Sound Check Rage Against the 5 String
posted by on October 4 at 12:58 PM
Bass is the law of music. Bass lays it down and holds it down. There are 4 string and 5 string varieties. If you are Dave Schools from Widespread Panic, you play a 6 string.
Today we have bassists, Camilo Estrada and Sugar McGuinn talking about the 4 string vs. the 5 string. I mean really, is the 5th string necessary?
Sugar plays in Brent Amaker & the Rodeo – See story in Stranger print. (Also hear Sugar in the Drop, Dolour, Kristen Ward, and the Fighting Machinists.) Sugar says:
You don’t need the 5th string, but I’m not against them. I’ve played lots of 5 strings in my day. For country western music though, what you need is a stand-up bass (4 strings). For Brent Amaker and the Rodeo, we wanted that stand-up sound, but we didn’t want to labeled as rockabilly. So I play a bass that’s worn around my shoulder and I modified it to sound like a stand-up.
One is a ’78 Fender P-Bass with a maple fret board. The other is a ’62 Burns Bison Bass with a rosewood fret board. It’s a Buffalo Bass. The strings are nylon tape wound. They have a center steel core. They are dipped in nylon and wound with nylon.
I took a big chunk of closed cell foam and wedged it under the strings near the bridge. It deadens the sound and mutes the strings. You get percussive qualities and an ultra low sonic register. It sounds like a stand up, but it looks like ROCK.
Camilo is from a more funk and jazz school. In fact he’s in school, for music, at Cornish. He’s probably practicing some ridiculous scale right now. (Hear Camilo in Gabriel Teodros, Blue Scholars, Big World Breaks, and Red Eye Flight.)
Camilo plays a 5 string Warwick Corvette and says:
The 5th string is not essential. It really only gives you five extra notes. The advantage of a 5 string is that on longer runs, you don’t have to go up and down the neck. You can just go down to the 5th string. It also saves you time if you want to tune down.
The beginning of Rage Against the Machine’s “Bulls on Parade”, that’s probably a 5 string. I think he’s playing a drop D.
Drop D Baritone Les Pauls cooked to bland with distortion, delay, reverb and chorus all bouyed by 5 string basses.
Die 90s, die!
Chris Belew wrote better songs on 2 strings. The minutemen played better out of tune.
Feeeeeel Mah HAAATE 90s!!!! RAAAAWWRRRR!
I actually saw a bass player in a country-ish band playing a 5-string once. Totally weird.
Oh, yeah, 2 strings! Mark Sandman! Yesss!!!
Call me a snob, but I can't stand 5-string basses, 7 string guitars, fretless basses or any other Guitar Center Employee's idea of a wet dream.
as far as i'm concerned, the technology of the bass guitar was mastered in the 1960's. 5 string basses are for retards.
You are all weak and your calluses are pathetic.
I play a 9 string Spyro Dildonic Cauldron Bass. I play more notes in 4 seconds, than you will ever play in a lifetime.
more than likely your 4 second note barrage is 4 seconds too long. for your average bass player, 5 string basses have 2 strings too many.
Nice bison picture.
I'm with #5. A sixties P bass through an Ampeg flip-top is what I like to hear in a bass.
A 5 string bass isn't simply a 4 string with and "extra" string, it's an entirely different instrument, and it my opinion, about as useful as a 5 wheeled car.
Personally, I wouldn't trust anything that Sugar McGuinn says. He sticks garbage underneath his strings.
Camillo is the BEST, he should have his own action figure.
Best use of 5th string I ever heard was Ruthie Foster's bass player at the Tractor. She dropped on that fifth string and rocked the old Tractor walls till they trembeled.
What do you mean stange bass in country music???Where do you think bass came from but over the waters and up them thar hills...
Tante
Five strings is a sin.
It's like carrying a seven-wood in your golf bag. Please.
...only for metal, where geekiness gets buried under all the Satan. Meshuggah have EIGHT strings on their guitars.
"Geekiness buried under Satan." Sounds like my boss.
You guys are all haters. It's not how many strings you have, it's how you play them. Why not diss people for wearing the wrong ironic hipster t-shirt while you're at it.
One thing that seems to be missing from the conversation is not the fact that the 5 string has one more string, but the fact that you can play lower. Yes, mall-metal retards love to break it down on the 5th string and complain that their parents don't understand them, but I love using my low B to play dub. The lowness gives me a total chub. Hey, that rhymed!
I love Sugar and I love Trenty.
My bass has 4 strings and sometimes 2 or 3 depending on how poor I am at the moment.
I'd like to try a 5 where the strings aren't so bunched together - that part blows what with my mutant-sized large hands. Sugar - sweet foam trick. Wanna snowboard er what?
Looks like @16 is on to something (not chub related). The B string allows you to play some lower notes, which are important in certain types of music. Most people think it's just metal where it's useful, but it's used widely in hip hop these days, probably why Camilo plays a 5 string? Also, Camilo is right, you can do a lot more and MORE EASILY cause you can just move your fingers down to that low string, instead of changing the position of your whole hand. Must be why Camilo kicks so much ass and makes it look so easy.
Rage bassist Tim Commerford uses a four string but tunes it B, E, A, D ( Same as a 5 string but without the G string )
Carol Kaye had a brief stint with a 5 string, but concluded they don't sound good at all. To each his own blah blah blah, but nobody would know better than Carol.
All the 5-string haters can fuck off. Let's agree that the most important thing is the music, regardless of whether it has 2 or 3 or 5 strings. If a 6-string player has a pretentious and underwhelming personality, the music is probably going to blow. And sure, a 4-string '60s P bass sounds like heaven, but the instrument can also cost as much as 20K. Personally, I like the feeling of my balls vibrating against my leg when I hit the low B. Fuck off.
Jamerson and McCartney only had 4 strings, and they were pretty good.
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