I've had to curtail my drinking a lot due to digestive health issues, most recently, celiac.
Chrch and
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Generally we just bore out the nut and use large gauge strings. It's a replaceable part. I use a .130 gauge B string for my low tuned basses.
I've pointed this out before, but I see a lot of people on talkbass complaining about the B string sounding bad on their 5s, whereas I almost never see anyone complain about a bad B string on a BEAD tuned 4.
I have three BEAD tuned basses. A heavily modded Peavey, a somewhat electronically modded Epiphone, and a Rickenbacker 4003S. They all sound great.
As to why people use the basses they do, admittedly part of it is almost certainly image.
Part of it is the tone, though. Partly because those basses tend to have tones that work really well in the kinds of mixes we find ourselves in. Also, they are proven to work pretty predictably well with effects, which is a big deal in doom. In my experience, passive electronics seem to work better with effects.
I have seen bassists use other kinds of instruments, though. A fair number of T-birds, and Ron from Bongripper was using a Gibson RD before he got his custom Electrical Guitar Company bass. Dave from Neurosis uses mainly Ibanez basses. I've seen old Guild B-300 series basses and Ovation Magnums used, too. I've seen a fair number of Peaveys used, and the dude from Badr Vogu uses a Warwick.
Why not just use the 55-02? If you have more than one, put them in different tunings.
I've seen G&Ls. Geezer Butler uses Laklands. Sadowsky basses are likely too unaffordable and probably perceived as too hi-fi (even if unfairly).
Pretty much. I don't really get the idea that only a longer scale bass will sound good in BEAD. I've never had a bass that didn't. I used my old banger Peavey as my bass in Catapult for all of the first three years I was in the band, and it's a budget instrument.
I think you might be mistaking some of the wall of sound for guitar when it's actually bass. Like the link to Chrch I posted earlier in this reply, most of the sound is actually bass. Many people tend to assume that any overdrive they're hearing is guitar, when in doom, it's just as likely to be the bass.
The thing is, I find bass in most death metal to be practically inaudible, but that's metal mixes in general, of basically every subgenre but doom.
A lot of the trick to doom mixes has to do with being where the guitars aren't... in bands where the guitars have a lot of low end, this is why the bass ends up sounding really ganky. I use a very different tone in Catapult versus in Dustern. In Catapult there are three guitars at times, so I tend to go for a midrange spike around 500 hz. In Dustern there's only one guitar, and the guitar sound is much more midrangey, so I go for a much bassier tone and roll off some of the highs.
The tendency towards big tube amps and so forth I think partly rests with these, in a way, being more 'user friendly' for a couple reasons.
1. Tube amps generally have less power than solid state amps and so you stand less chance of blowing your cabs when turning way up and playing with heavy fuzz (less, you can still blow up your speakers), especially if you have lots of cabs.
2. Some amps (including many tube amps and some solid state amps) sound nicer turned way up past the point of clean volume than others.
3. Old-ass primitive amps can be near infinitely repairable, which can be kinda important.
Generally a larger cab is mostly just taller than a smaller one, and so doesn't actually take up more stage space. My 2x15 doesn't really take up more room on stage than my 1x15. Actually less, in one way, since it isn't as deep.
For a lot of people in doom, including myself, the volume is coming from using a bigass loud cab. My head is only 180 watts, not much for a bass amp. But it handles being turned up without sounding bad, and I run it through a really loud cab.
That said, a tube amp isn't required. My cab actually makes the biggest difference in my tone, as far as all my gear goes. I've played different basses and even a different amp while mine was in the shop (drummer's GK head, nice amp), and still sounded mostly the same.
I play in a six piece where every guitarist (there are three) has a half-stack and one of them also plays keyboards, and the singer plays additional percussion. Some of our first gigs were at house parties. So I think the issue of big amps taking up too much room onstage is kinda exaggerated here on talkbass.
