Tuning a bass

  • Thread starter Thread starter Michael Jones
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Holy cow, three pages have passed since I logged off 8 hours ago!!! Good job fellas!!
 
Great link.

Doggone! It's too bad my kids are grown. "Scordatura" woulda been a great name for a girl.
 
lpdeluxe said:
Doggone! It's too bad my kids are grown. "Scordatura" woulda been a great name for a girl.
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I'm tempted to print it out. It's got some really cool stuff in there. I've been playing everything in standard tuning too long....
 
lpdeluxe said:
"Scordatura" woulda been a great name for a girl.
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My wife and I wanted to name our daughter something that no one ever thought of. We thought about it for 5 months straight, and one night, close to calling it quits for another day, out of my wife's mouth came "Shennalyn". It was a keeper. But I don't want to sidetrack this thread, just throwing it out there.


Back to the topic at hand:

The E E B E tuning looks interesting. And all the tunings have scales with them...
 
My wife and I wanted to name our daughter something that no one ever thought of

My approach was to give each child a reasonably conventional first name, with a more unusual middle name, with the idea that he or she would then have several options later on in life. My daughter got the middle name of Zibeda after her great-aunt. In 1978 I found myself in Los Angeles working with a young lady of Turkish extraction (she was a valuable employee in that polyglot community, speaking as she did French, Russian and Turkish in addition to English) who went by the name of Renee. One day I told her about my daughter's name, and she took a marker and wrote a string of Turkish characters on a paper. She said, "that's 'Zibeda' in Turkish." I was a little taken aback, and I asked her how she could do that so fast. "That's my Turkish name. I was named after a famous Turkish actress." Had I named my child Scordatura, I would never had experienced that, so I guess there is more to life than tuning a bass (how's that for a last-minute save?).
 
lpdeluxe said:
My approach was to give each child a reasonably conventional first name, with a more unusual middle name, with the idea that he or she would then have several options later on in life. My daughter got the middle name of Zibeda after her great-aunt. In 1978 I found myself in Los Angeles working with a young lady of Turkish extraction (she was a valuable employee in that polyglot community, speaking as she did French, Russian and Turkish in addition to English) who went by the name of Renee. One day I told her about my daughter's name, and she took a marker and wrote a string of Turkish characters on a paper. She said, "that's 'Zibeda' in Turkish." I was a little taken aback, and I asked her how she could do that so fast. "That's my Turkish name. I was named after a famous Turkish actress." Had I named my child Scordatura, I would never had experienced that, so I guess there is more to life than tuning a bass (how's that for a last-minute save?).
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Nice save, great story.

Shennalyn has the middle name Darcy, just because it rolled off the tongue. It's funny too, with my last name being of Scottish decent, that she gets a made up first name, a French middle name, and a Scottish last name because her mother is from the Philippines!

And you can tune that bass anyway you like, it's still going to sound nice...
 
Rokket said:
Shennalyn has the middle name Darcy, just because it rolled off the tongue.
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My dog's name is D'Arcy, named by my daughter after D'Arcy Wretzky, former bass player for the Smashing Pumpkins. I'm not sure how she tuned her bass - with her fingers, I presume.

Poor D'Arcy (the dog, not the bass player) tore her ACL in her knee lat month, and has been hobbling around on three legs ever since, though she is starting to put some weight on it. Vet bills have been kept to under $150, for which I am eternally grateful.
 

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Check this guy out. He tells you how to tune a bass with the correct pitch in the absence of a tuner or another instrument, in the U.K. anyways.
 
ez_willis said:
Check this guy out. He tells you how to tune a bass with the correct pitch in the absence of a tuner or another instrument, in the U.K. anyways.
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Ya know, you gotta be pretty desperate or really bored to figure out stuff like that....
 
