All Strung Out

With student teaching over and summer employment yet to begin, I've had lots of time to practice playing my new bass. At the suggestion of many of my dear friends -- G$ chief among them -- I picked up some light-gauge strings at a going-out-of-business sale a few days ago, and threw them on. I don't know much about bass strings, so I bought the only set of lights that the store still had in a four-string set, and they turned out to be these. I'm not sure what kind of strings my cheapo bass came with, but man, what a difference these new ones made.

First off, the sound is a lot brighter. Associates and internet resources tell me that some of that brightness will go away as the strings get broken in, but I think a lot of the brightness will stick around. Along with being more bright, the sustain is much more pronounced. You might even say that you could go out and get a sandwich... and then come back and they'd still be going "wah."

Secondly, these strings cause much more of a sympathetic vibration in each other which, because I am lazy/no good at muting the strings I'm not playing, add all sorts of interesting overtones to the notes that I am playing.

I have to say, I didn't really like the new strings at first, but after an hour or so of playing with the settings on my amp and messing with the onboard preamp knobs, I think I have something pretty cool. Next up in the string experiment will be some sort of flatwound string... possibly from Fender or DR (once they come out with their flats). The neat thing about playing bass for me so far is that messing around with the instrument itself to get different sounds is MUCH cheaper than trying to do the same thing on saxophone. Reeds don't make all that much of a difference (in my experience), and good mouthpieces are so outrageously priced most of the time that you can't just try one out to see if you like it. And I don't even want to talk about pad/resonator/key-height voodoo. I don't understand those things, and I don't have an extra $800 sitting around to find out.

Bass is fun. Everybody should get one. Right now.