First of all, no, I have not read all the messages in the thread. For that, I apologize. Your initial post prompted two responses:
1. How many of us frequently use all the strings available, no matter how many we have? I played bass for about 30 years at church. With two keyboards, drums, two guitars, the occasional sax, mandolin, banjitar, whatever, plus four or more singers, the music director usually just wanted the bass to find the root rhythmically and stay out of the way. (OK, it wasn't always that simple, but you know what I mean.) I found myself usually using three out of four strings on a given song and, yes, that probably says more about my limitations than anything else.
2. Among my limitations is that I am 5'7" tall. My main bass for years has been an Alembic Persuader Vector with a 32" scale. I have thought about a fiver, but the one I found most appealing was a 32" Alembic I definitely could not afford. The same church gig, however, drove me to an alternative solution. I built a four-string jazz bass tuned BEAD. It's difficult to capo singers, so we played a lot of songs in Eb or other unappealing keys. I'm also convinced that a ton of 5-string owners just want to play E at the 5th fret of the B string and don't often use the full capabilities of their string range. For my part, I wanted to play Eb on the 4th fret of the B string.
At this point, my BEAD bass is just a beautiful oddity mostly hanging on my wall because I retired from playing at church this past Father's Day. Now I just sit around playing guitar and occasionally lobbing my strange opinions onto facebook or other discussion arenas like TB! Rock on, amigos!
1. How many of us frequently use all the strings available, no matter how many we have? I played bass for about 30 years at church. With two keyboards, drums, two guitars, the occasional sax, mandolin, banjitar, whatever, plus four or more singers, the music director usually just wanted the bass to find the root rhythmically and stay out of the way. (OK, it wasn't always that simple, but you know what I mean.) I found myself usually using three out of four strings on a given song and, yes, that probably says more about my limitations than anything else.
2. Among my limitations is that I am 5'7" tall. My main bass for years has been an Alembic Persuader Vector with a 32" scale. I have thought about a fiver, but the one I found most appealing was a 32" Alembic I definitely could not afford. The same church gig, however, drove me to an alternative solution. I built a four-string jazz bass tuned BEAD. It's difficult to capo singers, so we played a lot of songs in Eb or other unappealing keys. I'm also convinced that a ton of 5-string owners just want to play E at the 5th fret of the B string and don't often use the full capabilities of their string range. For my part, I wanted to play Eb on the 4th fret of the B string.
At this point, my BEAD bass is just a beautiful oddity mostly hanging on my wall because I retired from playing at church this past Father's Day. Now I just sit around playing guitar and occasionally lobbing my strange opinions onto facebook or other discussion arenas like TB! Rock on, amigos!
I'm in love, wow sweet fretless!
) horse 5-er. 