__________________

Rokket said:
Ya know, you gotta be pretty desperate or really bored to figure out stuff like that....
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No No Rokket, just being a genius :D


Eddie

--------------------------------------------------------------------

One day I will get it right, until that day I just keep on trying
 
crazydoc said:
I'm not sure how she tuned her bass - with her fingers, I presume.
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Not judging by that picture she didn't - she just stared at the bass and frightened it into tune ;) You wouldn't want to wake up next to her in the small hours of a dark February morning, I think :eek:
 
So, you named your dog D'Arcy and taught her to walk backwards?
 
Microtones, Slides, Distortion and Triagles as Tuning Device.....

Bassman Brad said:
Microtonalism is a fascinating subject. All those schemes that have been developed to try to reconcile the mathmatical purity of the harmonic series with the compromises inherent in the 12-Tone Western scale, by simply inventing new scales that have fewer compromises (but are incredibly difficult to actually PLAY). It's really pretty cool stuff. And it is very relevant to this thread since it has to do with tuning, and some microtonal instruments are bass instruments. (And, of course, the scales involved apply to bass frequencies, as well as to the higher frequencies.)

From a player's perspective, things get complicated very quickly in the microtonal world. You all know how many different chords there are to learn based upon the usual chromatic scale, which only has 12 notes. How many chords do you think there are in a scale with 19, or 24, or 31, or 36 notes???? And, how do even begin to memorize which notes go where????


Which is why, despite the impossibility of achieving harmonic "perfection" in your chords using the 12-Tone Western scale, I'm quite satisfied with it.

Brad
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To get some of those microtones you could use a slide, to get those microtones really stand out you may want to use a distortion [Oh no God forbid, a distortion on bass, how on earth do you dare Eddie?.....]

To get more out of your slide, [ and microtones] you could even use alternative tunings-------> Yes Rokker I really dig your link about this subject, great stuff man!!

To tune up to these alternative tunings you may like to use any chromatic [or for that matter, a standard] electric tuner, pitch pipe, a piano or any other device [such as triangles] which would allow you access to the correct reference tone.

Needless to say..................I thank you all again for the enjoyable hours I have spent so far reading this thread.

Eddie
 
To get some of those microtones you could use a slide

I play Dobro and a little pedal steel with a slide, and I have learned that there is one sure way to make a microtone stand out from the surrounding music:




hit it by mistake.
 
lpdeluxe said:
I play Dobro and a little pedal steel with a slide, and I have learned that there is one sure way to make a microtone stand out from the surrounding music:




hit it by mistake.
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LMAO!!!! That is so true!!!! :D
 
FYI - they began making the La Bella strings Jamerson used to play again.

La Bella 0760M

They play great...and tuning them is easy...except when you use foam underneath...

but perfect intonation is a small price to pay for a great sound! ;) :D
 
That brings up an interesting question that should get lots of responses:

How often do you change your bass strings? Me, I only change them when they won't tune anymore.

I never boil my strings either, what's your take on that?
 
As a side note, my current set has been on my bass for over a year.... :o
 
Rokket said:
How often do you change your bass strings? Me, I only change them when they won't tune anymore.
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The strings on my Squier P-bass are the same ones that were on it, when I bought it back in 2000. The strings on my Squier Fat Telecaster are the same ones that were on it, when I bought it in 2001. The strings on my Ibanez AG75 where there, when I bought it in 2003, and the stings on my Johnson JG-622-E acoustic electric bass were there, when I bought it last April.

When I was at Guitar Center in Indy, this past Saturday, I decided to hold off on strings for the P-bass, until I've actually got room for it in my bedroom, and I go get it out of my storage unit. I ended up leaving Guitar Center with a set of Ernie Ball Slinky Top Heavy Bottom (10, 13, 17, 30, 42, 52) for the Fat Tele, and Ernie Ball Beefy Slinky (11, 15, 22p, 30, 42, 54) for the Ibanez. Unfortunately the Fat Tele's in storage with the P-bass, but at least I've got strings ready for it, when I can bring it home.

Oh...the 2 sets of bass strings that I was considering are like $25/set, which is why I decided to hold off there.
 
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