Aries Bajadera 6

After playing for the last days exclusively the Aries I can conclude:
- this 6er is by the far the easiest to play with regards to power and effort you have to put into your right and left hand.
- a good, lively tone is achievable with relatively low force put into the string. The whole dynamic range shifts down a significant step.
- if you put much energy into the string, the tone does not break up. Some basses just start to hysterically jangle-dangle.
- after some adoption of right hand touch a nice slap tone is achievable with a very distinct, percussive attack.
- preamp output shows very low level and the sound is mid- and treble-heavy, very low bass frequency spectrum. Not useful at all when working with different overdrive pedals.
- fully engaging BASS on the onboard preamp compensates for this, but I find it to be a bit boomy sounding. The level issue remains.
- I tried different booster/EQ-pedals to compensate for low output level and low bass; facilitating switching between different bass guitars without adjusting the whole following processing chain. Most happy with the EXAR Ibex pedal, it's bass control layout pleases my ear more than the onboard preamp.
- these Rough Crystal pickups are as I know them from my Kost Sujet Standard: very linear, open, broad, but a bit harmless and lacking this grungy meaniness. Need to experiment further with full parametric mid eq.

So, finally this is a very very interesting beast which needs some adoption in playing technique and signal processing.
Sadly there are still no rehearsals on the horizon. I will have to pipeline the Aries through different settings to find a final assessment.