Whammy bar on a bass ???

It's a thing; Steinberger used to have the TransTrem bridge.
Fretless is close enough for me.

 

That's been done for decades. Heck, Dean used to put them on their basses at the factory. (Not my bass, but a pic of one.)

 

I had the opportunity to buy an older Peavey with a tremolo in it once and passed - so wish I would have grabbed that bass.

 

Stanley uses It on multiple basses and pretty aggressively . I could only try a Kahler once on a Warmoth bass, they used to sell It. Can be used subtle and fine too even while accompanying. It's just another tool and requires practice as much as slapping or any other technique If you want It to sound good though.
Here is a Ritter treat

 

Nooo!!! I can see the Guitar Center heroes having a blast with one!!

 

Gotta love those clickbait titles!

 

I had a Steinberger XM-2 with the TransTrem for many years. Fortunately, when you dropped the bar it would pivot into a locked position giving you a fixed bridge. Levers and tension, laws of physics, make bass trems worthless, IMHO. It was cool when I put piccolo strings on the bass and played it like a guitar, but might as well play guitar if you want to play guitar.

 

Last one I saw was a Guild Pilot w/ a stock Kahler at Bress Pawn Shop / Norfolk like 25 years ago. I remember it was yellow. Just did a search and I see an identical one in the TB classifieds from days-of-old.

Riis

 

It certainly looks more a lot more useful than the rubbish jazzmaster-style "tremolo" on the Bass VI.

 

I grabbed a lot of licks/tricks/fun stuff for my fretless playing from Eddie Van Halen. I’ve tried using an actual trem and don’t enjoy it nearly so much.

 

I had one of these briefly around 20 years ago... didn't care for the tremolo at all LOL. Hence, the "briefly".

 

You can hear one in action here. Yoshihiro Naruse playing a Tune 8 string with a tremolo. He puts it to work!

 

I had a Schaller tremolo on my Hondo fame bass master in the late 80's.

You had to understand that if you pushed the bar down and let go that the tremolo's resting position was relative to what you just did. Tuning at that point would mean that you could only ever push the bar down and be in tune afterwards. If you tuned as I just described, then pulled up on the bar and let go.... You are now sharp / out of tune. You would need to be sure to push the bar back down after pulling it up. Same applies in the reverse if you pull the bar up and let go and then tune against the resulting resting position of the tremolo.... You would always need to make sure that the last thing you did was pull up the bar, not push it down.

 

The Fender Bass VI has always had one.

 

MANY moons ago, (I was about 17, now 49) I was playing guitar and our first gig was supposed to be a party that got shut down before we even got there, so we talked a bar down the street into letting us play. Didn't have a bass player so we had found a guy to fill in, no practice. He nailed it. Showed up with a bass with a trem! Played the 2 handed tap version of Linus and Lucy while we were in between songs!

Also turned out to be one of the nurses when I was in the hospital for a week with a collapsed lung the next year.

 

Yeah, not a new thing. Yet, there will be those who will be impressed because he did it.

 

Glenn Cornick 50 years ago:

 

The late great Randy Coven:

 

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