NickA

Meanwhile here is the wonderful Esperanza playing her CzechEase (her full size bass has a nicer tone - but this is not something you'd complain about).

I guess that's one reason I bought it. The boot is tiny but the car is surprisingly voluminous for its external dimensions. Literally has "a wheel at each corner" which keeps wheel arches out the way. I load the bass bum end first through the passenger front door, pushing it in far enough that the neck then slips into the footwell. Lots of vids on line of people doing it. Here's the one I learned the method from. Note the bit about supporting the body using a pillow or the headrest, so the weight doesn't go on the neck. The neck will "probably" survive but it bends the tuners.

My 4/4 fits in my Skoda Citigo and frequently does, along with stool and music stand! Recline front seat and feed it in neck down the foot well and bum side on the back seat upright. The bloke at Bassbags reckons he can fit a bass in anything, though a BMW 3 series saloon was a challenge!

Stops him looking at his fingers I guess. But he must have an incredible memory for sequences of notes. I need a chord chart for an 8-bar blues and once forgot the opening bass line to Miles Davis' All Blues (the pianist had to play it to me so I could join in)! As I struggle to learn 5-string bass after decades playing but four strings ... I am increasingly amazed at these people's skill. (not a Theorbo but an 18 course baroque lute with 24 individual strings to tune) ... my experience with (my Dad's) viola da gamba is that it has too many strings, which are tuned in unequal intervals (not even the same intervals as a guitar) and all the music is written in the one clef I never previously had to read and POLYPHONICALLY so you have to read lots of notes in a strange clef at once. It was my, retired professional 'cellist, Dad's retirement project and out-witted even him! Theorbo and lute music seems to be mostly written out in Tab - which is something else I've never mastered. :¬)

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!