JoeEvans

Thanks for this interesting overview everyone, looks like the only consistent themes are diversity and personal taste!

@BigRedX yes, my proposal wouldn't give an exhaustive list of the qualities of each timber. But if, say, 65% of listeners chose the adjective 'bright' from a list of options to describe the maple body and only 35% chose it for the pine body, regardless of how the other components were swapped around, that would pretty definitively end the 'it makes no difference which wood you use' line. 

I guess I'm looking for easy-ish steps away from pure opinion and towards actual evidence.

2 hours ago, BigRedX said:

 

No of course it hasn't. You'd need to do it with hundreds of instruments, and you still wouldn't have a definitive answer because every piece of wood is different, so there is no way of telling if it was actually the body wood that was making a difference and not some other variance in the construction.

 

Even if you did tests where you just swapped the body and kept everything else exactly the same, first you'd need to eliminate the possibility that simply disassembling and reassembling the instrument didn't result in changes in the sound. If you could get to the point where it was possible to consistently rebuild the instrument without changing the sound you would then need a scientifically valid number of bodies - say 25-50 of each type of wood. All the bodies would need to be exactly the same size and shape, and each made of a single piece of wood to eliminate any effect joining two pieces of wood together might have.

 

Until someone can go to this trouble and expense all you can say is that every instrument will sound slightly different to the others, and it is impossible to pin-point exactly which factors are causing those difference.

It wouldn't need to be that complicated. Make three bodies of woods with very different qualities (eg pine, maple, mahogany) and fit with electronics etc as close to identical as possible. Record the same musician playing the same piece on each, then swap all non-body components and repeat. Then play a number of people the recordings and ask them to describe them in whatever way seems appropriate. If each wood had a distinct character that would jump out of the data. 

It seemed to me that in the clean sound comparison in that video, the ash guitar was actually a bit brighter than the mahogany... But impossible to judge properly whether I can tell without a string of properly set up double-blind tests. Does anyone know if such tests have ever been done?

22 minutes ago, Dad3353 said:

 

The late Spender Dryden, rolling tape in the studio whilst waiting (in vain...) for the others to arrive and continue 'After Bathing At Baxters'. Certainly not the 'best' track on the album, but not without merit. 

Anything that functions as both philosophical metaphor on the nature of human existence and knob joke, simultaneously, is worthy of praise.

4 hours ago, Baloney Balderdash said:

Can we agree on a compromise and settle for a peninsula then?

 

I seem to remember that position being put forward on a Jefferson Airplane album. It does hold up, both as metaphor and mild double-entendre...

1 hour ago, BreadBin said:

Bristol must be up there, especially in the electronic dance music realm

Edit - Wikipedia link added

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bands_from_Bristol

I live in Bristol and have done for years; I love it, but although the music scene is great, it does tend to include a lot of pretty niche bands and some very enthusiastic archivists, perhaps leading to over-estimates of its scale... If you take out Massive Attack, Portishead and Roni Size, there aren't many names in there that people outside the city will know.

39 minutes ago, WHUFC BASS said:

 

What about the Isle of Man?

We're getting into deep waters here...

11 minutes ago, neepheid said:

 

I am also an island.

No man is an island.

I've recently read quite a few reviews of Steinberger-type small-bodied basses. Interestingly, they nearly all say that the bass has very long sustain and bright tone.

That suggests an interesting possibility - that the body actually reduces sustain, by soaking up the string vibrations.

It might be that the resonance of the body does affect the sound, because that's energy which is no longer in the vibrating string; different woods might absorb different frequencies at different rates, changing the sound.

In other words, the tone wood is actually sucking tone out of your strings, and it's the rate that it does it across different frequencies that produces the sound of a bass 

1 minute ago, BassAdder60 said:

Fender 7250M x three packs for three basses approx £20 a pack and I change every 3 months on average 

 

 

I guess lifespan, and hence annual cost, is part of the picture really - if you're buying a particular string because of its new sound, or conversely because of its longevity...

