I recently bought a used bass for real cheap because it badl1y needed some maintenance. I replaced the strings with new SS rounds, fixed a few things, did a setup and it now plays and sounds great.
But the rosewood fretboard desperately needed to be conditioned so I ordered a bottle of finishing oil from Stewmac.
When the oil arrived I applied it as I've always done in the past except that I was too lazy to remove the strings. They were only on the bass for about a week and I wasn't about to change them.
There is no doubt that the strings got doused with oil but I assumed this would be okay because I did a thorough job of wiping the oil off the strings and the fretboard with a dry cloth.
The next day I began a practice session as usual and my bass tone was horrible. There was almost no treble. Instead of the piano like "ding-ding-ding-ding" sound I expected, I heard something like "blorp, blorp, blorp, blorp".
I checked everything in my signal chain. Both pickups in my passive PJ set worked fine. Tone control worked. preamp/DI fine. Cables functioning perfectly. I even bypassed everything and plugged directly into the board. Same issue.
Tried a different bass with active EMG P. That fixed the problem. The rich, grindy tone I'm used to. So, something about that bass was killing my tone.
I was stumped and gave up playing for the evening.
Then, today at work, I was thinking about this and it occurred to me that maybe the small amount residual oil on the strings was killing the tone. Is that the right answer?
If so, I don't believe that just 24 hours is enough to actually ruin the strings and I should be able to take them off, clean them with windex or something, reinstall them and they'll be fine.
I'll be back in my studio tomorrow night so I can figure this out and I'd like to have some advice before I tackle this.
What say you, TalkBass?
But the rosewood fretboard desperately needed to be conditioned so I ordered a bottle of finishing oil from Stewmac.
When the oil arrived I applied it as I've always done in the past except that I was too lazy to remove the strings. They were only on the bass for about a week and I wasn't about to change them.
There is no doubt that the strings got doused with oil but I assumed this would be okay because I did a thorough job of wiping the oil off the strings and the fretboard with a dry cloth.
The next day I began a practice session as usual and my bass tone was horrible. There was almost no treble. Instead of the piano like "ding-ding-ding-ding" sound I expected, I heard something like "blorp, blorp, blorp, blorp".
I checked everything in my signal chain. Both pickups in my passive PJ set worked fine. Tone control worked. preamp/DI fine. Cables functioning perfectly. I even bypassed everything and plugged directly into the board. Same issue.
Tried a different bass with active EMG P. That fixed the problem. The rich, grindy tone I'm used to. So, something about that bass was killing my tone.
I was stumped and gave up playing for the evening.
Then, today at work, I was thinking about this and it occurred to me that maybe the small amount residual oil on the strings was killing the tone. Is that the right answer?
If so, I don't believe that just 24 hours is enough to actually ruin the strings and I should be able to take them off, clean them with windex or something, reinstall them and they'll be fine.
I'll be back in my studio tomorrow night so I can figure this out and I'd like to have some advice before I tackle this.
What say you, TalkBass?
