I just got a set of D'addario XL tapewounds to try on a frettless jazz bass. They sound great, but the blue silk wraps extend past the nut, as much as an inch onto the fretboard. This doesn't look right.
The package says medium scale, but I'm wondering if these are really short scale. Thoughts?
View attachment 7033380
As explained above, the standard (Fender Precision, Jazz, and thousands other basses of various make and model) scale for bass guitar (34" from bridge to nut)* is actually called "long scale". "Medium scale" does exist but, at 32", it's shorter than standard, and a lot less common: in fact, even less common than "short scale", which is usually 30".
(Of course, because strings don't anchor directly at the bridge saddle but further back even on toploading bridges, strings for each scale come with at least 2 extra inches of full-gauge length, i.e. at least 36" ball-to-taper for long scale; 34" for medium, like the ETB92M you unfortunately bought; 32" for short.)
The reasons for the current nomenclature are purely historical. Until the late '60s, most models available were ~30" scale, but Fender's 34" basses outsold the competition by far: so neither scale could be considered the undisputed standard, and a binary opposition (short- and long-scale) made sense. Also of note, no bass guitars
longer than 34" existed (the Gibson Thunderbird was only a smidgen longer at 34.5"), so 34" couldn't be called "medium".
Come the mid-Seventies, most of the competition had begun offering all or most of their models in Fender scale, finally making 34" the standard.
Only around that time, or a little later, the first 32" scale basses came out of Japan (they were preceded by Burns of London's 31.5" models from the Sixties) and were called medium-scale. So the names of this revised, three-way opposition (~30=short : ~32=medium : ~34=long) stuck.
Outside the above:
- 35"- and 36" scale appeared some time later still (never becoming widespread except with 5- and 6-string basses), so they got allotted the goofy "extra-long" or "super-long" description;
- conversely, significantly-shorter-than-30" have existed since the late Fifties, but have never been very common.
(most of them tend to be either
· 28.6", like the Ibanex MiKro;
· 23" to 26", or guitar-scale;
· or, if equipped with non-steel-core strings, ca21", or uke-bass scale.)
