A 17 string bass

[Sharkman]

Can anyone here explain to me how to play a 17 string bass, and/or why anyone would need something like this in the first place?  I heard about Elwood Francis, the new bass player for ZZ Top getting one of these things, and after looking at it, my big question is WHY?

[Scott Fraser]

1 hour ago, Sharkman said:

 my big question is WHY?

 

My bass is bigger than your bass.

[KuruPrionz]

1 hour ago, Sharkman said:

Can anyone here explain to me how to play a 17 string bass, and/or why anyone would need something like this in the first place?  I heard about Elwood Francis, the new bass player for ZZ Top getting one of these things, and after looking at it, my big question is WHY?

Because if a crazy person jumps up on stage, you can use a 17 string bass to crush their skull like an overripe watermelon. 

 

I think everybody is using it wrong. Put legs on it, get a nice heavy slide like a Shubb and play bass lap steel. You could tune up all sorts of cool intervals with that many strings. 

 

It was clearly invented by a chiropractor who needed to generate more business so he created the 17 string bass to cause more spinal dislocation and other painful injuries. 

[KuruPrionz]

Or maybe somebody just had a bunch of truss rods sitting around and decided to use them all up?

[Sharkman]

24 minutes ago, Scott Fraser said:

My bass is bigger than your bass.

That makes sense.  The reason I bought a Stihl chainsaw with an 18 inch bar instead of the usual 16 inch was so I could say "Mine is two inches longer than yours".

[Caevan O’Shite]

Three reasons come to mind right off the bat.

Note that it was brought out for only one song- and that the title of that song is "Under Pressure". And at times, Francis employs some ultra low open-string notes to underpin the riff with notes that must have been felt deeply indeed by the audience.

So, it's a titular-topical sight and sound gag reflex.


For further context, bear in mind that this is the band that brought this alleged rig to the stage- note the vertical array of serial Bixonic Expandora fuzzes and the "TV-front tweed" Fender amp purported to have been dredged from the mud of the Mississippi riverbed:

                       
      
         

[Ivan May]

I'm not sure why, but talking about this 17 string bass reminded me of that Wal triple neck bass Chris Squire used to play in Yes in the Seventies...

 

[CEB]

Elwood is great.  He has worked for Billy forever.  Elwood's brother is one of the top front console guys in the sound business.  Elwood is an artist and a good lap steel player.  Many ZZ stage guitar designs and patterns started as literal Elwood Francis paintings.  His beard is what shocked me.  He has never had a beard that I knew of.  Dusty hasn't been gone long enough to have grown that much facial hair.  

[CEB]

Well ... Apparently if this thing is to be believed Elwood's hair was a pandemic lockdown thing.

 

https://ultimateclassicrock.com/dusty-hill-replacement-zz-top-beard/

 

 

[CEB]

I wonder what the tuning is?  

[KuruPrionz]

1 hour ago, CEB said:

I wonder what the tuning is?  

Me too, you can't go low enough or high enough to justify 17 strings with one scale length. 

You could have 12 strings tuned chromatically and still have 5 strings at the bottom that are just a regular bass. 😃

[desertbluesman]

I have enough trouble playing a six string guitar🤣

[Caevan O’Shite]

6 hours ago, CEB said:

I wonder what the tuning is?  

Given that he plays it almost exclusively in the top (treble-side) first four strings with an occasional low open-string (the lowest, the 17th? Or is it the 15th or 16th or... ?), I'm wondering if it's possibly relative 'Standard' 4th intervals on the first four, and downward repetitions of the standard intervals from there. Sounds like the Key of E with that occasional low open pedal-tone also being E. Or somethin' like that.

Hmmm... What tunings wood, ehr, would, a player of both steel AND bass gravitate toward... ?
   
     

[Caevan O’Shite]

Coming back to this, I think that starting with a standard 'G' as the 1st-String, and going downwards in 5ths (so that the ascending intervals would be 4ths, as is typical with tuning an electric bass), the 16th-String would be a very low 'E'... would it not?

