Sweetened tunings

[Al Heeley]

Been reading up on ACU sweetened tunings, aka James Taylor and acoustic guitar, trying small compromises to get around the harmonic clashes on a fretboard, some sweetened tunings are also incorporated into the Petersen strobe tuners. My acoustic guitar certainly sounds really nice with the ACU tunings;

E= -12c, A = -10c, D= -8c, G= -4c, B= -6c, E= -3c  this is to help compensate fro finger pressure on frets and also for string windings or lack thereof.

Does anyone have experience of sweetened tunings for Bass, and what the steps are?

[BigRedX]

They are most effective on chords of 3 notes and more, and as you say in helping to compensate for intonation differences between plain and wound strings. So lots of use to guitarists with sensitive ears.

I have a Peterson Stroborack tuner so I had a play with sweetened tunings when I first got it. TBH I couldn't tell any difference between the sweetened tuning and the normals one on the bass.

[Al Heeley]

Do you know what the cent shifts are for the E,A,D,G on bass for the sweetened tuning?

[Musashimonkey]

I play an MTD with Buzz Fentein tuning. It really does help the intonation when playing chords further up the neck. 

[MrDaveTheBass]

My guitarist uses all sorts of weird tunings. One rehearsal I took my fretted bass along, rather than my usual fretless, and it just sounded wrong. I realised that I must automatically compensate the pitch on the fretless to match the guitar - I was rather chuffed - my ears must be better than I thought they were. If you're going to use any sweetened tuning system, make sure that you're using the same one as the guitarist.