I nabbed one of the 29.5" Gretsch baritones a while back, and have been using that in F standard more as a bass (Not going super heavy). So far it has enough low end for my tastes, but I'm looking to drop an inch and go up to G using the D'Addario bass VI set. 29.5 is already on the edge for me, so I'm wondering if 28-5/8 is going to lean too much towards guitar for my purposes. Anyone have any experience doing Tic-Tac-y shit with something that length?
Can 28-5/8" convincingly do bass?
- Thread starter T_Gobbs
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GunpointMetal
Well-Known Member
It can, but you'll want to look at your processing. If you're not already, I would multi-band compress the hell out of the 120HZ and down range and turn it up before it ever even goes to any gain stages just to make up for the lack of low-low end from the lower tension/smaller strings compared to a bass.
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In my experience, no, but who cares. You do you.
On an RG8? I'd believe it with the og pickups!
jephjacques
BUTTS LOL
use the neck pickup and a pick and 99.9% of people won't be able to tell it isn't a p-bass
The sound of bass isn't exactly come from scale length, it's more of tension and pickups. If you get super thick strings or straight up bass strings with that kind of pickup, you may find good. I think it's doable with a baritone guitar and bass VI set, but it will be more different to a bass and you will absolutely need some processing.
luca9583
Well-Known Member
I reckon it all depends on how you want to set up the instrument.
If you want to still be able to use it for djenty, twangy guitar sounds, then thinner strings with a djenty bridge humbucker or single coil for tic tact stuff would be the ticket.
If you want it to feel more like bass tension, then maybe slightly thicker gauges would be a good idea. After a certain thickness in gauge, lower tunings tend to sound more thuddy and bass like.
+1 on on using the neck pickup too for the "bass" tone...i would even install a stereo jack and send the bridge pup to the left output and neck to the right output, so you can run both the guitar and bass tones at the same time to separate paths.
If you look at the Ibanez 28.5" scale Mikro bass they ship it with an .085 for the A string, so i reckon you'll be totally fine at G1 with an .084 form the bass vi set at roughly the same scale length and with slightly less tension.
Ibanez would also stick an .084 as the stock string for E1 on the SRC6 30" scale baritone, so you should be fine at G1 at 28 and 5/8".
There should be a 'sweet spot" gauge you'll find that can do both twang and thuddy quite well depending on what you run each pickup into.
