Or: The Search for the Sound of Wood, or: what's keeping me up at night this week…
Probably through a little subconscious name relation with Bowie's Blackstar, I've been revisiting Jason Moran's 2001 album Black Stars. It's a killer album with a tremendous band (known as The Bandwagon). This got me digging around on YouTube for some recent concerts where I found this:
A great show, but what really caught my attention was Tarus Mateen's bass. He's playing a Marco bass similar in many ways to my Flattop, but man he's getting a solid acoustic tone out of it. And this led to me rethinking my bridge:
If you want to sound more like an upright, why not mirror the construction of an upright instead of an electric? Although I can't build a big violin bass style bridge due to height restrictions, I can build a squat version of it—something with more spring to it than the ebony slab bridge I've been playing. And why not construct a pickup similar to what you would use on an upright? So that got me building a biscuit pickup:
Yea and that came together pretty nicely:
I didn't take a picture, but that biscuit wedges into the bridge slot below the E string. After a test run I noticed that the E was a bit louder than the other strings and had a different sound quality—more direct with less wood, less acoustic-ness to it. In my fiddling I pinch some wires and was out two bucks. But I had a new idea…
I touched bass with Tarus (thanks to the internet) and found that his setup was similar to this idea: placing the piezo under the entire bridge so that one side rested on the soundboard and the other on the bridge. And baby it works!
It don't look pretty, but it's completely changed the sound of the Flattop: it's more woody, more percussive and more acoustic sounding when amplified (loud (and soft)) compared to the old setup. An electric bass does sustain and direct sound really well and an upright does thump and acoustic sound really well. I figure the trick to sounding like an upright is to get rid of some of that sustain and directness… This new setup does this and I'm getting a much more even output from the strings. Right now I'm getting a ton of percussive sound which is a little strange. For the moment I don't know if it's good or bad, but I like where it's going…
Probably through a little subconscious name relation with Bowie's Blackstar, I've been revisiting Jason Moran's 2001 album Black Stars. It's a killer album with a tremendous band (known as The Bandwagon). This got me digging around on YouTube for some recent concerts where I found this:
A great show, but what really caught my attention was Tarus Mateen's bass. He's playing a Marco bass similar in many ways to my Flattop, but man he's getting a solid acoustic tone out of it. And this led to me rethinking my bridge:
If you want to sound more like an upright, why not mirror the construction of an upright instead of an electric? Although I can't build a big violin bass style bridge due to height restrictions, I can build a squat version of it—something with more spring to it than the ebony slab bridge I've been playing. And why not construct a pickup similar to what you would use on an upright? So that got me building a biscuit pickup:
Yea and that came together pretty nicely:
I didn't take a picture, but that biscuit wedges into the bridge slot below the E string. After a test run I noticed that the E was a bit louder than the other strings and had a different sound quality—more direct with less wood, less acoustic-ness to it. In my fiddling I pinch some wires and was out two bucks. But I had a new idea…
I touched bass with Tarus (thanks to the internet) and found that his setup was similar to this idea: placing the piezo under the entire bridge so that one side rested on the soundboard and the other on the bridge. And baby it works!
It don't look pretty, but it's completely changed the sound of the Flattop: it's more woody, more percussive and more acoustic sounding when amplified (loud (and soft)) compared to the old setup. An electric bass does sustain and direct sound really well and an upright does thump and acoustic sound really well. I figure the trick to sounding like an upright is to get rid of some of that sustain and directness… This new setup does this and I'm getting a much more even output from the strings. Right now I'm getting a ton of percussive sound which is a little strange. For the moment I don't know if it's good or bad, but I like where it's going…
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