David, absolutely no offence taken… we are all passionate about bass playing and that’s it.
Again, we are all different and I’ve set up my basses your way for years before discovering that an even distance of the strings from the fretboard suited me better.
Yesterday I went on and worked on the bass… first thing I raised the nut on the E string side to be even with the G string side at 0.30 mm. Then I dropped the bridge all the way down and then raised it evenly until the strings barely touched the frets: all the strings were at the same distance from frets.
That confirmed my suspects: the bass was setup following the same steps, THEN, in order to pursue that higher strings drop down, the guy lowered the treble side of the bridge until he obtained 1.5 mm on the G string at 12th fret. At this point he had unnecessary height on the E string and to compensate for it he dropped down the nut on the bass side! Voilà…
All I did was making the nut and bridge even and I ended up with a nice even action of 1.75 all over the neck. Now it really plays effortlessly…
One curious thing I noticed is that now that the nut on the bass side is set higher (0.30 mm now instead of the previous 0.10 mm) I found the notes in the first frets on the E strings easier to play. I attribute this to the fact that when the string was at a minimal distance from the fret I probably didn’t feel the response of the string while pressing it and ended up using way more pressure than needed, resulting in a perception of being “hard to play” despite the very minimal distance between string and fret.
All is good now.
Again, we are all different and I’ve set up my basses your way for years before discovering that an even distance of the strings from the fretboard suited me better.
Yesterday I went on and worked on the bass… first thing I raised the nut on the E string side to be even with the G string side at 0.30 mm. Then I dropped the bridge all the way down and then raised it evenly until the strings barely touched the frets: all the strings were at the same distance from frets.
That confirmed my suspects: the bass was setup following the same steps, THEN, in order to pursue that higher strings drop down, the guy lowered the treble side of the bridge until he obtained 1.5 mm on the G string at 12th fret. At this point he had unnecessary height on the E string and to compensate for it he dropped down the nut on the bass side! Voilà…
All I did was making the nut and bridge even and I ended up with a nice even action of 1.75 all over the neck. Now it really plays effortlessly…
One curious thing I noticed is that now that the nut on the bass side is set higher (0.30 mm now instead of the previous 0.10 mm) I found the notes in the first frets on the E strings easier to play. I attribute this to the fact that when the string was at a minimal distance from the fret I probably didn’t feel the response of the string while pressing it and ended up using way more pressure than needed, resulting in a perception of being “hard to play” despite the very minimal distance between string and fret.
All is good now.
