High mass bridge debate (again)

[Johannes]

To my experience mass of a bridge doesn’t matter much, actually a heavy slab of metal can make Your beloved vintage bass sound and feel strange. I think most important feature in bass bridge is its rigidity. Meaning that bridge saddles must hold their position in every axis, front-back for intonation, height for proper action. Sometimes there`s a problem with bad bridges when saddles are slightly sliding sideways. That’s where strings are loosing their vibrational energy.

[Dan Dare]

13 hours ago, Johannes said:

To my experience mass of a bridge doesn’t matter much, actually a heavy slab of metal can make Your beloved vintage bass sound and feel strange. I think most important feature in bass bridge is its rigidity. Meaning that bridge saddles must hold their position in every axis, front-back for intonation, height for proper action. Sometimes there`s a problem with bad bridges when saddles are slightly sliding sideways. That’s where strings are loosing their vibrational energy.

 

Good points. I use a Babicz on my vintage J. It has the properties you describe and works very well. Being aluminium, it isn't really high mass, despite its appearance.

[Stub Mandrel]

So you are saying that instead of mass-debating, we should just ensure our gear is as stiff as possible.

[ezbass]

20 minutes ago, Stub Mandrel said:

So you are saying that instead of mass-debating, we should just ensure our gear is as stiff as possible.

Come on, Mr Stubz, you’ve wandered off, without your medication again, back to the DoI with you.

[Doctor J]

I believe it was 1966 when Jaco first recoiled in horror, pointing at his bass -four stringed, naturally - and shouted "BAD VIBES, MAAAAAAAN!" as he struggled with the emotion of tone-sucking shonkiness of his original, rare and future vintage, but not yet, Jazz bass. He tried to kill the crappy bridge with a butter knife, as legend has it, but slipped on a stray banana skin, missed, and inadvertently invented the first electric fretless bass and Jazz Fusion, all on a rainy Wednesday.