So...what exactly is a Fender/Squier Bass VI?

[Samuel Newsom]

alright so I got the chance to play a Squier Bass VI in the store yesterday. I must say it was an absolute blast to play! Coming from a guitar playing background it was nice to play and had a great sound. It's made clear on Fenders website it is NOT a baritone guitar as it has a short scale bass scale (30") versus an extended scale guitar scale (27") and has "bass" strings. But being a typical six string bass is strung B-C would that make this guitar technically a piccolo bass? I saw an Elrick on bass club Chicago that was a six string E-E tuning and was marketed as such. Just curious.

 

[Bassmingo]

The clue is in the name....

 

[Samuel Newsom]

The question was whether it would be considered a piccolo bass or something else.

 

[Tom Baker]

It's "Cool". That's what it is. Other labels are irrelevant past that.

 

[Samuel Newsom]

I was just curious is all

 

[jd56hawk]

The Squier Vintage Modified Bass VI is descended from the historic Fender Bass VI (1961–1975) that was embraced by guitar and bass luminaries alike. Jack Bruce played one in the early days of Cream. George Harrison used one in the Beatles' "Hey Jude" video. The Vintage Modified Bass VI puts classic Fender bass tone, looks, and feel into your hands at an amazing price point. It features a lightweight, resonant basswood body cut in that unmistakable, vintage Jaguar body shape that not only looks great but lays comfortably against your body for hours of comfortable playing. In addition, a unique trio of single-coil pickups on the Vintage Modified Bass VI put out an array of rich, full low-end tone as well as great midrange and touches of treble. And a classic maple neck with "C"-shaped profile brings you that legendary Fender playability and comfort — just ask bassists here at Sweetwater how much they enjoy this vintage neck.Stellar trio of single-coil pickups

The Squier Vintage Modified Bass VI features a trio of Custom Single-Coil Jaguar with Claw pickups. This unique array of pickups along with three on/off slide switches — one for each pickup — and a "strangle" bass-cut slide switch, put an impressive array of tonal options at your fingertips. You can dial in smooth low end for classic bass tone, as well as a slightly brighter range for a more "guitar-like" sound. And because the Bass VI is tuned E–E, a full octave lower than standard tuning, you can really dip in and out of both worlds with comfortable familiarity.

That neck!

This solid maple neck with "C"-shaped profile also features an Indian Laurel fingerboard with elegant white binding that provides yet another layer of comfort and playability. In addition, a vintage-style bridge with non-locking floating vibrato provides great tonal support.

Squier Vintage Modified Bass VI Features:
Classic Fender Jaguar 6-string bass brings vintage looks, feel, and tone
Maple neck with "C"-shaped profile and 20-fret Indian Laurel fingerboard offer great comfort and playability
Trio of Custom Single-Coil Jaguar with Claw pickups delivers an array of bass and guitaresque tone
Four two-position slider switches—an on/off switch for each pickup and one bass cut "strangle" tone circuit switch—for a wealth of tonal variations
Vintage-style bridge with non-locking floating vibrato provides great tonal support
Three-ply pickguard, chrome hardware, and black plastic knobs add even more classic look and vibe to this wonderful instrument

 

[FenderOli]

 

[bassstrangler]

Strung E low to e high, one octave lower than a traditional six string guitar. A cool instrument if used like The Cure did/does. IMO it is practically useless as a traditional bass for playing traditional lines.

I saw The Church quite a few years ago and Steve Kilbey used one the whole show if I remember correctly. It worked for him as a traditional bass. In recent years I see him use it on one or two songs and then his Jazz for the rest of the set.

 

[consectaneus]

I once saw Dwight Yoakam's backing group as a stand alone act in a club led by Tele twangler Pete Anderson, and the bassist did the whole set with a LPB Bass VI.

 

[Anders Barfod]

With a set of labella rounds or flats that has a 0.95 on the bottom you can get a better tighter bottom end than the daddario set with a 0.84 on the bottom.

 

[BucketOfFish]

@1:50

 

[mcarp555]

The idea behind it was to have a bass tuned one octave below a guitar, so that "guitarists" would be able to fill in on bass when needed. This is why John Lennon and George Harrison would use one when Paul McCartney was playing piano. It predates modern 5- or 6- string basses by several decades.

 

[Burwabit]

Great song. Didn't know this was played on a VI. Thanks for sharing that.

