Ampeg offered a five-string Baby Bass in the sixties by special order, though for the life of me I can't recall right now whether it had a low B or a high C. Probably the C.
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Ampeg offered a five-string Baby Bass in the sixties by special order, though for the life of me I can't recall right now whether it had a low B or a high C. Probably the C.
Gonna, Beer Can Chicken, Church Bells, Reality, Leave Love Alone, Honey Bee, Humble and Kind, Feel Like a Rockstar, That’s what I love about Sunday’s...
It could be the Chubby Jackson five string bass that was made by Kay in the forties.
A lot of baritone guitars are tuned B1–E2–A2–D3–F♯3–B3. I think that the Fender VI and the Danelectro six-string instruments from the fifties and sixties are considered bass guitars.
The first mass produced five-string that I remember was made by Yamaha in the early eighties. Nathan East was instrumental in the design so he could double the synth lines on 80's pop records. From what I remember, the five-string was largely inspired because synth bass could go lower than electric basses. That didn't make us bass players happy.
With that low B we could go a half-step lower than the keyboard player, so once again we became the rulers of the bass kingdom.Edited to add: With vinyl records the bass frequencies had to be kept under control to keep the stylus from jumping out of the record grooves, so it might not have worked so well to have lower frequencies in music. The CD came along right around the time that five-string basses & synth bass started to get popular, so maybe with that new technology it became more feasible to use basses with a low B. I'm just guessing; I could be completely wrong about that.
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I totally disagree!
My Fender ADPV or my Sadowsky MV5 make is sound absolutely fantastic and are both 34". So does my Lakland 55-02 with 35" scale. It's sounds just different, but it sounds great in both 34 or 35 scale.
There is this common thing about 35 scales having a better B. I don't know where does it come from, but it's just nonsense to me.
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On a grand piano i think that A (below a 5er's low B) is the lowest note. This is an A at about 27.5 Hz
EdwardofHuncote
I Still Dream of Jeannie
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This was his original, #76-AC-418
It was stolen in 1987, and has yet to be recovered. (He's still looking for it)
*FWIW, Jimmy claims the idea to string his bass with a low B came from his Dad, who was an orchestral bassist.
I tuned my Steinberger L2 BEAD back in the 90´s for a live tour with some folk music that had been rearranged by the composer/performers son.
He had gone solo in the studio and recorded a LP with a lot of synthesizers and drum machines on top of the original tapes with the traditional instruments. It sold very well here, so he was asked to perform live.....
So he called me
and some other guys.
Live I had to match some of those synth lines going below E.
I didn´t want to buy a 5´er for this project, and he wanted me to bring the Steinberger.....
So I bought a B string and retuned.
There were some funny faces in the audience on that tour (Bassists looking at me playing and thinking w****t***f***** is he playing..)
And the Steinberger sounded so good strung BEAD you would think it was made for it.
Anyway, I think some of that music from the 80-90´s with synth bass lines made some bassists want to go below E.
He had gone solo in the studio and recorded a LP with a lot of synthesizers and drum machines on top of the original tapes with the traditional instruments. It sold very well here, so he was asked to perform live.....
So he called me
and some other guys.Live I had to match some of those synth lines going below E.
I didn´t want to buy a 5´er for this project, and he wanted me to bring the Steinberger.....
So I bought a B string and retuned.
There were some funny faces in the audience on that tour (Bassists looking at me playing and thinking w****t***f***** is he playing..)
And the Steinberger sounded so good strung BEAD you would think it was made for it.
Anyway, I think some of that music from the 80-90´s with synth bass lines made some bassists want to go below E.
My bet is on the technology, history, and tradition.
Basically, bass frequencies are hard to create without modern tech.
Here's my take on this.
Most old (pre-Baroque) music is centered around octaves that were higher than the centuries that followed. Cellos, bassoons, bass lutes were pretty much the only portable instruments that could produce the required bass lines. At that time there were two families of popular bowed string instruments, the violin family (modern violins, violas, and cellos) and viol family (modern double bass). The former are almost always fretless, are tuned in fifths, and have bodies where the curve of the wood joins the neck horizontally. Viols are often fretted, tuned in fourths, and generally have bodies where the curve of the body tapers up to neck (look at pictures of violin bodys and bass bodies and you'll easily see this).
Viols were replaced mostly by violins somewhere between 1700-1800 as the violin family is louder and technically more adept with the exception of the bass viol (now double bass) as low freq technique does not work so well tuned in fifths.
For about 150 years your choices for a portable bass were limited to a double bass or a tuba. Woodwinds generally don't work as well and were not as popular. It's still not uncommon in some realms for doubling on bass to mean being able to play bass and tuba. I'd have to check my references as to when E A D G became standard but I think it was more or less settled by the 1800's. The electric bass derives its tuning from that as early on all electric bass players had been double bass players. That changed, probably around the end of the 50s I'd imagine when guitar players and novices took it up. These folks were not limited by pre-conceptions of acoustic music and so let their imagination take the instruments to all sorts of new places including higher and lower tunings. This became more feasible over time as the amplification, reproduction, and availability of improved hardware like strings and pickups that could reproduce these lower frequencies in a pleasing manner. Try listening to a low B on a 50s phonograph or playing through it a pre-50's amplifier. Not recommended.
