hi popmusic

my experieces with bowing bass strings are humble but it may help you.
i guess you are not planning to make the effort of converting an old bass into a reasonable electric cello (as i did), but if you don't mind being limited to one string only, you can easily help yourself:
take a roundwound string (just as big as you think you need it, for i found thin ones work better), treat it heavily with emery paper, so the string it gets a rough, grippy surface.
depending on the body shape of your bass, it's probably the better idea to fit it in the place of the g string, because you are likely to get a more comfortable bowing angle this way... (matter of taste, of course)

with enough colophony one the bow you should get a reasonably strong sound. not exactly what you would expect from a proper cello, but it's a cheap and flexible way to add the occasional long string in a mix.

i can not say if your bow would suffer significant damage - my cello bow still works, however.
mind i am not a violinist and can't actually tell a good bow from a broken one :-) - so you're kinda going at your own risk...

greetings
stefan

You can't bow on an electric because the strings are flat. A cello has a curved fingerboard so you can bow the strings one at a time.
I have three suggestions.
1) Use a volume pedal. Hit the note with the volume off and then swell into the note with a volume pedal.
2) Use an e-bow. Michael Manring and Steve Lawson are great at this.
3) Forget your bass and record the part with a synth.

If anyone invents a curved bow that can bow one string at a time, I'll buy one.

1: EBow
2: sampler (or synth), short loop of any satisfactory waveform with amplitude and filter envelopes (ADSR, etc) adjusted to support your conception

I've used a chello bow on a bass. Just adjust the string height of the middle two strings to be quite high and the E and G to be lower. It's a pain but it works.

I have NO experience on this, but some things come quickly to mind. One, why not borrow/rent a cello (or a cellist)? Two, a decent MIDI device should let you play any sound you want with the bass, & my is that the MIDI would make the volume level quite manageable. (There's a good recent thread on using MIDI with bass, btw.) A really good sequencing program might be up to the job, as well.

You may also be encountering problems because electric bass magnetic pickups are not good at picking up a bowed string. Guys have slapped p-bass pickups on double basses for a long time, only to find out that it's fine for plucked notes but delivers weak-sounding bowed notes. I've only found two magnetic pickups so far that reproduce bowing well, and neither are conventional bass guitar pickups.

...Didn't see a question about that ; P



And indeed it does. I like to get the sound organically myself. But then being able to manipulate it with a digital editing recorder -- which is one way a sampler functions -- often makes the difference in terms of quality and fit once one has generated the waveform via bow and string and whatever.

But then, as much as I collected others' sound libraries with and for samplers, I moreso by far enjoyed sampling my own custom sounds with a variety of miking techniques and sometimes outboard gear -- and then programming the sounds using my skills and imagination. Using the sampler not just as a keyboard with a bunch of presets, but as a really cool recorder that allows additional manuipulation via mapping and synth-type parameters is both a fun pastime and a useful tool toward good mixes.

But I dig what you are saying.

<-- greenboy ---<<<<    then there was that EBow ; }...

[ 01-14-2002: Message edited by: greenboy ]

Rent a Cello. It's tuned totally different and it feels very different but it'd work.

Bob, would an electric bass with a piezo pickup respond better to bowed strings? How about a midi pickup? Interesting...

well,

according to my experience, trying to pick up an electric bass with a piezo (only) has always resulted in %$&(§...
most of what you get is rumble. since the electric bass totally lacks the acoustic body resonance, the unwanted noises simply dominate.
maybe it would work if you installed a mechanism that would let the instrument hover a few inches in the air magnetically, so you don't have to touch it with your hands while playing....
but considering the effort, i would also prefer the sampler method

another thing that just came to my mind... some effects units (zoom bfx708 for example) feature a slow-attack algorithm. have you already tried this one?
works fine as long as you are not playing polyphonic (which you were not planning to do anyway, popmusic, if i got you right)

i personally dont think midi guitar pickups are the best approach to slow attacking sounds. one simply doesn't have the control that e.g. a keyboard with aftertouch offers...

...ok, i'm shutting up

gnoobu

Yes, piezo senses the actual movement of the string, so the material of the string is immaterial. Midi would be ok, too.




I know what you mean, but some of the newer piezo systems are much better. I've been working with the Graphtech saddles and preamp, and they have a much better tone without the quackiness and brittle sound of others. My Graphtech page is at http://www.urbbob.com/graphtech.html, though it is out of date since Graphtech has made a few changes. I sell them now, so feel free to weight my evaluation. But if you get the chance to check them out, do so.

didn't jimmy page do that once?

"didn't jimmy page do that once?"

More than once!! For years Page had a trademark style of playing his Les Paul with a bow. Check out "Dazed and Confused," esp. the very extended live version on "The Song Remains the Same" (I mean the album, but it's on the video, too); there's also a *little* of this to be heard on the studio version on the first album (but it's a little sterile, imho). He actually did a surprisingly good job of singling out the strings with that bow; not sure how, but researching Page's method might be VERY instructive. (Bottle-necking with your left-hand might be good in combo with the bow; I *think* Page did this.) He also used to just slam the crap out of the strings with the thing & get one nasty sound on his chords!

On the topic of piezo pickups...check out the sweet sounds of Carvin's piezo--listen to the LB70P samples at:
http://www.carvin.com/jamroom/index.html
Of course, a lot of the sweetness is coming from Ed Friedland's fingers, who plays these very fine samples! But the piezo is in there, too.

1. The lowest note on a cello is a C (4th fret on the A string) and a cello is a hollow-bodied acoustic instrument ... so bowing the lowest string is not going to give you a "cello sound."

2. A cello bow has more hair, which means more surface contact with the string, which means more drag, which means more vibration, which means more sound. A bass bow would give you even more.

3. That said, you'll get some kind of sound, whether you use a violin bow, a cello bow, or a bass bow. To get any volume at all, you'll need a butt load of rosin and a really heavy stroke to drag an E-string enough to get a tone that will speak for magnetic pickups. Even more for a B-string. [No insult intended here - only info: Rosin is essential to playing with a bow; a brand new bow will only glide over the string without making noise.]

4. Rosin (from your bow) won't damage the string, but it will make it sticky and gross, and you'll probably not want to play finger style on the string after you've gotten rosin all over it. Rosin also flakes off as "rosin dust," that will likely get into your pickups and possibly the other electronics cavities.

5. Roundwound strings are likely to wear on horsehairs more quickly than flatwounds would (cellos and violins have flatwound strings), but so long as the bowhairs are tightened enough, it shouldn't damage the bow. Make sure there's no contact between the stick and the strings when you're playing. Of course, you may have to get a bow rehair (which string players do every few months) a little quicker, but it also doesn't sound like you're making a career of this ...

6. No offense, but IMHO, this seems like a silly idea. A bowed electric bass is going to sound nothing like an acoustic stringed instrument. Conversely, with not much gear, you can get interesting sustained sounds with a lot less work by screwing around with a keyboard. And if you've got the $ for a new cello bow and a new set of bass strings (to replace the ones gunked up with rosin), you've definitely got the bread to hire a starving cello student from a music school to sit down for an hour, who will play circles around any line you could manage to squeek out on your electric bass. In a lot less time.

good luck whatever you do ... hope this doesn't sound too snotty.

I would advise you to check out this guy:

Search Mp3.com for "Dr.Bow"

Maybe a flat-wound string for more surface contact with the bowhair, maybe rough the string up a bit as previously mentioned & a ton of bass or cello rosin .... it's just crazy enough to work.

My 2 yen

Tony

[ 01-20-2002: Message edited by: td ]