Wouldn't anyone play a metric bass?

[Skeezix]

90 minutes, + whatever random time the ref decides to add. But who's counting

I stand corrected. Actually, right now I am sitting down...
So, I sit corrected. Or something like that.

 

[Jeff Scott]

I thought "SAE" meant "Stupid And Expendable"...

In the home stereo world we called it Scientific Audio Explosion.

 

[Picton]

When I was building guitars, I always laid out my fret slots in metric. The math was about a million times easier.

Fender scale is 648 mm instead of 25.5 inches. Other than that, it's all rule of 18ths.

 

[Durham52]

Football is a real man's game that leaves men battered and crippled for life. Soccer is what suburbanites take their not-particularly-athletic kids to play on the weekend. See the difference?

Ever seen Rugby or Aussie rules football? No padding and helmets, Yank wusses!

 

[saabfender]

Ever seen Rugby or Aussie rules football? No padding and helmets, Yank wusses!

Stand there while a 220lb man in plastic armor hits you running at top speed then talk about wussies.

 

[EmuBass]

Haha, you thought this was complicated? Here are my 2 Cents. Talking of scale length (whether in Inches or centimeter) cannot be done this easy. Are we talking of scale length or string length? The latter cannot be done because of the setting of the bridge where you find different string length depending on the thickness of your strings (not to speak about "fanned frets" here). It seems to be easier if we focus on the "scale length" between the nut and the 12th fret and double this distance (just for calculation-reasons). The historical reason for Leo choosing 34'' (or whatever you would call it) has a thread of its own: Looking for historical information on how 34 inches became the standard for Bass scale.

 

[donotfret]

As someone who lives in a country where you can buy 2.272 litre bottles of milk (that's 4 pints), I know from everyday experience that imposing the metric system doesn't work.

Oh, I almost forgot. Would anybody here be able to tell me if my EUBs have 106cm or 41 3/4" scale length? I'm certainly not able to measure the difference with the equipment I have. I might manage with a good laser interferometer and careful planning, but all the effort might be in vain, because whenever I change strings it's unavoidable to slightly move the bridge.

 

[EmuBass]

I accept pints only for beer!

 

[NMTB]

Stand there while a 220lb man in plastic armor hits you running at top speed then talk about wussies.

A bit like rugby, only they do it without the plastic armour.

 

[TrevorR]

The recent threads about scales got me thinking that I'd never seen a bass built on anything but Imperial units for the scale length. Even the top notch European builders spec their scales in even inches with an odd number metric equivalent listed. It's remarkable that this is so engrained in the industry that builders who use metric for everything else in their lives would design basses with inches.

I'm sure someone will bring up some metric European basses to prove me wrong and that's OK.

Gosh 10 whole pages ago... but actually here's an answer to the OPs' actual question... they did. Aria SB Series basses back in the early 80s listed their scale lengths in mm rather than inches. I remember all the promo material I had when I got my SB700 waaaaaaay back in 1982 had the scale length listed as 860mm...

 

[Manuel Bass]

Here in South America we use both metric an inches and get the best of the two worlds

 

[ccfalkner]

My bass makes this problem much easier. See that switch on top? That is the English/metric converter. One flick and I don't even have to think about it.

 

[Furutan]

Evidently, it wasn't as important as its advocates claimed. Take most of what is taught in "schools" with a grain of salt?

It didn't work because Americans were stuck in too deep a rut. Few knew how many ounces were in a gallon or square feet in a hectare but they were - to be frank - too lazy to learn anything better. With rare exceptions the rest of the world (96% of the world's population) operates on metric. It's the same reason why the US gallon is smaller than the gallon everywhere else.

It would have been a heck of a lot better if the push for the metric system had petered out after just a few years. By now nearly two generations would have been raised on it and today they would look back at the old imperial measurements as being as ridiculous as they are. (BTW, perhaps it hasn't occurred to people that we accept two-liter bottles without blinking an eye.)

But we don't like to change.

 

[5StringBlues]

My '79 Jazz weighs 75250 grains.












Best sports thread on TB ever!

The gentleman seen above is being knocked approximately 4.572 meters into the end zone,





whereas the gentleman seen below is having his spleen pummeled approximately 7 inches into his body.

Thank you and goodnight from the BBC.

 

[bobyoung53]

It's because the musical instrument business is international. The USA is the biggest single market and if your product isn't measured in inches most Americans will have no idea what size it is but will have the suspicion that your product is somehow a threat to their way of life and the purity of their precious bodily fluids.

Ahh, we tried that metric krap 30 years ago, we're all too stupid.

 

[bobyoung53]

I've read several papers that suggested that "Time doesn't exist. It is something humans do to codify their existence." If you're up for a really deep rabbit hole, google it. Not recommended for those with hangovers.

I have always thought that, we exist, that's all but it is nice to have a thing we all agree on for coordination.

 

[bobyoung53]

My string spacing is 3/4", as Leo intended .. Where can I get one of them 19mm bridges?

I hate metric string spacing.

 

[IamGroot]

I tried. I think I heard something break. Does anybody else smell feathers burning?

I've read several papers that suggested that "Time doesn't exist. It is something humans do to codify their existence." If you're up for a really deep rabbit hole, google it. Not recommended for those with hangovers.

The Illusion of Time: What's Real?

There is disagreement among physicists over the nature of time.

 

[TrevorR]

Anyone heard the story of the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter? NASA did all their stuff in metric units and asked their software contractor, Lockheed, to do the same... they didn't, they used imperial. So the craft ended up ploughing into the atmosphere of Mars instead of going into orbit. From Wikipedia...

"The Mars Climate Orbiter (formerly the Mars Surveyor '98 Orbiter) was a 338-kilogram (745 lb) robotic space probe launched by NASA on December 11, 1998 to study the Martian climate, Martian atmosphere, and surface changes and to act as the communications relay in the Mars Surveyor '98 program for Mars Polar Lander. However, on September 23, 1999, communication with the spacecraft was lost as the spacecraft went into orbital insertion, due to ground-based computer software which produced output in non-SI units of pound-force seconds (lbf·s) instead of the Invalid Link Removed of newton-seconds (N·s) specified in the contract between NASA and Lockheed. The spacecraft encountered Mars on a trajectory that brought it too close to the planet, and it was either destroyed in the atmosphere or re-entered heliocentric space after leaving Mars' atmosphere.Invalid Link Removed[2]"

Oops!

 

[mongo2]

I could measure the scale length in cubits and it would still sound the same.