Picked up bass again after an age.... My beard has now turned white since I last took fat strings seriously - hence the name of my avatar (White Beard).
Long story, but a friend from Amsterdam, who plays double bass, was coming to visit me, so I asked another friend who is the bassist for local Rockers "Black Kiss Superstar"(*) if he could lend me his fretless for a couple of days. He did so, but was in no hurry to get it back. So I started messing around on it and .... soon fell in love with it.
The only thing I didn't like so much was that it was a standard scale 34" and I only have short arms. So I went hunting for a short scale fretless. Plenty available in the USA, but not so many in Europe here. Eventually found a ridiculously cheap semi-acoustic (solid build Chinese job) and I decided to risk the $80 it cost. I figured that if it was a piece of cr**, but the neck was OK, I could always use the neck to convert my fretted bass the easy way (bolt off the old / botch on the new). In the end it turned out to be playable and quite loud. The action is quite high, but once it has settled I'll see a friend who is a local luthier and ask him to adjust it for me.
So here I am hoping that this old dog will be able to learn a lot of new tricks here. Already impressed and I've only dipped my toe in these vast waters here.
Hope to see you around,
Berni (Barbablanca)
(*) I know - no English speaking band would have called themselves that... But they're Catalan speakers wanting to look cool with an English band name
)
Long story, but a friend from Amsterdam, who plays double bass, was coming to visit me, so I asked another friend who is the bassist for local Rockers "Black Kiss Superstar"(*) if he could lend me his fretless for a couple of days. He did so, but was in no hurry to get it back. So I started messing around on it and .... soon fell in love with it.
The only thing I didn't like so much was that it was a standard scale 34" and I only have short arms. So I went hunting for a short scale fretless. Plenty available in the USA, but not so many in Europe here. Eventually found a ridiculously cheap semi-acoustic (solid build Chinese job) and I decided to risk the $80 it cost. I figured that if it was a piece of cr**, but the neck was OK, I could always use the neck to convert my fretted bass the easy way (bolt off the old / botch on the new). In the end it turned out to be playable and quite loud. The action is quite high, but once it has settled I'll see a friend who is a local luthier and ask him to adjust it for me.
So here I am hoping that this old dog will be able to learn a lot of new tricks here. Already impressed and I've only dipped my toe in these vast waters here.
Hope to see you around,
Berni (Barbablanca)
(*) I know - no English speaking band would have called themselves that... But they're Catalan speakers wanting to look cool with an English band name
)