Correct me if I'm wrong!
    
   

[Sharkman]

Since I don't have a bass guitar (yet), I got out my Les Paul and pretended it was a bass in standard EADG tuning (with the first and second strings not there).  If each of the 17 strings were tuned to a chromatic note, with the 17th string at E, you would have E, F, F#, G, G#, A, A#, B, C, C#, D, D#, E, F. F#, G, and G#.  So, that would work, if your intention was to play open strings instead of fretted notes for most of a song.  But when you factor in the size of the neck, headstock, body, and bridge, that bass would have some incredible sustain, so all your notes would moosh (I hope that's the way to spell it) together.  I'm pretty sure this is not the bass guitar that I'm going to buy someday, just so I have one.

[GRollins]

If I may venture an opinion...

 

Speaking as a bass player and guitar player and luthier, my first thought on seeing the instrument was to either:

a) Use it as you would a Chapman Stick

-- or --

b) Use it as you would a harp guitar, using the upper strings (presumed lower pitch) as drone notes and play over that

 

Disclaimer: I have not watched any videos or done any research as to what's going on. I could be wrong on one or both of my suggestions.

 

The most strings I've ever played (on bass) was six. (Okay...okay...I've played an eight-string bass [four courses of two strings each], but I didn't own that one.) I eventually traded the six-string bass as part of a deal for a Martin, so I don't have it any more. Honestly, I feel more at home on four strings or maybe five; I don't regret letting go of the six. Well, not often, anyway.

 

Speaking as a luthier, it doesn't look like all that difficult of a project, but I would expect the instrument to be neck-heavy and very prone to sympathetic resonances between strings that you're actively playing and the ones not being used. I've got a 6 & 12 double-neck that you can play that way--play the 6-string neck with the 12-string neck live and it produces a cool "playing in a cave" sort of echo effect.

 

Grey

[KuruPrionz]

Just now, GRollins said:

If I may venture an opinion...

 

Speaking as a bass player and guitar player and luthier, my first thought on seeing the instrument was to either:

a) Use it as you would a Chapman Stick

-- or --

b) Use it as you would a harp guitar, using the upper strings (presumed lower pitch) as drone notes and play over that

 

Disclaimer: I have not watched any videos or done any research as to what's going on. I could be wrong on one or both of my suggestions.

 

The most strings I've ever played (on bass) was six. (Okay...okay...I've played an eight-string bass [four courses of two strings each], but I didn't own that one.) I eventually traded the six-string bass as part of a deal for a Martin, so I don't have it any more. Honestly, I feel more at home on four strings or maybe five; I don't regret letting go of the six. Well, not often, anyway.

 

Speaking as a luthier, it doesn't look like all that difficult of a project, but I would expect the instrument to be neck-heavy and very prone to sympathetic resonances between strings that you're actively playing and the ones not being used. I've got a 6 & 12 double-neck that you can play that way--play the 6-string neck with the 12-string neck live and it produces a cool "playing in a cave" sort of echo effect.

 

Grey

I like 4 string too. I've strung a 4 string bass with the 4 low strings off a 5 string set - BEAD and that works ok but starts to lose definition around the D below E. 

B is just a deep growly noise to me, it didn't translate well on recordings when I tried it. 

 

My thought about the 17 string bass is maybe a bass lap steel. Then it can put your legs to sleep instead of sending you to the chiropractor after playing it for 15 minutes. I totally get why Elwood just played it on the last song, too heavy. 

[GRollins]

My previous post should have been submitted about eight hours ago, but the phone rang and it was important and I had to get busy with other things...only to turn around and discover the post waiting patiently, unsubmitted.

