NickA

The shop is rammed with stuff. all kinds of basses and more in stock out of site. I guess more 2nd hand stuff is sold on eBay, reverb and .... HERE these days. So they seem to have more and more new instruments. Years ago my home town had a fantastic used guitar and bass shop .. shop's still there but now only sells new .. and mostly fender (yawn).

Spread the load between first and second finger ( ie use both and alternate a bit .. hard to explain) else you're using the same muscle and tendon the whole time, use whole lower arm not just fingers. Do stretches on fingers of right hand. Soak right hand in hot water before and after practice. Some famous violinist (Oisterach?) said 10 minutes with your hand in hot water is worth an hour of practice. I had some physio for similar and it got better with the stretches and hotcwater ...though in my case it wasn't the bass playing that caused it but typing / mousing wrong. Bass playing just used an already strained tendon. One thing the physio said was DON'T stop playing, keep at it and do the stretches too.

Genius! I love it. Even without the audacious fingering, it would still be great.

Just right now watching him on youtoob!

Just downloaded Elizabeth Kenny's solo works from linn records! I used to go in the the early music shoppe at every opportunity but never saw an actual theorbo. Did have a go on a Racket tho, but last year when I decided to buy myself the " build your own racket" kit for Xmas found they'd discontinued it 😞

Ooh and someone has built an electric one. Not so fine looking mind.

TAS: Theorbo Acquisition Syndrome. I really need one of these babies to add to my bassy instrument collection. The 7 extra strings have a longer scale than my 4/4 double bass. Never mind your 6 string basses, this has 14 "courses". The idea is that you fret the top 7 strings and pluck the bottom 7 with your thumb to create a bass line. This particular one appears to allow some of the "bass" strings to be fretted too.

Jones has said he worries about sounding too like Jaco! I think they both pluck all over the place to get different sounds ... compare, say, teen town ( bridge) with " a remark you made " or " refuge of the roads " ( over the fingerboard ) and of course Jaco played fretted too ( Portrait of Tracey ... which I can only get anywhere near playing on the fretless for some reason ). Meanwhile Percy Jones on Noddy goes to Sweden has about every sound you can get out of a (fretless Wal) bass! I count both as major influencers .. but much as I like Mick Kahn and Pino P, (and others from that great British fretless era, eg Andy Pask) I can never sound anything like them. ..and Trevor, you need Wal no 3. A walnut faced fretless would complete that line up nicely!

Nice little article and couldn't be more right. the only true Wal is a fretless Wal .....though the fretted ones are also decent basses. How can a slab-bodied bolt-on neck bass ...be so special (and expensive)????

you're right; I tried playing left handed as an experiment and it was worse that starting all over again. Apparently, if you have a symmetrical fingerboard you can get away with swapping the strings around without moving the bassbar and sound post ... sounds dodgy to me, but I suppose if you're playing through a pickup it doesn't make much odds. Anyway .. way off topic.

No no don't do it! The complicated stuff is all in the fingering hand so you south paws have an advantage over the rest of us! And swapping the bass bar over, fitting a new bridge and reprofiling the fingerboard is an expensive way to de-value a valuable instrument!

There's a VERY early 4-STRING Smith in the for sale section at the moment if this is giving anyone painful GAS. https://www.basschat.co.uk/topic/338291-new-pricedrop-smith-pas-ii-1981-new-york-a-piece-of-my-history-quote-from-ken-smith/ Big pricey .. but I believe it's negotiable. Have to get a go on a Smith sometime, bass bucket-list material.

Maple fingerboard on a fretless? Why exactly? Won't it wear out a bit fast? Epoxy maybe?

... but did it make you sound like him? it didn't work for me :¬). I fear it's all in the fingers (and the two Acoustic valve amps .. and the custom pickups and the delay line between the two amps ...and on the Joni Mitchel recordings at least, the double tracking).

So ..? Was it the missing Amati or firewood .... or more likely something in between.😉

Unlike the strings which are super zingy out the packet and dead a few weeks later 😆

Esperanza Spalding too. Pretty much full scale so no deep note issues, just quieter ...THIS could be your solution. There was a bloke on here trying to make one from a normal laminate bass ....

My first upright was a Ply Boosey Hawks 1/2 size ...... a HORRIBLE little bass (probably not an excelsior mind)... I hated it with a vengeance and vowed never to play another plywood bass ever again. Muddy tone, little sustain and no bottom end whatsoever. I have since been persuaded that some laminate basses are really rather good but I'm still not converted to tiny bodies. THIS ->https://piccolomaestro.com/#shop/341-double-bass-1-2 might convert me .. but at around £4000, so it should. Gary Karr hates big basses, but still played a full 3/4 : "Many conductors request that their double bass section players use large instruments because they incorrectly assume that these will produce a bigger, warmer and more projecting sound. As I have found in my own performances and listening to those of other players, this assumption does not stand up to scrutiny. For example, a student of mine insists on playing a large, 7/8-size instrument, which she believes has a loud, projecting voice. In a small room it does indeed soar, but in a capacious hall, when compared to a cheap, 3/4-size plywood bass, her instrument sounds half as loud. In spite of this she continues to use her instrument: like many conductors and double bassists, she has a mindset that cannot be changed." I have a 4/4 myself, not really due to the horror of the B&H, but because 4/4 basses turned out to be cheaper, quality for quality, than 3/4 ones - and indeed it does sound better to me than my orchestral colleagues' 3/4 basses - which may be because I got more for my money or maybe because (like the lady above) I'm deluded. Epilogue: after I gave up on the 1/2 size bass and went back to the 'cello for 10 years, my school friend Karen, inherited it and went on to get a distinction at grade 8. Hey ho.

@DanOwens .. sounds like your strings are a little short for the bass!

"....the peg-end silk IS important, but the bridge end isn't?" I'm not sure about the peg end silks to be honest. I'm guessing that the peg end silks traditionally protect wooden tuners from the sharp wire. But some string designs taper down to just the core at the peg end, so the silk is keeping the end of the outer winding in place and stopping the thin end of the winding from coming un-wound. On the other hand my electric basses have d'Addario NYXLs on which have no silks at either end and work fine. I've also had to fix the odd snapped string on my double bass, which has brass tuning pegs .. and on my 'cello, which has wooden tuning pegs .... with bare un-silked bits of string now and then with no harm done. Depends on the string design then! But surely you could trim back the bit that protrudes over the nut.

Fair nuff. Mine's a full 4/4 so a 1/2 would feel like a toy. Try some, report back. Meanwhile, good comparison chart and advice on the always excellent gollihur site: SIZES_DOUBLE_BASS_SIZING_FAQ.html

Yes you can, yes it will unravel, no it doesn't matter. The silks are purely decorative.