Electric Bass Guitar Brands

How to choose a Bass Guitar

Component rhythm, part melody, there’s virtually no denying the necessity of the bass electric guitar in modern songs. This Sweetwater purchasing Guide covers crucial information that will help you choose suitable bass guitar to meet your needs. There’s a lot to consider when buying a bass guitar, therefore please do not hesitate to phone your Sweetwater Sales Engineer at (800) 222-4700 private help.

Tonewoods compared

Numerous facets determine the tonal properties of wood. Many luthiers believe that the lumber selected the top could be the single most important factor in determining the standard of tone of instrument. Additionally, it is interesting to note the lumber itself takes on different traits dependent on which part of the bass guitar it is useful for. But wood types is accountable just for particular facets of the tone of every electric guitar. Incredibly important are design, ability regarding the manufacturer, as well as the quality of the wood used. Tonewood choice, but could be a determining element in the development of a tremendously unique guitar, or a guitar designed for a particular purpose.

Ash and Alder

As ash and alder are incredibly comparable, both supply sustain and uniformly balanced tone that is resonant and high in harmonic overtones. The most typical reason that guitar manufacturers choose ash is due to its more desirable grain, which is apparent under a transparent or semi-transparent finish.

Agathis

Many wonderful entry-level basses produced from agathis as it is reasonably cheap. Tonally, it's a method between ash/alder and mahogany, resonating with an abundant tone that emphasizes the reduced midrange within the top.

Mahogany

Mahogany basses are best general as sounding hot and full-bodied. The medium thickness and low resonance of mahogany gives the lower sign-up of this bass guitar an obvious emphasis and moves off the snappier sequence attack that you would get with an ash or alder human body.

Basswood

Basswood is a favorite human body timber for bassists whom play an array of songs. An interesting quality of basswood is its severe softness, which readily absorbs oscillations. It has a shorter sustain, making it well suited for quickly or maybe more complex playing methods.

Maple

Maple is a tremendously heavy lumber, producing remarkable sustain and a brilliant, sharp tone. Many bassists and recording engineers swear by maple due to the clarity and definition it gives bass guitars.

4, 5, or 6 Strings?

it is appealing to state that if you have to ask, you’re best off following a traditional 4-string bass. Regular 4-string basses have, by design, a great deal narrower necks than 5- or 6-string basses and are usually tuned in standard E-A-D-G format; this will make them better to deal with and learn how to play on. However, there are varieties of music that benefit 5-string basses. Modern-day worship songs and country seem to have more songs that root in B, for that reason its B-E-A-D-G tuning is perfect. Aside from design, 5- and even 6-string basses give bass players more area to enhance creatively. Specially if you perform a lot of bass solos, a 6-string bass, tuned B-E-A-D-G-C, enables you to pull off some fancier tips.

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Shop for 5-string basses
Shop for 6-string basses

Fretted vs. Fretless

There are two main various fretboard designs available whenever you’re shopping for a bass electric guitar: fretted and fretless. A fretted neck could be the standard guitar neck, with steel frets dividing each half-step for the chromatic scale. This will make finding the proper notes a lot easier, particularly if you are only starting out on the instrument. A fretless bass, but features a neck that doesn't have steel frets; it is only smooth wood, comparable to an upright bass or violin. Even though many bass people think that fretless basses offer a smoother, hotter sound, the pitch of this note you are playing totally relies upon your finger position. Competent people rely on muscle memory to put their particular hand in the appropriate place, but practice makes perfect.

Go shopping for fretless basses

Acoustic Bass Guitars

If you’re in search of a bass guitar, however don’t want to be slave to an amp, then an acoustic bass could be for you personally. With all of the exact same faculties of an acoustic 6-string guitar, an acoustic bass produces noise through a resonant hollow body. This allows that play unplugged with a full-bodied, powerful sound, which will be occasionally appropriate for acoustic music. However, numerous types of acoustic-electric bass guitars occur, giving you the hollow-body sound of an acoustic bass have real profit plug directly into an amp for additional volume.

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Passive vs Active Pickups

There are two kinds of bass guitar pickups to choose from. Passive pickups, that have been around considering that the start of electric bass, offer a dynamic noise and a warm, complete tone. The disadvantage to passive pickups is the fact that they present less total control of the tone of instrument. This is certainlyn’t fundamentally a bad thing; if you prefer fat and punchy, passive pickups tend to be for you.

Energetic pickups tend to be a much more recent development than passive pickups. Numerous modern-day bassists consider them the coolest thing since sliced bread; others locate them to-be almost heretical. The tone that energetic pickups produce on a bass electric guitar is brilliant, percussive, and obvious. Also, active pickups feature an integrated battery-powered preamp, making a much greater output than passive pickups. You have to remember to periodically replace the battery.

Bolt-on vs Neck Through Body

Some debate exists about which construction style is best for bass guitars. The bolt-on throat design is the more widespread and old-fashioned construction technique when the neck is a different little bit of lumber that’s bolted on the body. There are some important advantages of this design, such as the capability to change the neck if it is damaged.

In a neck-though-body design, the bass guitar’s neck timber actually spans the whole duration of the instrument. Neck-through bodies have a tendency to offer greater sustain and much more direct power transfer. These basses are constructed with a few items of lumber that have been glued collectively. One upside of this design is the fact that timber is normally of very high high quality, that itself advances the quality of the tool.

Precision vs. Jazz Basses

Fender’s Precision and Jazz Basses take over the field of bass guitars; and therefore’s no accident! Leo Fender and his small crew created the very first electric bass guitar significantly more than 50 years ago. And even though there have been numerous changes to both models over the past 50 years, the brand new P Bass or J Bass you purchase these days however holds the tradition for the classic originals.

So just how do they differ? Why is a new player decide one within the other? The principal differences could be summarized in three places: the human body, the throat additionally the pickups.

Body Design

The Precision Bass ended up being a radical design in 1951. Its deep two fold cutaways and forward-raked design had been like absolutely nothing a guitar world had seen. In 1954 the Precision Bass, which have been a “slab” until after that, adopted the contoured body associated with brand-new Stratocaster. These sculpted recessions in the bottom and top managed to make it much more comfortable to put up. The initial Precision body was ash; now you can choose from designs with ash or alder bodies.