I'm interested in how much you all spend on strings - per set, not per year. Do you go Tesco Value (Harley Benton), Waitrose (La Bella) or Fortnum and Mason (Thomastik)?

That's the weirdest way of calculating volume I've ever seen...

Per capita calculation is essential... Also, for somewhere like Brixton, how many of those musicians actually grew up there and how many moved in as adults already involved in music?

I think that the difference, if there is one, might be in the rigidity of the bridge not the mass. The (original) bridge on my old Tokai is similar to an old fender bridge in that it's basically a piece of flat steel plate with a 90 degree bend in it. I suspect that this allows a tiny bit of flex, which slightly damps the vibrating strings. A high mass bridge is much more rigid.

CiciBass, your playing is great but frankly I'm shocked that you're meeting people right now, in 2023, who find a female bassist with dyed hair who plays some high twiddly bits in any way surprising or wrong. Surely you'd need to go back to the late sixties for that to be shocking? I can only assume that the younger people you meet have led very sheltered lives and have completely missed out on everything except the blandest, most mainstream music of the last fifty years.

14 hours ago, Bloopdad1 said:

If that were true a double bass Luthier wouldn't be able to sell a new £15000 bass. 

Everyone would be looking to buy old basses. 

It takes a decent setup, and for the first 6mths a couple of trips back for sound post tweaks and general checks but basically you're good to go from day one. 

*Providing you've bought from a great Luthier with a proven track record. 

Ultimately if a bass needed 40yrs to "play in" there would never be any new basses! 

Yes - I don't think he meant that basses were no good until they were forty, more that if there is such a thing as a 'playing in' effect, it takes a very long time...

A luthier told me that basses 'open up' in tone after about forty years of playing. No idea if it's true but if you play it for forty years it will definitely sound better!

The Billy Jean baseline, for example, would sound great under loads of different chords and scales, because in my terms it's very 'open', just 1, 4, 5, flat 7.

Oops - don't know how to delete that!

Anyway, what I meant wasn't that an E clashes with a C, but that it's more harmonically specific than a G, F or D. It pins down the chord to a major, whereas a baseline with just C, F and G works with both minor and major chords.

In my mind as you work around the cycle of fifths in either direction from the root note, the notes become more harmonically specific, so they will only sit well against more niche chords, whereas closer to the tonic, they sit with more mainstream chords.

18 hours ago, TimR said:

 

9 hours ago, TimR said:

I don't think the circle of 5ths instructs you to anything regards note choice.

My observation is that a flattened 7th is used in a much wider range of chords and contexts than, say, a flat 6th, and that a flat 9th is even more niche. I see the circle of fifths as being the path you travel in as you move away from the root note.

But everyone thinks about this stuff in their own way, luckily, or we'd all end up playing the same stuff which would be tedious as hell.

As a bass player I feel like I'm trying to support the rest of the band without limiting them. I think about the circle of fifths as a measure of whether a note is neutral, allowing other musicians to play whatever they want over it, or specific, defining a particular sound or harmony.

So if you're on a C chord and you play a C under it, that's totally neutral - anyone can play any chord or scale of C over that. Go one step each way and you can add F and G - still very neutral and ok in almost any situation.

One step more and you bring in D and B flat - still quite soft and neutral but starting to pin down the harmonies a bit more. That pattern of C D F G B flat is going to be very familiar and useful to any bassist.

One more step gives you E flat and A and now you're really defining a chord. Next you get E and A flat and now it's going to clash if the guitarist plays the wrong chord, and a horn solo will need to steer clear of certain scales too.

And so it goes on until you reach D flat and F sharp, which clash like hell with almost anything.

Anyway, that's how it feels to me, backed by some science about harmonics etc.

I've started using a Turbosound iP300 for DB instead of a bass amp, with a Prodipe mic and an ART Tube pre-amp. It's the first time I've been really happy with an amplified sound.

You need something to give a very fine polish - the visible white of a scratch in lacquer is the rough surface of the damaged area. If you can polish it out, the actual scar will be pretty much invisible. I'd actually try T-Cut, for a leftfield option that might not work (but might).