It's like bluegrass or jazz really, a lot of bluegrass is in the Key of G because of the instrument tunings, and early jazz in Bb because of brass tuning. I think popular music might have been a little different if the electric bass had a B string early on and assuming that the reproduction technology was available, but I think the primary driver of the keys of popular music is the guitar tuning not the bass. And E on a guitar is definitely more accessible than other keys. If one looks at the effect of the low B on current popular music, my opinion is that it has reduced this E lock and helped free the music to move to other keys.
Basically, bass frequencies are hard to create without modern tech.
Here's my take on this.
Most old (pre-Baroque) music is centered around octaves that were higher than the centuries that followed. Cellos, bassoons, bass lutes were pretty much the only portable instruments that could produce the required bass lines. At that time there were two families of popular bowed string instruments, the violin family (modern violins, violas, and cellos) and viol family (modern double bass). The former are almost always fretless, are tuned in fifths, and have bodies where the curve of the wood joins the neck horizontally. Viols are often fretted, tuned in fourths, and generally have bodies where the curve of the body tapers up to neck (look at pictures of violin bodys and bass bodies and you'll easily see this).
Viols were replaced mostly by violins somewhere between 1700-1800 as the violin family is louder and technically more adept with the exception of the bass viol (now double bass) as low freq technique does not work so well tuned in fifths.
For about 150 years your choices for a portable bass were limited to a double bass or a tuba. Woodwinds generally don't work as well and were not as popular. It's still not uncommon in some realms for doubling on bass to mean being able to play bass and tuba. I'd have to check my references as to when E A D G became standard but I think it was more or less settled by the 1800's. The electric bass derives its tuning from that as early on all electric bass players had been double bass players. That changed, probably around the end of the 50s I'd imagine when guitar players and novices took it up. These folks were not limited by pre-conceptions of acoustic music and so let their imagination take the instruments to all sorts of new places including higher and lower tunings. This became more feasible over time as the amplification, reproduction, and availability of improved hardware like strings and pickups that could reproduce these lower frequencies in a pleasing manner. Try listening to a low B on a 50s phonograph or playing through it a pre-50's amplifier. Not recommended.
It's like bluegrass or jazz really, a lot of bluegrass is in the Key of G because of the instrument tunings, and early jazz in Bb because of brass tuning. I think popular music might have been a little different if the electric bass had a B string early on and assuming that the reproduction technology was available, but I think the primary driver of the keys of popular music is the guitar tuning not the bass. And E on a guitar is definitely more accessible than other keys. If one looks at the effect of the low B on current popular music, my opinion is that it has reduced this E lock and helped free the music to move to other keys.
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I am going to go with a slightly different answer to what everyone else has mentioned.
The E on a double bass is plenty low. It 'feels' lower than an e on a bass guitar due to the way that it is produced and the way that a bass guitar is amplified which doesn't emphasize the fundamental. Therefore no one would consider the need to go lower than the bass instruments in an orchestra at that time.
The E on a double bass is plenty low. It 'feels' lower than an e on a bass guitar due to the way that it is produced and the way that a bass guitar is amplified which doesn't emphasize the fundamental. Therefore no one would consider the need to go lower than the bass instruments in an orchestra at that time.
Think of it this way, if you are playing in Ab on a conventionally tuned 4 string bass, are you not moving up in down the fretboard? BEAD tuning makes a lot more sense than trying to play with an E string dropped to D, which I did for 7 years.
Interesting. I’m thinking that’s a chicken or the egg poser. An E would sound plenty low if that is what the the music called for. Which came first? Music that was written to only need a low E as the lowest note, or one that requires a lower note?
I get where you are coming from, and I love that characteristic too, but assuming the double bass was designed to provide that specific fundamental you speak of, I would doubt that it would be better going lower when detuned.
One thing I agree with, in order to get close to the fundementals of a double bass at low E out of an electric bass would require an EQ rendering the over all sound somewhat muddy. JMO
I saw a 5-string upright in a museum in Florence, Italy - next to a Stradivarius violin. I don't know when it was made but clearly it was very old.
Viols often had more than four strings. The smaller ones often had up to six or more. There are a lot of non-standard configurations for early instruments, especially bass instruments (for example three string basses were often common). I am not aware though of bass viols that played in the same octave as the modern double bass with more than four strings until about the 1800s.
The standard converged around four strings tuned E A D G to complement the tunings in the other string instuments. For various reasons (technical, technique, and temperament) early instruments did not tend to go far from their native tunings. Modern five string and extension double basses were limited primarily to orchestras and arrived late on the scene. Their use was pretty much limited to "serious" music as they are more expensive.
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we play bass guitars, but don't call me a guitarist, play a baritone guitar and you are a bassists, play a piccalo bass, and you are a bassists. I guess, if I play bass clef off using a guitar, I'm playing a six string piccalo. With tongue in cheek, I wish I knew this, before I played double bass, I could have used a retuned viola, and called it a mezzo-piccalo bass.
If Fender had put a B string on it’s basses in the 50s or 60s I bet it wouldn’t have gained much popularity just based on the limitations of bass amplification available...
Maybe if you're playing a .130 or .135 gauge B string on a 34. My .145 B, however, is tight, thunderous and defined on my 34. The tension is more important than the scale length, IMO. And also string fitment is very important for sound transference. (How well the string sits in the nut and bridge saddle.)
