Darker and lighter sounding basses.

[LukeFRC]

Here’s a question- to the folk who have lots of basses, do you have darker and lighter sounding basses in your arsenal? Do you use them for different things?

 

reason I ask. My main bass for years was a Japanese ‘57ri, I’ve a fairly strong right hand finger style technique and digging in harder would unlock this wonderful grindy sound. (it’s not the strings hitting the frets clank as I have the action higher than that)
I use this for a more aggressive louder sound and then hit softer for a less aggressive sound. 
my latest bass, an old Lakland 55-94 is a darker sounding bass, with supposedly “darker” sounding pickups and preamp... when I dig in the tone doesn’t change much, just gets louder! Now that could be a positive, but it’s a bit unnerving at the moment.

I guess the question is how do people approach different sounding basses? Pickup swapping to get similar response vs enjoying instruments for their differences..

[Cuzzie]

Love them for their differences.

My graphite neck basses sound different to the wood necked basses pick ups aside and lend themselves to different things

[dudewheresmybass]

Each bass I own has its own character, which will determine where it gets used. 
I have basses that suit differing tunings, and ones that suit pick playing over fingerstyle. 
 

Edited May 31, 2020 by dudewheresmybass

[Silvia Bluejay]

My basses all sound different from each other, but I'm damned if I can say for sure that's due to the pickup/strings, active/passive combination as opposed to the actual woods they're made of...

[P-Belly Evans]

The only reason I have seven (not Gas honestly😎) is coz they all sound different and are great at different things. Output levels on a couple are a bit lower (I'm looking at you Mr Mustang) , but I can take that for the awesome tonal qualities. 

 

Well that's my excuse to the missus...... works a charm doesn't it! 

[fretmeister]

Sort of.

I have basses that stick with flats and rounds and I have some where I change the strings.

My P is always Monel flats and I use it for old proper RnB, big band etc, and of course Iron Maiden!

My PJ-Ray5 has rounds because I’ve never found a Flatwound B that was worth having. It’s quite bright and needs a lot of EQ adjustment to make it work right in a 25 piece big band. But it’s fantastic for anything more modern. It’s also the bass that I will use if I need to tune down with some heavier strings. I do find that the lower tuning I use, the brighter I want the natural tone of the bass / strings to be to lower the chances of flub.

My Sandberg TT4 (Jazz) is very string dependent. With rounds it’s very Marcus Miller. With flats it’s got a great old tone. If I want to play it with the big band I put flats on it. For anything else it gets rounds.  Fortunately it has a slotted bridge so swapping strings and saving the older ones is dead easy and I don’t have to thread the coiled string part from the headstock through a bridge hole. Sometimes the big band set has some modern funk arrangements where the the Monel flats don’t really work for slap parts so I might experiment with some Pressurewounds so see if I can get a good compromise.

 

Those are the 3 that I use the most. If we ever get to rehearse or pay live again I expect my new Ibby medium scale to feature a lot too. Until then I’ll just have to imagine what it sounds like in a live mix. 😢