A Bass for a Guitar Player

While most of what I write here is more guitar oriented, it is never my intention to leave out the bass player and certainly not to ignore the reality that many guitar players at some or another decide that they need a bass. So let’s talk about picking your first bass when you are a guitar player.

My second “guitar” was a bass. It came from the Sears warehouse and was a very limited clone of the 1951 Fender Precision Bass that had the Telecaster style headstock. It even said Telecaster Bass on the headstock, even though no such thing ever really existed. I believe that it cost $40 and was worth all of that. Why did I buy a bass? At the time I was not sure if I would be a hack guitarist or a hack bassist. Now I am passably adequate on both, but there are days where I find the bass being an opportunity to get outside the box as it were. As primarily a guitar player I am more influenced by bass players who are / were also guitarists such as Geddy Lee. That said, I find myself more relaxed to play differently by listening to Jaco Pastorius, Chris Squire and Bootsy Collins. All different but bringing the magic. Perhaps you feel the same.

Body Style

Guitar body shapes tend to follow one of three styles, let’s call them S Type, T Type and LP type. Build something that looks too different and it can be a really tough sale. Bass body designers tend to see differently more often and while there are lots of copies of the body shape of a Fender Precision bass or Jazz bass, bass players tend to be more open minded about the body shape. Finding the right body shape for your body, size and strength is important because we want to be comfortable and not be fighting the instrument.

Scale Length

Most electric basses have a scale length of 34 inches. A Jazz bass with its offset body and a full scale neck is large but not difficult to play. A Gibson Thunderbird has the same scale length but its design can make it feel like the headstock is in the next county. Many guitar players coming from a Gibson or Fender scale length find going to a short scale bass as their first bass to be an easier acclimatization, because the 31 inch scale is more like the guitar. Bass strings are also heavier and flex less so the shorter scale is easier on the fingers because there is less tension on each string. My first good bass is a Cort made from a mahogany body with a wenge neck and fingerboard. It is extremely easy to play because it is a short scale and in the decades that I have played it have never once regretted the short scale decision. If one is a smaller person, a short scale can be more comfortable.

Neck Dive

It’s impossible to judge neck dive without actually picking the bass up. This means a visit to your friendly music store. Take a strap with you because most shops will not have demo straps. To check a bass for neck dive, put your strap on it and then hang it on your body. Does the headstock drift towards the floor? If so, that’s neck dive and it tells you that you will be applying energy to keep the neck from diving all the time that you play it. I have heard some people say that a grippy strap prevents neck dive. Not really, it moves the strain elsewhere but it’s still there. In a perfect world, whatever position you hang the bass on you, it stays there.

Pickups

Basses like guitars have all manner of different pickups. They could be single coils, stacked single coils, opposed single coils, humbuckers or something very different like the Fishman Fluence line. Basses are also more likely to offer both passive (no power required) and active (needs 9v or 18v). Active pickups put out a slightly hotter signal and are usually in place to support an active tone stack where you choose the frequency roll over point for the tone controls. They may also have separate treble, midrange and bass tone controls. While some basses have pickup selector switches, more common is a pickup blend knob where you can control the blend of neck and bridge pickups across a continuous range. Guitars rarely do this, but this function on a bass is very valuable. To get a good idea of the flexibility, consult the tone stack documentation for the Marcus Miller basses from Sire which is a wonderful implementation.

Number of Strings

Just as we have guitars with 6, 7 and 8 strings, basses are available with 4, 5, and 6 strings. The lower the string count, the narrower the neck and the lower the weight. As you add strings the width of the neck and overall body weight increases in a not so subtle way. A four string is tuned like a guitar from low to high as E A D G. If you choose a five string, it adds a low B string prior to the E. If you go to a six string, it adds a high C string below the G string. Each instrument plays differently and really talented bassists have said it’s easy to go from 4 string to 5 string, but adding the 6th string requires some mental work to prepare. This has been my experience as well

Standard or Multiscale (Fan Fret)

It is unusual to find a four string bass that uses a multiscale or fan fret layout. In five string basses, both are available. If you are looking at a six string bass, I am going to propose that you look at a multiscale bass. It actually is easier to play because of where your fingers are going to fall.

Fretless Bass

If you are like me and love the playing of Jaco Pastorius, you might be thinking of a fretless bass. If you studied stand up bass in school you may be better prepared for fretless, although most fretless basses today have lines inscribed on the fretboard to show where the frets would be if they existed. I wanted a fretless bass and purchased a Sire Marcus Miller four string bass. I love it, but as you would expect finger placement discipline is key otherwise you will be out of tune to some extent. However the effect of fingertip vibrato on a fretless cannot be replicated anywhere else. Fretless basses appear to make more frequent appearances in jazz than in rock. You’re the player, you decide.

