Steve’s blog

Fretless Basses

The upright bass was the instrument the electric bass was meant to replace. Upright basses are large and less hardy than solid body instruments. They needed to be large in order to produce bass frequencies at volumes a listener could hear along side other acoustic instruments. The upright bass had a hard time competing with the volume of drum sets and electric guitars. A new instrument was needed to go with the new music being played that used these instruments. There were several instruments invented in the decades preceding Leo Fenders release of the Precision Bass. There were attempts to amplify upright basses. Reliability and ease of portability won out in the end. The instrument recreated the low end of the upright bass but had the addition of frets. Frets are small pieces of metal wire attached to the fingerboard of strung instruments at each note. Upright basses didn’t have frets. The musician held the string directly to the fingerboard to produce the desired pitch and being in tune was up to him. Frets made it easier for guitarists to transition to electric bass in the early years as well.

Something was missing.

Electric bass guitars and upright basses have notes that fall in the same register, but the tones are different. It’s not impossible to comp the sound of an upright bass on an electric bass guitar. Having frets on the neck of a bass guitar makes this attempt a little more difficult.

Legend has it that jazz great Jaco Pastorius had an upright bass that fell apart in the humid Florida climate. Instead of getting it fixed, he grabbed his pliers and removed the frets from his electric Fender Jazz Bass guitar and the fretless bass was born. While Jaco’s contribution to fretless playing is undeniable, he didn’t invent it. Companies like Gibson and Ampeg were putting out fretless versions almost from the beginning. The recipe of playability and sound wasn’t right at the time.

Fretless bass guitars are very expressive instruments. Many bassists are intimidated by the lack of frets. Like all things in life, practice will fix that. In this case, ear practice is what’s necessary. Placing your finger in the exact right place comes from repetition of the hand but tilting your finger forward or back to make the micro-tonal adjustments necessary for correct pitch happens with ear training. Almost anyone can do it with practice. Tone deafness is extremely rare. I find that that fretless goes great with acoustic guitars, pianos and ballads. The decreased attack of a fretless tends to get muddled when placed opposite overdriven guitars. That’s certainly not a rule, as evidenced by Les Claypool. Fretless is a great option in the studio. It’s good to have as many colors on your palette as you can.

Alembic Basses

Alembic was a company started in 1969. The intent of the company was to help the Grateful Dead have better audio quality on their live recordings. A lot of the technology used during live concerts was conceived and developed by people working with the Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead played live constantly and were an ideal testbed for different ideas about sound amplification. PA systems and live microphones were some of the pieces of gear that were modernized during this time period. Instrument electronics were another field that needed advancement. Alembic was on the forefront of these advances.

Instruments before this time tended to be noisy when plugged in to an amplifier in some situations. The electronics used in vintage instruments commonly picked up electrical interference. In 1955 an employee of Gibson named Seth Lover invented a guitar pickup called the Humbucker. The humbucker solved the problem of noisy instrument electronics by cancelling the 60-cycle hum that instruments picked up. He did this by using two magnetic coils in his pickups. One to sense the movement of the string, and the other with reverse polarity to provide phase cancellation of the sound. This lead to a quieter instrument. The side effect of this design however was decreased treble from these instruments as some of those frequencies were also cancelled.

In an effort to increase the fidelity of Grateful Dead recording, Alembic attempted to get the same results in a different way. They used pickups that had a full frequency range but a low output. These low impedance pickups needed a preamp to boost their signal. Alembic started as a preamp manufacturer. They designed an on-board electronics package that was quiet and reproduced an instruments full range of frequencies. In 1972, they began building extremely high-end instruments with these electronics built in. These instruments were innovative electronically and structurally. The boutique instrument market was almost singlehandedly invented by Alembic. Their basses were in high demand by studio musicians in the 70’s as brands like Fender and Gibson fell out of favor due to quality control issues and technological stagnation.

Electronics are an import part of Alembic Basses. These basses are named after the model of electronics on-board. The body of an alembic can be anything the customer can dream up. All things are option for a totally custom experience. Alembic basses come at a premium price with base models starting around nine thousand dollars and high-end models in the twenty to thirty-thousand-dollar range. They make enough instruments that the resale value is much much lower, usually due to the individuality of each instrument. I’ve used an Alembic Europa and an Anniversary model on recordings and been happy with the results. They are extremely versatile instruments in the studio. I like to keep an eye on the used market for them because serious deals can be had occasionally.

The Fender Precision Bass

Fender basses were some of the first usable electric basses offered to musicians. In 1965 Leo Fender decided to sell his company to CBS. A decade and a half of cost cutting by the new owners led to the companies slow demise by the end of the 70’s. A lack of innovation and increased competition from overseas manufacturers devalued the company. A group of employees was able to buy the company in 1985 due to its devaluation. The new owners set to work rebuilding the company’s reputation and by the late 80’s had been fairly successful.

I started playing bass in 1979. It wasn’t until 1992 that I owned a Fender. I purchased a Precision Plus from a local music store. It was the first new Fender I had played that felt and sounded good. It had an ash body and a rosewood fingerboard. It was like early Fender Precision basses except for an added jazz bass pickup. Fender’s other bass model, the jazz bass, had a different type of pickup than the Precision bass. These pickups had more top end and a punchier midrange when installed close to the bridge of a bass. In the seventies, adding a jazz pickup was a standard modification to a precision bass. It was made popular by Donald “Duck” Dunn. Dunn was a famous studio musician with Stax Records who can be heard on countless albums like “Hold On, I’m Coming” by Sam & Dave. He was a member of the Blues Brothers band.

The Precision bass was the first model of bass guitar to be mass produced. It was launched in 1951. The invention of the Precision bass helped codify many of the features that are still used today by most manufacturers. The length of bass strings are one feature that Leo Fender standardized with the Precision. The distance from the place where the strings cross the nut at the end of a guitar neck to where they cross the saddles on the bridge of an instrument is called the scale length. Most bass guitars have a scale length between 30” and 36” inches with 34” being the standard. 34” is the distance Leo Fender chose for his electric basses because he felt that it sounded best. There’s no scientific reason for a 34” standard and Leo Fender wasn’t a musician, yet it’s been the most common scale for 69 years.

Anyone who has listened to music since 1951 has probably heard a Fender Precision bass. The magnetic pickup Leo Fender designed for it is naturally hum cancelling. Magnetic pickups turn the disturbance in the magnetic field above them caused by the strings into electrical impulses. Those impulses are then reproduced as sound by an amplifier at the other end of a wire attached to the bass. Many electric instruments pickup interference in the form of static noise from the environment around them, the 60-cycle hum from wall outlets and Neon lights are also picked up and turned into sound. The quietness and warm tone of the Precision bass have made it a staple of studio sessions since the inclusion of this pickup in 1957. Other technologies have been invented that accomplish the same thing and I’ll talk about them in the next blog.