The
most metal bass out there is without a doubt the
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Stands to reason because:
1), even this model's name has the word "metal" in it. That alone makes it supremely metal.
2), it only has ONE GIANT FRET!
Yes, that's right. Take away that one fret and the rest of it is fretless, ie it is "fret less 1 metal fret". It's a French company, so things kind of get twisted in translation. It does indeed have but one fret, but one that covers the entire fingerboard!
Not only for metal, though, because that one fret is made out of "
Delta Metal" — That's right, you can play Delta blues on this beaut!
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There is, however, a "downside" to having only one fret...
You only get one note per string (open string and fretted octave). So it behoves the player to
plan ahead and tune quickly in between songs for whatever the next song's key is in, unless you're adept at tuning on the fly — for instance:
For a blues in E you may be tempted to use BEAD tuning so you've at least got all the roots of the chords, but in fact you'd want to tune that high string up, either:
BEAC# for the vi, say if you want to play with the rest of the band on a classic turn-around;
— OR
BEAF# so you have the ii, if you're doing a jazzier prog-metal "ii - V - I" blues turn-around.
So you can see there really is no downside. Keep it simple and easy to play.
Really, with four notes and their octaves you can play ANY song. Jaco was on the right track after all, a pity he wasn't able to hold on to this mortal coil long enough to see his dream come to fruition: His only mistake was to remove ALL the frets from his fingerboard, when all he needed was four strings — and ONE FRET!