Pick or Fingers

Some bassists prefer to pluck the strings with their fingertips and thumb-tip. Slappers tend to slap the low string with the thumb and pop the higher strings with their fingers. Others prefer to play with a nice heavy pick. This is entirely up to you, although for the slap bass sound, you have to follow the slap bass method. To get a really good sense of the different styles, head over to Anderton’s TV and look for older episodes of All About the Bass with Nathan and Lee as hosts. Nathan has moved on as I write this, but I refer you to the older episodes because both fellows are super talented and tended to inspire each other. Nathan would also demonstrate each sounding method so you can see and hear the difference.

Popular Basses

Back when I was coming up, the Fender Precision Bass was probably the most widely used instrument with players like James Jamerson in Motown. Many other rock players loved the P Bass with its opposed single coils. It has a Strat like body shape, although to be time correct, the Strat has a P Bass body shape. The other Fender Bass is the Fender Jazz Bass. It has an offset body like a Jazzmaster guitar and is better suited to the player who sits while playing. You can certainly play a Jazz Bass with a strap standing. The offset body was designed to cater to those who played sitting and didn’t want the instrument to be unbalanced. Chris Squire of YES was best known for playing a Rickenbacker, first a 4001 and then a 4003, although the bassist who really played the Ric first was of course Paul McCartney. When I first starting going to see Rush, Geddy Lee had a teardrop shaped P Bass, but became known for playing the black Ric. A P Bass sounds different from a Jazz Bass and a Rickenbacker sounds different from both. Rics are hard to come by these days, but you can get Precision Basses and Jazz Basses at a variety of price points under the Squier brand as well as under the Fender brand, either made in Mexico or in the United States. Ibanez offers a wide range of basses at different price points depending on the line most of them coming out of Southeast Asia or China. Epiphone basses are copies of Gibson basses but made in China to keep the prices low. Cort is still around, but is now best know to make products to be branded with other names. Their quality is still excellent value for the money.

If you were to ask me today, what I would suggest to the guitarist who wants his or her first bass, and a short scale was not required, I would direct you to Sire. They have multiple tiers of basses in different styles and I have yet to play one off the rack that was not superb. My fretless is a Sire as is my six string bass. I only recommend that which I have played extensively or chose to buy with my own money.

If you are a big person, consider a Gibson or Epiphone Thunderbird. They are very unique in style and sound. If it sounds like I am saying that there are myriad choices, you would be right and there is no need to get a junk bass.

Strings

Bass strings come in three basic finishes. Roundwound is like a wound guitar string. This is the brightest sounding string. Half-Rounds are round wounds with the tops of the exposed string burnished down. They are less bright and sound warmer than roundwounds. Flatwounds are just that. After the string is made the strings are prepared so you feel no ridges on them. They are super smooth and very warm, but a lot of their treble is gone for good. Most new basses come with roundwounds. As with guitar strings, there are hundreds of brands. I have been most successful with D’Addario NYXL bass strings as well as Ernie Ball bass strings. I do want to try the Elixir strings when I next buy strings, because I am impressed with the lifetime and lack of tone loss in the new recipe coated Elixir guitar strings.

Amplifiers

Producing great bass tone needs a lot of power and large speaker cones. This makes the great bass amps, large, heavy and cumbersome. While it is true that nothing sounds like an Ampeg SVT head on top an 8 x 10” cabinet, unless you have a road crew, that thing is not going anywhere. In addition to Ampeg, look to companies such as MarkBass for smaller excellent sounding amplifiers. Fender is respected for bass amplifiers and I am a big fan of the Mesa Boogie Subway family. If you are just playing at home or in a very small gig, my favourite setup that sounds good and is still portable is the Ampeg Micro30CL It’s a 100 watt head and a 2x12 vertical cabinet. Sounds great and you don’t need a forklift to move it.

However, that’s not the trend. Years ago, Geddy Lee dumped his backline entirely and used a Palmer Speaker Simulator to capture his bass sound and send it direct to the house PA. Later he moved on to products from Tech21NYC and they currently have two signature bass boxes. An option that I use in the studio here is a DSM & Humboldt bass DI that runs straight to the recording interface and incorporates it’s own preamp, with amplifier and speaker emulation as well as a very useful tone stack. Like other devices of its type, it also has a headphone out, so with some decent headphones, you can hear bass as it should be heard, but no one else hears anything. You can also run the unit into an FRFR speaker for when you need others to hear you. The beauty of DI gear is that it is so small and so flexible. That XLR out can go to an audio recording interface, to a mixer, to a PA or to an FRFR speaker, and the DI box itself fits in the large pocket of your gig bag.

In Closing

It’s my opinion that every guitar player benefits from a bass. Whether for songwriting, riff development, self-recording, having a bass at hand is very beneficial. Playing bass is different from playing guitar of course, but that does not mean that a guitarist cannot give the bass a go once in a while. Please subscribe to be notified whenever new content gets posted. Thank you for being part of That Guitar Lover and until next time, peace.