Quick story.
For the longest time I only played 4-string basses. I was one of those bassists that thought, "Jaco only needed 4 strings... Victor doesn't seem limited by 4 strings... upright basses have 4 strings... centuries of GREAT music have 4-string basses underneath it... it's fine other bassists want extended range basses but 4 is all I need."
In fact, the business man in me wondered if extended range basses were perhaps a gimmick to sell more basses to people who have enough basses — a solution to the business problem of market saturation.
Then I bought DVD (Lee Ritenour & Friends live from the Cocoanut Grove). On it, Anthony Jackson played a 6-string Fodera. I loved the DVD and watched it several times.
Then the unthinkable happened:
I was playing a live gig. We were doing a song I'd played countless times, only this time I went for a low C on my non-existent B-string.
I could not believe I did that!
After some thought, I decided if my ears and hands wanted a B-string, what would be the harm in getting just 1 bass that had one, for those special circumstances only, of course. (After all, everyone's doing it, and it will only be this once. ;-) )
Rather than buy a 5-string bass, which at the time seemed completely pointless to me (may as well have a C string too for soloing), I set out to buy a 6-string bass.
Alaska isn't exactly New York, Chicago, LA, or Hamilton: we can't just try different basses until we find what we like — so I decided to buy what one of my bass heroes was using for a 6-string bass, John Patitucci:
There were lots of options so I reached out to Ken Smith with questions and got a surprisingly arrogant and rude response.
Ken Smith convinced me that I would feel better about myself knowing that he would be making his living without my money, so I went looking for another 6-string bass maker.
Eventually I bought a Yamaha Patitucci model 6er, then a fretless Patitucci 6er, then discovered FBass's 6ers and sold my Yamahas and have been FBass for 6-string basses ever since.
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