 

[TuneSalad666]

A Piccolo bass is usually a normal 4 string bass tuned an octave higher like a guitar but with thicker strings, so it is not a piccolo bass.

I guess you could call it a short scale 6 string bass tuned E-E, but with tighter string spacing than your usual 6 string bass, cause that is basically what it is.

It is what it is.

You could claim it is it's own type of instrument all together and in that case calling it a Bass VI type instrument would probably be the most fitting term, as it is not just Fender and Squier that makes these type instruments, even if, as far as I know, it was Fender that invented it and called it Bass VI.

Facts are though that due to it's tuning it has most in common with a regular bass.

 

[Jeff Scott]

...as far as I know, it was Fender that invented it and called it Bass VI.

Gibson had the EB-6, and there was the Danelectro UB-6 (?); not sure if those predated the Fender VI or not.

 

[HaphAsSard]

even if, as far as I know, it was Fender that invented it and called it Bass VI.

Danelectro did, in 1956, five years before Fender. Even Gibson beat Fender by one year with their EB-6 (the earliest version was in 335/EB-2 shape, the later one had the SG/EB-0 looks).
Dano's six-string, the UB2, was simply their sole bass guitar model back in '56, and one of very few basses available over all: the '51 Precision, the Kay K-162, the Gibson Electric Bass (EB-1), the Höfner 500/1, and that was about it.

More on the history of the old-style (short-scale, narrow spacing) six-string bass in a wider context below (caution: friggin' wordy):

The electric bass guitar was invented by Seattleite Paul Tutmarc in 1936 and sold locally from at least early '37. It was a short-scale (about 30", or three more frets than a guitar, like most short-scale basses of today), solid-body, neck-through -made, fretted, mag-pickupped, horizontally-held instrument tuned E1A1D2G2. Both it and its late '40s reissue by Tutmarc's son Paul Jr. AKA Bud failed to make any impact in the potential market, went essentially unnoticed and today survive in less than 20 specimens (only two of which are Bud's version).
Leo Fender's original Precision (single single-coil pickup, Tele headstock, later reissued in 1968 IIRC under the "Telecaster Bass" designation) came out in 1951. Solid body, long 34" scale (guitar scale plus 5 frets, rounded up a skosh). While it initially struggled to be accepted, at no point did it and its Fender descendants not outsell their competition by far - after a competition started to exist at all, in 1952 with the introduction of Kay's K162 electric bass (the so-called "Howlin' Wolf bass").
However, those few models that tried to get a slice of the budding market created by Fender didn't follow Leo's recipe too closely: the Kay was short-scale and hollow-body, the Gibson Electric Bass (later retconned EB-1) from 1953 was a short-scale solid-body violin-shaped instrument with the option to be played vertically on a screw-on endpin; Höfner's 500/1 bass (1956), later to become the iconic "Beatle bass" for many of us, was, beside short-scale and violin-shaped, a hollow-body one and actually built with violin-making principles and techniques, to a point. Only in 1957 was another long-scale bass issued, the Rickenbacker 4000; it was neck-thru like most Rick basses that followed (thus reintroducing the design in bass-dom after the Tutmarcs' forebears) and, based on the addition of 5 frets' worth of length to their guitars (again with a little correction) it ended up slightly shorter than 34" Fender scale: to wit 33.25". (In fact, if we only look at the number of models brought to market, not individual sales which were dominated by Fenders as mentioned, long scale only became the undisputed standard in the early '70s). (EDIT: as far as deviations from 34" scale norm, in 1959 early Carvin and Supro basses appeared which were in ~25" guitar scale! More Japanese-built mini-basses came out in the following decade.)

