BigRedX

If you want to attract one of the Mods attention to move a thread the most effective way is to "Report" the first post and then say why in the resulting dialogue box. IME anything else will most likely be missed.

No. Absolutely not. Unless there is also a user option to retain the current style.

Yes, that's me. There are certain forums I don't look at very often because there are rarely any threads I'm interested in (EUB and Double Bass for instance), but by simply browsing through the threads is the easiest way for me to see new topics I might be interested in contributing to.

It used to be mine. I bought on eBay for about $700 from someone in New York in 2008, and sold it on to someone here in the UK five years later for roughly the same price. I'd still have it if it had 5 strings, but since I only play 5-string and Bass VIs these days it was surplus to requirements and therefore sold along with most of my other guitars and basses when I had a big clear out.

Either given the right strings playing style and amplification. The more I work through this subject, the more I become convinced that the ultimate sound of a solid electric instrument is mostly down to how it is played and what signal processing has been applied to the sound. And this makes me even more convinced that my criteria for selecting a bass or guitar - looks first, playability second, and plug it in just to check that the pickups and controls are actually working third.

So why does this sound just like a typical P-Bass? It's definitely not due to the wood it's made from.

You don't become a famous musician and songwriter with a bit of ability and good luck alone. You get there by being completely driven to do it and working bloody hard to get there. It goes way beyond what the typical person playing covers at the weekend will ever understand, and even then it may not be enough. I know I'll be playing right up to the point when I am no longer physically or mentally capable of it, simply because it is what I want to do, and who am I to begrudge other musicians the same facility just because I don't like their music?

There's people making Fender style guitars out of all sorts of non-tone wood materials, as well as ones with 3D printed bodies. Unsurprisingly they all make usable guitar sounds, and in the context of a recorded band mix I doubt whether anyone would be able able to pick one of those against a guitar with a "conventional tone-wood" body. Also as I posted in another thread recently everyone who has played the Born 2 Rock F4B bass I used to own commented on how much like a conventional P-Bass it sounded despite the fact that it mostly made of aluminium and has very unconventional design that negates the need for a truss rod in the neck. This along with the guitar made of strings between two work benches, seems to indicate that the wood or any other material used for the construction of a solid electric instrument has very little impact on the final sound, and what impact it does have is mostly unpredictable.

And that leads to the question: what makes a particular type of bass that bass? A Precision Bass is generally thought to be something with a single split humbucker in a particular position with regard to the scale length of the strings, but the original Precision bass had a single coil pickup in a slightly different position. Does that make it any less of a Precision Bass? Similarly with the Jazz Bass, Fender moved the position of the bridge pickup. And then what about the Thunderbird - that seems be almost entirely down to the (rough) body shape as all sorts of constructions and pickups appear to be permissible and the bass still be considered a Thunderbird. Ultimately once the bass has been compressed and EQ'd to fit into the arrangement/mix of the recording (which is how the vast majority of our audience will hear it) unless some very noticeable audio processing has been applied to the sound, they will all end up sounding pretty much the same.

We're obviously interpreting what you have written in two different ways.

Unfortunately for scientific methodology "as identical as possible" is not close enough. It has to be EXACTLY the same otherwise you can't rule out construction as the reason for the difference is sound. And even having the same musician playing the instruments isn't good enough. I'm a very average player, but I know that I unconsciously adjust my playing technique to match the sound of the instrument I am playing. Plus a sample of one of each three different bodies is statistically meaningless. The whole point of the "tone wood myth" for solid instruments is that tonal qualities can absolutely be attributed to a single type of wood used in the construction of an instrument. As we can see and hear it is very easy to make instruments that sound different, what we need to be able to do is make instruments made from the same woods sound consistently the same (while sounding obviously different from otherwise identical instruments made from different wood) over hundreds of examples.

IIRC Ten Years After were Mansfield-based? Jake Bug has pretty much fallen off the radar after his one moderately successful album. Sleaford Mods seem to be doing better, but I just can't shake the image I have of them from their very early days when they supported the band I was in and were astoundingly underwhelming. Bands form Nottingham who have done well after leaving the city - Stereo MCs, posh boys from Ruddington (I was at school with them), and Tindersticks who started of life in Nottingham in the 80s as various far more musically interesting bands before deciding to move to London and become Nick Cave Lite.

Yes I did. AFAIK the Marleaux version of the Pagelli Bass was a different instrument to the Diva, hence my comment.

Then they should buy a different bass. Surely the whole point of having lots of different designs is that somewhere there will be the right bass for everyone. Otherwise we should all play Fender Precissions and be done with it.

IIRC there were some Pagelli badged basses built by Marleaux. Certainly when I asked Pagelli about getting a "Golden Bass" made he pointed me in the direction of Marleaux who then ignored all my emails.

Never happens for me. I really don't care about the individual musicians. It's the songs and the overall arrangements that are important. Good bands are always greater than the sum of their parts anyway.

Nottingham is ace (at least compared to Mansfield it is). 😉 However considering it's size and the fact that it has a vibrant local music scene, it doesn't seem to be able to produce the number of nationally well-known artists that other similar cities seen to do. And some of the best known "Nottingham" bands have had to move away from the city and ignore the fact that they came from there in order to get any real success.

Do they? But there are over 40 different species of tree that are included in the "Ash" family. As far as the timber merchant is concerned they are all ash. But they are all biologically different so it follows that the timber they produce must have slightly different qualities. If the wood used on a solid electric instrument is important to its sound then manufacturers should be telling us exactly which species of Ash is being used. And where it comes from, because "ash" grows in a wide variety of climatic conditions all of which will have an impact on the way the layers of grain that go to make up the trunk of the tree and produced and in turn the timber that comes from it as a result.

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.

Depends on the bass. IME there is no one brand/type gauge of string that suits every bass. In the past I have spent between £10 and £60 for a set depending on what worked best for each particular bass. At the moment for the four basses I use regularly I have four different sets of strings costing between £20 and £35

And Carl Thompson, another highly skilled and renowned luthier, has said that there is no way of telling what an electric bass will sound like until it has been finished.

Both of those changes would have made a difference to the sound of the bass. However, it would have been slight and until they were made there was no way of knowing if they would be an improvement (which in itself is completely subjective). We also don't know what other tweaks to the setup of the bass were made at the same time, or if simply the act of dismantling and re-assembling what is essentially a very ordinary factory-made instrument would have been responsible for most of the "improvements" in sound. There of course is the placebo effect, and the fact that no-one will want to admit that complicated and expensive modifications to their instrument will have resulted in it sounding worse. As with all these anecdotes there is no scientific method and the data itself is completely subjective.

For one band where a play a more "traditional" bass guitarist's role I have a pair of 34" scale 5-string basses. For the other where I play both "bass" and "melody" parts (alternating with the synth player) I use a 30" scale Bass VI. Whilst I could play a lot of the first band's bass lines on the Bass VI, it wouldn't be a particularly pleasant experience. Most the things I play on the Bass VI are impossible to play on a conventional 4 or 5 string bass.

I play in two very different bands and therefore need two very different basses.

Well it's certainly not Nottingham.