Tapered B string - is this normal?

[BismarckHerring]

I've been curious about tapered strings for a while now, so I decided to try one, a Dunlop 130T NPS. The good news: it feels and sounds great on the first five frets, probably the best of any B string I've tried.

The bad news: beyond the fifth fret it sounds progressively worse the higher up the neck I go. It sounds like a ring modulator.

In the attached example, I play a scale starting on the 3rd fret and ending on the 24th fret. Not that I'd ever go that high, but I do care about the notes up to the 12th fret, and ideally, I'd like it to sound usable up to the 15th fret. I tried it yesterday with my band, and I started to notice it at the 6th fret, and it sounded outright bad beyond the 9th.

I've seen a couple of other threads discussing this. Apparently it's called inharmonicity and other people have experienced it too. I was wondering how common this is. Is this a tradeoff you have to make for having a great sounding/feeling B string on the lower frets? If I could get the benefits without the downsides, that would be great.

The taper starts 2,5 cm from the saddle, which seems quite far. Maybe that's the problem? Using washers or stringing through the body to bring the taper closer to the saddle is not an option: the bridge design isn't great for that, and the taper on the other end of the string begins only half a centimeter beyond the nut (the bass is 35 inch scale). Does anyone know of a B string where the taper begins around 5 cm from the ball end?

 

[BismarckHerring]

I tried the string on a different, Fender-style, bass. 34 inch scale, bent plate bridge. Same issue. So maybe I just got unlucky and received a bad string after all.

 

[GTHintz]

Interesting, maybe there’s something wrong with the string then.

Hey so just to throw this out there I put a set of Dunlop steels on a new bass and not realizing it thought that I had a pickup or nut issue because the tapered B just didn’t sound right anywhere on the neck including open. Bass is a mtd k5 so it’s 35” scale and zero fret which I was thinking could have been causing this. But anyway after making sure the string wasn’t twisted and everything was riding perfectly on the nut and bridge it was still sounding strange and even acoustically buzzing in a strange way. The notes were weaker and it was a shame because the rest of the strings sounded awesome as usual. Dunlop signature has been great strings for years. I took off the dunlops and put them on another bass that was needing strings too. Same issue so I confirmed that the b string is the issue. The other bass I knew for a fact is well setup and usually sounds great with most strings. I took that tapered string off and threw on one of my spare Dunlop B strings from an old set and it’s sounding great together. So I don’t know how new your dunlops were but if they are relatively new like mine then maybe we both got a bad batch of taper B’s. I’ve used tapered strings a few times before and it’s usually hit or miss whether they sound good. Because of that if I was doing this professionally I wouldn’t be bringing tapered strings on the road or in studio. You just don’t know what you’re getting. Sad part is there’s been some really great taper strings out there like Dean Markley sr2000 but they are not around anymore.