Dean ‘Edge 09’ Bass Guitar Review

I’m a fretless player, tried & true, and I really don’t play fretted basses unless coerced. But I thought I should have one around just in case I needed it. I was perusing the Guitar Center website one day, and saw the Dean Edge 09 bass on sale for dirt cheap ($119.95). I had a GC gift-card and some money to throw down, and I thought to myself that this would be a good opportunity to get hold of a fretted bass.

Now, the very low price was of course a sale price. This is Dean’s most inexpensive bass, and the MSRP/list is something like $239, I think. But my experience with playing other peoples’ Dean products has been that even their lower-priced instruments are well-built and quite playable, and very good value for the bucks.
 

Anyway…let me get to the meat here…I’ll do this in a categorical fashion, I think.

Dean Edge Build Quality/Fit & Finish:

The finish on my Dean Edge bass guitar is the ‘Satin Mahogany’ finish, and is really rather nice-looking. It has one or two tiny little imperfections as are to be expected in an instrument made in Indonesia and sold for this price, but overall, the finish is very nice. I like the satin finish, as it is just shiny enough to show highlights on the edges, but it’s not glassy-glossy. It has a nice feel to it, and doesn’t show fingerprints at all.

The body wood is not actually Mahogany, but a lighter-colored wood with similar grain pattern to Mahogany, sealed and stained a quite pretty reddish-brown. It’s solid wood, too, not laminated. But it is made of about three separate edge-joined pieces. It’s not too heavy, certainly less so than an Alder-bodied Jazz Bass, for instance, but it has a decently hefty feel to it.

The neck is Maple with a rosewood fingerboard and the ‘standard’ round pearloid markers. There are some fret-dressing issues on mine, but they’re way up on the neck where I really don’t play much. The frets weren’t really dressed-off at the edge of the fingerboard as well as I’d like, and a couple will even snag some skin if the player’s not careful. These would be very easy to clean up with a file, though.

The headstock is angled via a scarf-joint, which runs out to about the third or fourth fret. I my opinion, this can cause a problem when trying to adjust the neck relief with the truss rod, because that part of the neck is less flexible than the rest. So you can get a ‘hump’ there that you can’t pull out with the truss rod, which can cause some buzzing on the first three frets. But some judicious fret filing can overcome that.

The neck pocket on this bass is better fit than a lot of Fenders that I’ve seen. It’s very close against the neck heel, and there’s virtually no visible gap between them. The neck mounting is via four screws and metal insert ferrules in the body, rather than a ‘neck plate’. The neck engagement into the body is quite short, though, much more like a guitar neck than like any other bass neck I’ve seen. That gives me a little worry should the instrument ever fall off the stand, because there just doesn’t seem to be enough length of the neck in the pocket to resist breaking if it fell. But then again, it seems quite solid, so I’m not too worried about it.

Dean Edge 09 Bass Features:

This Dean Edge bass has a single soapbar pickup, humbucking, with a single tone & volume control. The bridge is a standard stamped-steel chrome piece with four saddles. The tuners are actually pretty nice ‘Gotoh-clone’ tuners which are very smooth and effective. The neck is a slim-taper neck, which means that it’s a standard string spacing at the bridge, but tapers quite a bit toward the nut, somewhat reminiscent of a Jazz Bass neck. That’s about it for features; very basic and simple.

Dean Edge Sound Quality/Playability:

I don’t much like the placement of the Edge's pickup, as I think it’s too far from the bridge. It’s maybe just a tiny bit farther from the bridge than a P-Bass’s pickup is, so it has almost that same midrange-y ‘squonk’ as a P-Bass, but with a little less high-end in it. I’d have been much happier with the pickup back in the area about where the Music Man basses have their (single) pickups. This pickup, at least in the position it’s mounted in, doesn’t really seem to have enough of either fat bottom end or bright, punchy top end. The attack seems rather slow, again because of its location.

Fingerstyle playing gives a slow-attacking, mid-muddy tone, which might be good for some styles like Blues. Playing with a pick, though, seems to wake the thing up quite a bit, yielding more bottom, more top, and much faster attack.

As for its playability, I give this Dean Edge 09 bass a big thumbs-up. The slim-taper neck makes it easy for a smaller-handed guy like me to play down in the lower registers, as the string spacing is much narrower at the nut than at the bridge. The shape of the body makes for excellent balance either on a strap or on the knee. There’s no neck-diving at all, since the upper ‘horn’ of the body is extended beyond the center of gravity of the instrument.

And the general shape of the body, with its forearm and tummy-cuts, lets it snuggle up to you very comfortably. It’s actually quite curvy and sexy-looking, too.

Dean ‘Edge 09’ Bass Review Summary:

I think Dean could have done a little better in design as regards the pickup placement, and in quality control as regards fret-dressing, but otherwise, I really love this bass. It just feels so nice to hold and to play that the few tiny flaws are overshadowed completely. And at this price, for a Dean-branded instrument, you just cannot go too wrong.

So, taking into consideration the price I paid for mine, and where it was built, this bass definitely gets 4-1/2 Stars from me. No, it’s not a Sadowsky, a Pedulla, or a Modulus, nor does it even approach that kind of quality and tone. But the Dean Edge Bass is a quite functional, playable instrument that’s certainly a good starter bass, and would serve perfectly well at least as a backup or spare. Heck, I ain’t proud…I’d use my Dean Edge 09 Electric Bass Guitar anywhere!