Now, what was Danelectro's 1956* take on the electric bass guitar concept?
(* Some Internet sources say 1959. Anyone in possession of a copy of Doug Tulloch's Neptune Bound - I don't own one yet - feel free to correct any and all inaccuracies; ditto for errors in the general timeline above, and below.)
The UB1 (and the better-known 2-pickup version the UB2): a single-cutaway, short-scale (Dano- guitar-scale plus three frets, or a smidge less than 30"), semi-hollowbody, 6-string instrument with close-spaced light-gauge strings tuned E1 to E3 - essentially a long electric guitar tuned an octave lower. It is my understanding that, for a couple years until the introduction of the Longhorn bass (the 4-string version - a 6-string one was also available), the 6-string bass as described above was the Danelectro bass, as in, the only one in their catalog.
Now, since the Dano cut itself a significant niche in the Nashville pop-country scene of the time, where the practice of having two basses in the rhythm section, one upright and the other a Danelectro 6-string (AKA "tic-tac" bass) playing mostly the same, pre-arranged bassline in unison was established, other manufacturers came up with their own version of the instrument, like Gibson with the EB-6 and the Fender VI, later Bass VI, the most famous of all.
If you mentioned a "6-string bass" at the time, when the aircraft-carrier decks of nowadays** were still a speckle in Anthony Jackson's eye (he conceived his "contrabass guitar" in the mid-'70s but they only became sort of widespread in the late '80s), you'd either get blank stares or nods of understanding from musicians who got that you were talking about short-scale narrow-spaced EABGBE things.
(** J/K folks, I don't play but nevertheless like modern BEADGC sixers, they're awesome.)
Many of these instruments were used by guitarists for low-pitched lead guitar duties rather than basslines, either as-is or retuned higher with lighter-gauge strings: the so-called "baritone guitar", for which dedicated, shorter-scale instruments became somewhat common come the Nineties (plus-1-fret 27" and plus-2 28.5" are popular scales), but, and this is important, was a concept that was an offshoot of the old-style 6-string bass and didn't exist before it, except perhaps for acoustic one-off custom affairs.

^Too long, didn't read: dude, they've been around since forever!
_______

Couple extra comments:
Squier reissued the VI a couple years ago, and there are a number of alternative choices from other makers, so there are probably more out there now than at any point in the past. Predictably many adopters will end up not knowing what to do with them. [...] I've actually written extensively about the topic - here's an old post of mine, about as lengthy as this one so I'll just link to it if you care checking it out:
NBD... Ibanez SRC6 crossover... LOVIN IT!
[...]


[Nth EDIT - a separate section for TB thread links.
A recent thread - if you forum-search for "bass VI" in thread titles more should come up - about the possible uses of it:
How to use a Bass VI in a band?
Another one:
Who here uses a Fender Bass VI as an actual bass?
Four megathreads on this type of instrument:
The Short-Scale Six-String Club—for the original six-string basses!
The Short-Scale Six-String Club Part 2- for the original six-string basses!
The Short-Scale Six-String Club Part 3 - for the original six-string basses!
The Short-Scale Six-String Club Part 4 - for the original six-string basses!
Two specifically about the Squier re-issue:
Squier Bass VI. At last an affordable, somewhat correct VI!
Official Squier Vintage Modified Bass VI Club ]

 

[Nephilymbass]

alright so I got the chance to play a Squier Bass VI in the store yesterday. I must say it was an absolute blast to play! Coming from a guitar playing background it was nice to play and had a great sound. It's made clear on Fenders website it is NOT a baritone guitar as it has a short scale bass scale (30") versus an extended scale guitar scale (27") and has "bass" strings. But being a typical six string bass is strung B-C would that make this guitar technically a piccolo bass? I saw an Elrick on bass club Chicago that was a six string E-E tuning and was marketed as such. Just curious.

I've tried the fender and a danelectro bass vi type instrument. To me they are very much there own thing. I wouldn't really consider them to be a piccolo bass because piccolo bass from my experience anyways implies a typical bass like string spacing.

 

[brianrost]

A piccolo is the exact opposite of a Bass VI. The Bass VI is a guitar tuned down an octave, a piccolo is a bass tuned up an octave.

 

[hieronymous]

I have one of the mid/late 90s Fender Japan reissues. I approach it as a short-scale extended-range bass, though it can be used as a "baritone guitar" as in the Glen Campbell Wichita Lineman clip posted above.

One of my favorite players who uses the Bass VI as a "regular" bass guitar is Roy Babbington of later Soft Machine. This is one of my favorite Soft Machine recordings - the CD comes with a DVD of the performance as well (as seen in the trailer).



You can hear a complete song (without the video) here:

It's definitely easier to play with a pick - I'm about 50/50 fingers/pick, depending on the instrument I'm using and music I'm playing, so not a problem. I think it would take work to get proficient on the Bass VI with fingers, but it's possible because Roy Babbington is doing it! The amazing thing is he started out on upright - why did he select basically the opposite instrument with the Bass VI?

 

[Flamingo21]

So the "VI" is a Roman numeral meaning "six" then, correct?

I used to wonder if it was an abbreviation, similar to "VM" for "Vintage Modified".