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Light tuners affecting tone?

#21
allexcosta said:
Gotoh could care less if Fodera started using some other tuners...

Fodera has made about 3000 basses in almost 30 years working non-stop. Samick and Cort make 300 guitars and basses EVERY DAY each...

Engraving the little butterfly on the back of their tuners probably costs a lot more than what they pay for the tuners themselves.

I mean, Fodera pays Hipshot to make 10 custom bridges per month. Do you really think they can't pay for Ultralights, which are 3 or 4 bucks more expensive than the ones they use?
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Given what a Fodera cost to buy and the two year wait for one, I would hope that I would find hardware on it that I didn't see on every bass in Guitar Center. It is a principle thing more so than a quality thing.

i could live without the butterflies on the backs of the tuners. ;)
 
#22
Jeff Scott said:
Given what a Fodera cost to buy and the two year wait for one, I would hope that I would find hardware on it that I didn't see on every bass in Guitar Center. It is a principle thing more so than a quality thing.

i could live without the butterflies on the backs of the tuners. ;)
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While I've agreed on more than one thread that Fodera's prices are a bit too steep let's be fair here. You won't see their bridges, electronics, pickups, hard-case, truss rod, woods, design, features and playability on any Guitar Center bass... The Gotoh tuners work just fine and happen to have the mass that they're looking for so why not using them?
 
#23
Everything on a Fodera is top notch, I think they are great basses (for the money :D), why skimp on the tuners? I know tuners are not as glamorous as a really well designed bridge, for example, but to me, that does say something about a company.
 
#24
This is a fantastic question about ultra light tuners making a difference in sound! I've not considered it! It leads to another question, do medium and heavy weight basses sound better than a light weight bass? Does a 9 to 10 pound Fender sounds better than a 7 pound? Isn't a lot of our sound differences about bass based on playing solo? In a live band senario, who can even notice? So, is light weight a desirable goal when considering bass sound?

Thanks for asking this question about light weight tuners! It's wonderful reading the comments!
 
#27
The reality is that we have not been able to find better functioning, lasting and sounding tuners than the Gotohs and those are the only factors that we considered...price did not enter the equation.

J

Jeff Scott said:
Everything on a Fodera is top notch, I think they are great basses (for the money :D), why skimp on the tuners? I know tuners are not as glamorous as a really well designed bridge, for example, but to me, that does say something about a company.
Click to expand...
 
#28
philtoler said:
Do you know why they do? I have never experienced such. Quite the reverse.
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It depends. Do you have the steel reinforcement rods? Are you running a neck with the steel rods in conjunction with a high mass bridge? Or do you have a neck without the steel rods but with a high mass bridge AND a brass nut? Or do you have graphite reinforcement rods AND a low mass bridge AND a plastic nut? And then there's the relationship between tuner weight and fretboard wood. I don't think we even want to get started down that road. ;)
 
#29
Hmmmm... These accounts of tuners changing things smells like suspect science to me. When you replace tuners, you *usually* replace strings too, yes? So maybe it's the strings? Also, when you remove the tuners, you are allowing the neck to shift a bit (potentially) - -

I don't buy the idea that tuners make *any* difference in tone. At all. The string resonates from the witness point of the fret (or nut) to the bridge and the pickup only detects that portion of the string that is resonating, not the trivial amount that happens between the nut & tuner.
 

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