So I’ve been playing for around 10 or 11 years now and have been a TalkBass junkie for pretty much the entire time. I’ve had around 20-25 different basses during this timeframe from $300-$400 models all the up to ones in the $2,500 range. With all those basses I’m not sure I’ve ever had one that truly (by definition) didn’t have at least one dead spot. Obviously some were more pronounced than others. That said one of thing I’ve learned with playing is the importance of your technique especially in the sense of muting strings so you don’t get the sympathetic vibration string noise (I.e. playing cleanly). I play primarily with my fingers so it’s usually some variation of the floating thumb technique. My point and question is this, it seems like controlling the dynamics and/or unwanted sustain/ringing of the wrong notes is more important than sustain and yet it seems we fixate on finding the unicorn bass where each note rings out perfectly on every fret on every string. I get the importance of sustain from a guitars perspective, but do we overrate sustain when it comes to bass? For example, so many of or 60’s and 70’s bass heroes used flats and stuck sponges under the strings close to the bridge. That seems to suggest sustain wasn’t at all important to them. Why then has it become so important to us?