 

Lower notes require increasingly stiff necks. If you treat the neck and body as a resonant system that can have interactions with the strings as they vibrate, sometimes reinforcing, sometimes cancelling, you soon find that you've got the potential for mud. Lots of people blame the humbucking pickup on the Gibson EB-0 (and similar models) for the poorly defined low notes. Well...yes...and no. There's more to it that that. Gibson (who should know better) chose to use mahogany for the neck. Bad idea. Mahogany is on the lower end of the stiffness scale as far as potential neck woods go. For a bass, it's disastrous. The EB-0 pickup is wound very heavily and has high resistance, inductance, and capacitance as a result--some people call it a "mudbucker" and blame it exclusively for the EB-0's lack of definition. They should direct at least part of their ire towards the tonewoods chosen--particularly for the neck (the body was also mahogany). To make matters worse, the neck is narrow, which gives it a relatively small cross section, so not only is the wood comparatively flexible, but there's not enough of it to make up in bulk for what it lacks in stiffness.

 

Note that I am not criticizing mahogany as used in a guitar neck, just bass necks.

 

Not knowing anything about the instrument in the OP--what woods, construction details, etc.--I'm not in a position to speculate as to how stiff the neck is. Clearly, there's going to be a butt-load of tension with that many strings. Even details like whether the truss rods are mounted free in the slots in the neck or if they're imbedded in, say, silicone can become important.

 

A few years ago, Fender released the Elite Series. Few now remember that Fender had an earlier Elite Series back in the '80s...their first attempt at active electronics. I owned two, a Telecaster and a Precision. Mine was a true Precision, with a single, split-coil pickup. They re-released the Precision a year or two later in a two pickup format...but I'm digressing...to get back on the trail, my Precision Elite had a bad resonance problem. If you held the bass by the top of the head and thumped the body, the entire bass would start going wooba-wooba, back and forth at about 3-5 Hz. I've never seen such a strong resonance. It made for some odd response in the low notes. I ended up getting rid of the poor thing. The neck wood? Maple. Normally a good choice for a bass. Which goes to show that there's more than just the choice of wood involved, but this could easily go off in other directions and I don't want to bore keyboard players with sordid guitar/bass things.

 

I'll try to find some details on the bass in the OP so as to have less guess work and more solid facts, but it'll have to wait, it's been a long, hard day and I'm running on fumes.

 

Grey

 

PS: I'm currently building a double-neck guitar and bass. That'll be a total of ten strings, but they'll be divided over two necks in the usual configurations. So, no, it won't be as unusual as the 17-string above. Sorry.

[GRollins]

Oh, and lack of definition on low B also gets into problems with amplification. Usually bass amps can go low enough (though not always...look at the bypass caps across the cathode resistors and the coupling caps between stages in tube amps), but bass cabinets typically start rolling off around 50-60Hz; an average cabinet is often down 6 - 8 - even as much as 10-12dB by the time you get to a low E at 41 or 42Hz. Low B? Ha! You're kidding, right? Response in the 30Hz range is down an additional 10dB or so, leaving the speaker cone doubling in a vain attempt to reproduce something it should never have to reproduce, particularly at high volume.

 

Time for subwoofers. Another topic. Another day.

 

Grey

[KuruPrionz]

Sir Grey, 

You are posting in the guitar forum, not the keyboard forum. 😇

Of course we should be posting in the Lowdown bass forum but sadly it's even less traffic than the Guitar one. 

 

Back in the day I was a luthier too, I still do some guitar tech work but not any more scratch builds. 

I totally get what you are saying about resonance robbing strings of energy, typically at various random frequencies. 

I have a bass with a Warmoth neck, maple with a thick ebony fretboard. The pickup is an EMG PA (Alnico magnet). The bridge is a cast metal Schaller. It may have been the strings I was trying but I never got the notes from D down to B to really sound right. It wasn't the amp, I wasn't using one - recording direct into a DAW using a decent quality (MOTU and or Presonus Quantum) interface. I could get those notes on a MIDI keyboard but not the bass for some reason. 

