Hello and welcome to Bass Tone, playing with precision with me Nick Long, brought to you by
Easy Ear Training. Last time around we talked about the daddy of them all, the acoustic bass,
but this time we’re going to be focusing on the electric bass. This time around I’m going to be
playing you some bass tone examples, so to that end I brought with me my trusty Warwick Streamer
Double Buck. You’ll be able to hear my voice in the left hand channel and the bass guitar in the
right hand channel. As I mentioned in the last part, laptop speakers aren’t very good at reproducing
bass frequencies, so if you want to appreciate the subtle nuances of the examples, I suggest you
use a decent pair of headphones or some desktop speakers. As with all firsts, it’s very difficult
to say who really invented the first electric bass, but there’s very little doubt that the genius
inventor Leo Fender can take a lot of credit for popularising and creating the first successful
mass production instrument. Released in 1951, it’s not an understatement to say the Fender Precision
revolutionised bass playing. It was a radical new design. It kept the tuning of the upright bass,
but it reduced the scale length from a massive 42 inches to a quite manageable 34. It added guitar-style
frets on a bolted-on neck. It has a sleek and sexy, if you like that kind of thing, solid
ash body, and most importantly of all, it flipped the whole thing on its side. What I think is
a mark of the genius of Leo Fender, who is one of my personal heroes, is that the design
decisions he made on the Precision have become the de facto standard of bass design. If you
go into a shop today and look at any bass guitar, the standard double cutaway, scale length, the
style of the tuners, the style of the bridge, all bear the hallmarks of the very original
Fender Precision bass. And I think the real testament to his design genius is that the Fender P bass,
as it’s affectionately known, along with its sister the Fender Jazz or J bass, is still the most popular
bass guitar in the world. The standard four-string electric bass is tuned E, A, D, G, like a guitar,
but an octave down. So let’s have a listen to that.
The new Fender electric bass answered the prayers of a lot of frustrated professional musicians,
but they also revolutionised the way that people could play the bass, as they explored new ways of
playing the instrument that had never been thought of by Leo Fender. The effect of the Fender electric
bass was nothing short of a revolution. Suddenly, the bass was portable and affordable, and any guitarist
could quickly learn to double on bass. The name Precision comes from the fact that the fretted neck
allows for perfect pitching of note every time, even for a beginner, and this had two immediate effects.
Firstly, the bass became a pretty easy instrument to pick up, leading to the popular trend of bands
putting the cool one with no musical ability on bass. But hey, what’s wrong with being the cool one?
Secondly, a skilled bass player could now tear up the fretboard like a guitarist.
It isn’t an exaggeration to say that modern music, such as funk and metal, just couldn’t exist without
the potential for high-octane low-end provided by Fender’s magical melding of wood and wire.
Now, let’s talk about pickups, and the huge impact they have on the tone of your bass.
The P and J style of basses have a very similar construction. The main difference is that the
P bass sports an unusual Z-shaped humbucking magnetic pickup, giving a fat rock sound.
The strange shape was allegedly to throw Gibson off the scent, as they still held the
patents for this type of pickup. Gibson Guitars are very proud that one of their employees,
with the extremely excellent name Seth Lover, invented the humbucking pickup, and it’s for that
reason that their style of pickup is often referred to as the PAF pickup, with the PAF standing
for patent applied for. A humbucking pickup is really just two single-coil pickups wired
together, so it has two rows of magnets and two coils of wire. The two coils of a humbucker
are wired the opposite way round to each other, which was designed to cancel out noise, but
also has the very pleasing side effect of creating a very fat sound. The bass I’m playing today
has humbucking pickups, but it has a switch which allows me to disable one of the coils and
make it into a single-coil pickup. What I’m going to do now is play a little riff with the
neck pickup set to humbucking mode. If we now switch that over to single-coil, you should
hear a little click. You’ll notice that the bass sounds a little bit less fat in the bottom
end. You also might notice that it became slightly quieter, and if you’re listening very carefully
on headphones, you might notice some background noise on the single-coil. The single-coil pickup
is notorious for picking up electrical noise from nearby equipment.
People tend to focus a lot on single-coil versus humbucker, but that really is only one
factor in the sound of a pickup. The type of magnet you use makes a big difference. If
you’ve heard the word alnico in relation to pickups, it’s because it’s often considered
the best material. Another material that’s very popular is what’s called a ceramic magnet,
which is more powerful. The number of wraps of wire, and the gauge of the wire, also make
a big difference to the sound. If you’re interested in hard rock and metal, you’re probably
aware that metal guitarists tend to use pickups with very high-output ceramic magnets, usually
what’s called overwound, where they wind a lot more coils of wire around the magnets.
This is essentially to produce a very, very high-output sound that creates a lot of distortion
and a lot of sustain for solos and big chugging riffs. Bass players don’t tend to go in for
these overwound pickups, because active basses can already produce a really high output level.
We’ll talk about active basses in a minute.
If you like the feel of your bass, but you’re not getting the sound you want, fitting new
pickups is probably the cheapest and best option to improve the sound. Probably the
most famous manufacturers of replacement pickups are Damasio and Seymour Duncan, and in the world
of bass particularly, also the company Bartolini. But there’s an awful lot on the market, and
because it’s fairly easy to make pickups, there’s an awful lot of interesting homebrew
companies that produce really interesting and fantastic pickups. So if it’s something you
want to get into, you can spend a lot of time comparing materials, looking at the esoteric properties
of magnets and so on.
