls. Those controls include offering you a stacked tone pot with separate treble and bass controls. There is also a blend via a blend knob to sweep from one pickup tothe other or varying degrees of each. Also included is a bypass switch allowing you to go from active to a very vintage passive tone with a quick click. Finally, to add to the comfort of this bass we built it using Red Cedar. Thiswood from the mahogany family is a great tonewood that allowed us to deliver the powerful sound that we were committed to. However it is a lighter weight wood which allowed us to reduce the overall instrument weight. This was