Double Bass Very high humidity in Sydney, Australia

[reverendrally]

Hi everyone,
We're experiencing extreme amounts of rain (4" on Saturday night) and some local flooding. I've been noticing my bass has been quite effected. At church on Sunday morning, I felt like I was wrestling an elephant. The bass has three Velvet animas (don't get me started) and a teflon weedwacker on G. Usually, it's quite a nice bass to play, but with all the moisture it feels like the string tension is through the roof.

Yes, it's up for a string change very soon, but it's not easy to play at the mo. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Any suggestions on new strings would be good too. I play about 65% pizz and 35% arco at church, jazz jams and whatever else. I liked the feel and sound of the Velvets, I hated the way they fell apart.
Cheers.

P.s. the bass is a 1920s, small 3/4, German solid bass.

 

[DoubleMIDI]

Nothing you can do about the high humidity if you move your instrument in rooms with high moisture to play outside your home.
The humidity gets into the wood and makes the wood heavier and therefor heavier to be moved. It also damps resonances of the wood and lowers the resonance frequencies.

It might be better if you can dry a room at home so the bass feels better, but I‘m not sure if moving back and forth from normal to high humidity too often is a good thing for the instrument.

 

[KUNGfuSHERIFF]

Yeah, that’s how you get a crack. The more stable the better for the bass. If possible, keeping it in air-conditioned environments will suck some of the water out of the air.

 

[David Potts]

If the cover gets wet while you are moving the bass then take it off to dry ASAP. Mine got drenched in the 5 metres between my car and front door the other night. Our Bureau of Meteorology has been forecasting 100% chance of rain and 100% relative humidity at about 80 degrees F (27 degrees C). Extensive record flooding up and down the eastern seaboard and, paradoxically, very high temperatures and dry conditions over in Western Australia causing extreme fire danger and bushfires.