On a jazz bass, the two pickups have individual volume controls, and bass players pretty soon
realised that by blending the two pickups, you could get certain sweet spots between
the more articulate bridge pickup and the fatter neck pickup.
Bass players love these in-between tones so much that basses tend not to have pickup switching
like a guitar, and instead usually either have individual volumes for each pickup, or a blend
control. The bass that I’m playing today has a single master volume and a blend control that
fades from the neck pickup to the bridge pickup. So let’s listen to that now. First of all,
I’m going to fade all the way to the neck pickup. Now I’m going to fade all the way to the bridge
pickup. You’ll notice that the bridge pickup is far more articulate if I play up the neck, then
with the neck pickup, which you’ll notice has a smoother, more hollow kind of a tone. Similarly
with this neck setting, if I play low down, you’ll get that big sort of a fat tone, whereas again,
with the same riff on the all the way to the bridge, it’s a more articulate kind of funky sound.
We can fade between these two pickups, so if I play a note now, you can hear the frequency sweep.
Even though the two pickups on my bass have exactly the same construction, you can hear
that they sound quite different, and this is because they’re sampling a different part of
the string. At the neck pickup position, the string’s moving a lot more, and so the sound
tends to be fatter, and at the bridge position, the sound tends to be more articulate, more
treble-y. You can really emphasise the sound of a particular part of the string by picking
at that point with a plectrum. Let’s try blending between the pickups and finding some sweet spots.
treble-y. See, that sounds like a nice sound to me. Let’s move them equally together. Move a little bit
closer towards the bridge. Finally, all the way to the bridge. Try taking a familiar riff
and playing it with different pickup blends. You’ll be amazed to hear what comes out. Bass
players tend to be more accepting of modern technology than just about any other type of
musician, except keyboard players, obviously. Despite this, of course, there is still a huge
market for retro designs, as the ongoing popularity of the precision and jazz basses shows.
Modern bass guitar designs are typically active, and this means that they have a battery-powered
preamplifier, which boosts the output level for a clearer signal and provides two or three bands
of equalisation. The boost in an active bass isn’t about changing your tone, it’s more about keeping
your tone pure. The really high output level that an active bass creates improves what’s called
the signal-to-noise ratio, so there’s less nasty buzzes and hums. And the high output level of
an active bass is also really good at driving a long cable. If you have a passive bass and a very
long lead, you can find that your tone drops away. The real power that an active bass puts into your
hand is control over equalisation. If you’re playing a passive bass, you may have a tone control,
which performs a very basic roll-off of the treble frequencies. If you have an active bass,
you may have separate middle, treble and bass controls, which give you a really wide sweep of boost and
cut. This isn’t really any different to fiddling with the controls on the front of your amplifier.
If you’re in the middle of a gig, it’s a lot easier to reach down and tweak a little bit
of treble on and turn your back on the audience to go and play with your amp.
On the bass I’m using, I’ve got a separate bass and treble control, which are capable of boosting
and cutting. First, to get a reference, let’s play with the control set completely flat.
Now let’s try boosting the treble frequencies.
You’ll notice as I add more treble frequencies, the sound of the bass jumps out at you more,
but also you get an increasing amount of string noise.
If I turn the treble up really all the way so it’s kind of too much, what you’ll start
to hear is a lot of string noise. If I rub my finger on the string with the treble all
the way up, you get a real nasty lot of extra string noise. If I turn it back down so it’s
no boost at all, you’ll see here that’s really, really low down in the mix.
One of the temptations when you’re playing live is to really crank a lot of treble on
because it makes you stand out in the mix, but it’s something you have to be a little
bit careful about because it can easily mean you end up stepping on the toes of the keyboard
or the guitar or one of the other higher register instruments. If we pull the treble right back
you’ll hear we get a more muted kind of a retro tone.
Let’s move on to the bass control. It is after all a bass guitar so the bass control really
adds that fat low end. Let’s hear our reference tone again. Now let’s add some fatness with
the bass control. Let’s try pushing it all the way. As the bass player you’re in charge
of the low end so it’s good to crank a little bit of extra bass on just to really get the
floor shaking, but you have to be a little bit careful that you don’t lose the articulation
in your playing. With the bass control turned up all the way, if I play something quite delicate
high up the neck like this, it tends to have rather a mellow sound, whereas if the bass is
slightly cut, this is particularly noticeable if you’re going to do some chording with the
bass. So here I’m just going to strum a couple of major seven chords with the bass cut very
slightly. Now I’m going to crank the bass up all the way.
As you could hear there, when I piled the extra bass on it sounded a lot fatter, but it started
to lose that nice articulation and got a little bit muddy. As well as whereabouts on the string you pick,
the choice of the string you choose to play the riff on can make a big difference to the sound.
I’m going to play an open G string. Now I’m going to play the same G note on the D string.
And the 10th fret of the A string.
Now I’m going to play the same note on the 15th fret of the E string.
When you play the same note on a thicker string at a higher fret, you’ll get a fatter sound.
Let’s try playing the same riff, first of all on the D and G strings, and then on the E and A strings.
I think the riff on the D and G strings had more of a funky edge to it, whereas played on the E and A strings,
it had more of a mellow groove. There are many other factors that influence the tone of your bass guitar,
like the choice of strings. They can be wire wrapped round wound, or a metal tape wrapped flat wound,
like an upright bass. It could be the choice of woods, and whether the neck is glued or bolted
construction, but I wouldn’t expect you to recognise them by ear, so they won’t be covered with sound
samples here. Next time around we’re going to be talking about the different playing techniques
available to the bass player, and how this affects tone. I hope you can join me then.
