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Alternate tunings

TaySte_2000

TaySte_2000

Jun 23, 2001
8,101
2,042
Houston, TX
#1
How often do you have a song you played in the studio that you have to play again live with the same artist but they've dropped it a semi-tone or a tone because it's difficult to sing live, but they want that same album tone, would you just restring your bass for this or tune down and deal with the sloppyness or just have 2 basses for this artist one for studio and one live.

To put it into a context my producers have decided that my thunderbirds sound best out of all my basses for the studio they also think they look the coolest live but we tune down a full step live so I'm playing DGCF so I have to transpose everything in the studio because I'm constantly playing live with these basses and occasionally recording, should I just be restringing them? or should I get another thunderbird for the studio?

Any advice or insite would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
 
#2
TaySte_2000 said:
How often do you have a song you played in the studio that you have to play again live with the same artist but they've dropped it a semi-tone or a tone because it's difficult to sing live, but they want that same album tone, would you just restring your bass for this or tune down and deal with the sloppyness or just have 2 basses for this artist one for studio and one live.

To put it into a context my producers have decided that my thunderbirds sound best out of all my basses for the studio they also think they look the coolest live but we tune down a full step live so I'm playing DGCF so I have to transpose everything in the studio because I'm constantly playing live with these basses and occasionally recording, should I just be restringing them? or should I get another thunderbird for the studio?

Any advice or insite would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Click to expand...

If it's more than two strings de-tuned more than a whole step, I'll devote a whole different instrument to the tuning. There are Beck songs (Novacane, Hi-5, Devils Haircut) in which I can grab the E-tuner and tune it down to D in about 2 1/2 seconds and I do it during the song without a tuner. Gotten pretty good at it. But other songs (Guero, several others) are the whole bass tuned down to C#, so I have to have a different bass for that. In your case, if you need to have your T-Bird DGCF and it can stay that way the whole show, then you're just retuning it for the studio, there's no urgent need for another bass, as long as it's holding the tunings, and the neck isn't behaving badly with all the changes. If it's a hassle, or you notice instability, I'd grab a different T-Bird...and try it with heavy gauge if you haven't already, they sound awesome with .50-.110.

Best,
JMJ
 

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