Neuser NFS technology...???!

Interesting... Sounds good..

I wish it went into a little more detail about how it works..

 

Listened to the sound clip - had me fooled except for a few places where he slid, but wow - sounds wonderful!

And it's just with the flip of a switch...how convenient!

 

I'd have to agree.. There's just something about feeling that slick fretboard under your finger tips!!

 

Kinds of reminds me of an ebow sorta. Very nice, though I'm betting it works similiar to the e-bow. Ya think?

 

Damn straight

 

That's the coolest effect ever!! I wish the demo would have some more single note lines. I would really like to hear the sound of it playing a supporting bass line.

 

I had thought about doing something, which may be what the Neuser NFS does.

[ begin informed but unproven analysis ]
With a fretless, the "mwah" sound is produced by the string "scrubbing" (actually scrubbing with respect to side-to-side motion, and bouncing with respect to up-and-down motion) slightly against the fingerboard just ahead of where you press it down. That is why action height affects the mwah - as you raise the action, there is less scrub, and less mwah. Also why plucking harder mwahs more - more string deflection, and more scrubbing.

What is happening is that the string is trying to deflect into an area where the fingerboard is, and it "bounces" off the fingerboard. The harmonics generated are higher overtones because of the short distance from the scrub area to the node. And the mwah "blossoms" on some basses because energy from the fundamental is being converted to energy of higher overtones.
[ end analysis ]

Anyway, imagine that there was an area at the bridge node that resembled the fingerboard node on a fretless. To create this, you could just lay the string over a hard surface at the bridge, and adjust the angle for proper sound. There is no reason the surface would have to be under the string; the conventional saddle could stay under it, with the surface introduced from the top. And that's what I am guessing Neuser is doing.

 

That demonstration on the Neuser site sounds great. Pretty close to a real fretless sound to my ears. The system is available as a retro-fit. It doesn't look to be too invasive. If I had a bass with individual bridges for each string, I would really be interested in this system.

 

Sounds like the old "Sitar" guitar trick.

 

Yep, it does sound like some sort of "sitar-style" bridge mechanism. There was a fairly cheap bridge add-on for guitar and bass that was advertised as something like "instant sitar" for guitar and "instant fretless" for bass. Reviews were underwhelming. However, I'm pretty darned impressed with that recording, and would guess this is a much higher-quality implementation of the same idea.

Pretty cool...

Mike

 

However it works, it sounds good to me. I wonder what the prices are.

Made by ABM sounds good, too. I wonder if it could be integrated into the ABM headless system.

 

I played one in Germany. It was really neato the way you could change the tones. It still doesn't beat a real fretless but I liked it a lot. I don't have any idea how it worked though. Those Neuser basses are really fine instruments. I think anyway.

 

I wonder if it has any p/up in the ABM? Could it be like an e-bow and a Lightwave integrated into one mechanism. Maybe a piezo and e-bow duking it out in a mini feed-back war?

Not enough info on the site, sound clip is interesting.

...Still will not replace fretless anytime soon.

Didn't Elio Martina (sp.?) do this instant bass-mute? Wonder how that is picking up.

 

Sounds like an awful complicated installation for something that's just supposed to be a simple bridge replacement. And the bass mute didn't "pick up" anything--it just pushed foam against the strings to mute them.

Mike