Double Bass Ebony vs Maple tailpiece

[Bassalova]

Anyone got any experience with maple tailpieces? If I´m right, maple is much lighter in weight than ebony. or what? Thus making the maple tailpiece more usable and absorb less vibrations than ebony. Am I not right?

 

[Matthew Tucker]

Yes and no.

 

[Gearhead43]

Absolutely maybe.

 

[Matthew Tucker]

OK enough fooling. Maple is lighter than ebony, true. It is a different material and has a different effect to ebony. It is no more or less usable. Ebony makes very good tailpieces. Maple makes good tailpieces. What works better depends on the bass and the luthier and the strings and and and and ...

 

[bonaventura]

Maple may pull. Other woods would too.

I've got a bunch of tailpieces. One is pear, very lightweight. Other is walnut, also lightweight. Relative to ebony, that is.

 

[mpm]

and eastern maple is much heavier, generally, than western "big leaf" maple...and quilt maple is much lighter than straight grain too...

 

[Jake deVilliers]

And a smaller, thinner tailpiece will be lighter than a big thick one...hey, what are we discussing here?

 

[Gary Lynch]

Steve Swan told me last week that for strictly pizz playing, he thinks a composite tailpiece, thin and light is best for tone. He claimed thick heavy ebony sucks tone for pizz playing. Steve said light and resonate works great and there is a lot of misunderstanding about the issue (Re; pizz only)

Anyway it seems ebonized maple and ebony are the most used.

 

[TroyK]

My tailpiece is currently a curly maple custom Jake DeVilliers jobbie. When I went up to Jake's shop, we whacked a bunch of different types of wood with a drum stick and the result was amazing. To my ears, in that experiment, Ebony was very dead sounding and maple that we used was very musical. When I got the bass back, I was very happy with how she spoke. I'm sure a lot more went into it than the choice of wood, but it was a factor, I suspect.

 

[smg_luthier]

My tailpiece is currently a curly maple custom Jake DeVilliers jobbie. When I went up to Jake's shop, we whacked a bunch of different types of wood with a drum stick and the result was amazing. To my ears, in that experiment, Ebony was very dead sounding and maple that we used was very musical. When I got the bass back, I was very happy with how she spoke. I'm sure a lot more went into it than the choice of wood, but it was a factor, I suspect.

so troy, what size sticks do you wack your bass with ? just curious..
smg

 

[Jake deVilliers]

so troy, what size sticks do you wack your bass with ? just curious..
smg

Troy doesn't whack, I do. I use a Vic Firth American Custom T2 Cartwheel for checking tunings and a 7A for the endpin.

 

[Mike Arnopol]

Question for y'all---
The general logic these days is that a lighter tailpiece is preferrable in that it doesn't mute the bass as much and allows greater vibration, right? I had a bass once that sounded great. It had a featherweight painted pearwood tailpiece. I had this great idea of putting on this beautiful ebony tailpiece. Noticeable difference. Less open, the bass felt like the response suffered. So to take it to more of an extreme---what about making a carbon fiber tailpiece? Anyone hear of this being done?

 

[Jake deVilliers]

Mike, the plastic composite tailpiece made by Wittner is pretty close to CF and it weighs 165 grams. I've taken maple down to ~113 grams to get the Mode-Matching right and you could lighten it even further, maybe down to 100 grams before it started looking too small for the instrument.

I would call the Marvin Tailpiece the ultimate - no tailpiece at all really, just stainless cable from the string ends to the endpin. Lots of good reports here on TB about how people feel about them, positive and negative. http://www.marvinusa.com/