Anyone else tune their basses as I do?

[Fat Steve]

Threads have been closed and TBers have been banned for less hostile threads. Y'all need to get some air or play your basses or something. This is just stupid.

 

[MarkA]

So, this thread has given me an idea that might get me playing the Stick again. Scale reaches on a 34" scale in fifths are hard for me. That is the way bass is tuned in the standard Stick tuning and I have always found bass scales to be awkward and uncomfortable on the Stick.

My thought is to reverse the standard Stick tuning to bass in fourths and melody in fifths. That will leave the bass on Stick looking like my normal tuning on the basses and the melody strings will look about like the guitar I keep in fifths-based Crafty tuning.

Interestingly, among the many tuning variations listed for the various instruments, I don't see this tuning on stick.com. Still it should be fun to try it!

Otto

Never played a stick, but I play cello (5ths) and bass (4ths). Don't know how well I'd do playing left and right hands in different tunings (and I don't do a lot of tapping to begin with), but your rationale for at least trying it makes sense to me. You might need to buy new strings. I say this without any intended reference to the ongoing controversy. May the Force be with you.

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I got the "H"! I want a cookie!
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What was this thread about again? And will there be adult supervision?

 

[I am Soma]

Threads have been closed and TBers have been banned for less hostile threads. Y'all need to get some air or play your basses or something. This is just stupid.

hmm...i only saw one person being hostile and they seem to have dropped off. the rest seems pretty tame compared to average instrument cable threads

 

[MarkA]

For whatever it's worth, I play in standard tuning 99.9 % of the time, but I have played around with other tunings. Wrote a piece years back in DGDG tuning that would not have been practical in EADG. The 5th Bach cello suite indicates a scordatura (alternate tuning) with the top, A, string dropped to G. You can play it in standard tuning, but some bits have to be revoiced to accommodate it. I prefer it with the scordatura.

"Standard" tunings are not the be-all-end-all and they are not handed down from God, but they have a lot of evolution behind them. "Alternate" tunings (and I realize that what is standard and what is "alternate" depends to some degree, at least, on your point of view) are not, in and of themselves, either good or bad. A lot depends on the context in which you use them.

I cryptically posted two names earlier: Joe Pass and Leo Kottke. Both guitarists. Joe, a master of improvisation and could play pretty much anything you put in front of him, played in standard tuning. Leo (whom I've heard twice, live), a monster in his own right, plays mostly originals and his own arrangements of trad tunes in a variety of alternate tunings. Each approach has different strengths, and it is possible to make observations about them beyond "it's all personal preference" without denigrating the other side as evil or stupid. Leo related an interesting conversation he had with Joe, actually, the last time I saw him. If this thread's still open and civil when I come back to it, I'll relate it.

Pierre Bensusan plays in DADGAD. Monster player, with a frightening command of his instrument. Nice guy, too. I'd like to ask him sometime about how free he feels to improvise in that tuning, and how readily he feels he can play "standard" stuff in it.

 

[Mushroo]

Aw snap. Things just got real.

And anyone can edit Wikipedia, so you can't prove it WASN'T Geddy Lee!

 

[ArtechnikA]

I cryptically posted two names earlier: Joe Pass and Leo Kottke. Both guitarists.

Was that cryptic? I know both those guys' work...
Surely no discussion of famous guitarists and altered tunings is complete without a mention of Joni Mitchell, who had her own reasons for developing them...

 

[smperry]

I'm closing this thread because it's not about a bass or type of bass. Feel free to start a thread in a more appropriate forum...maybe technique. If a thread is about what basses are handy for alternate tuning, that would make more sense here.