A friend had a 5 string neck through Ibanez with a 1600 watt Ampeg amp and a pair of speakers each with 1-18", 2-10", 2-6" and a tweeter. Never got it there either. Also never tried different strings or basses. 

 

You are right that there are many possible tone sucks in the string path. 

 

You are also completely correct about why those Gibson basses didn't sound very good. I will add that moving the gigantic overwound pickup back away from the neck would have helped too, both because it would pick up more definition from the strings when closer to the bridge and mainly because a deep route on a flimsy neck joint with all mahogany construction is just plain stupid. 

 

In balance, the Ovation solid body basses from the 70's sounded good but they had stout bolt on neck joints, heavier bodies and more full range pickups in better locations. The neck and the body on those were solid mahogany. It is partly the wood and partly how you design the instrument apparently. 

Gibson's design team made crap basses until they started copying Fender ideas more. By then the damage was done, Gibson still gets "meh" reactions for their basses. 

 

Meanwhile, I had a Moses Tele neck - graphite but too heavy, and now own a couple of Rainsong guitars which are 100% graphite (earlier Woodenville models) and those are fantastic. 

[Caevan O’Shite]

3 hours ago, Sharkman said:

Since I don't have a bass guitar (yet), I got out my Les Paul and pretended it was a bass in standard EADG tuning (with the first and second strings not there).  If each of the 17 strings were tuned to a chromatic note, with the 17th string at E, you would have E, F, F#, G, G#, A, A#, B, C, C#, D, D#, E, F. F#, G, and G#.  So, that would work, if your intention was to play open strings instead of fretted notes for most of a song.  But when you factor in the size of the neck, headstock, body, and bridge, that bass would have some incredible sustain, so all your notes would moosh (I hope that's the way to spell it) together.  I'm pretty sure this is not the bass guitar that I'm going to buy someday, just so I have one.

One thing about that- in videos, he's seen playing any and all fretted-notes entirely on the top (treble-side) four strings, which appear to be in standard electric-bass tuning or relatively the same, in 4ths.
 

 

2 hours ago, GRollins said:

If I may venture an opinion...

You may, and thank you for your excellent posts!
 

 

2 hours ago, KuruPrionz said:

I totally get why Elwood just played it on the last song, too heavy. 

That, and it was a stage gimmick concerning being "Under Pressure"- the title of that song...
    
      
 

[GRollins]

Uh...did this thread get moved from one forum to another?

Damned wobbly-assed forums...all these weird resonances that you can't predict! I could have sworn this thread started in the keyboard section....and guitar, rather than bass? Er...I'm confused, but that's not all that unusual.

 

Having an 18" doesn't mean you're going that much lower than, say, a 15" or even a 10". Look at, say, the Eminence website and find their suggested cabinet designs, then check out the frequency responses. All things being equal, an 18" driver will have more mass in the cone, which will cause the driver's resonant frequency to drop, but...then you have to add a stiffer suspension to maintain control, which in turn drives the resonance back up. After all, you don't want the voice coil sagging or slamming into the back plate of the magnet structure. Etc. etc. etc. As a rule of thumb, you're not going to get useful response below the free air resonance, and in the real world won't really even approach it in a lot of cases. There are exceptions--for instance, you can pull some surprising low end out of a driver with a transmission line enclosure, but they're inefficient and huge and heavy...not characteristics likely to endear them to your average musician; they're a hard sell, even in the stereo world.

 

In real world terms, you might move your -3dB point down by a few Hz by going with an 18"...maybe, 3-5Hz...? Look around. Compare apples to at least oranges, though it will be difficult. It doesn't really gain that much low end. So why use an 18" versus a gang of 10" drivers? Well, maybe you really want those few Hz, even if you're still nowhere near 30Hz. Or the weight might be worth the tradeoff--one 18" has more or less the same Sd (cone area) as four 10" drivers. Depending on the relative sizes and weights of the frames and magnet structures, it could end up being a lighter cabinet. And naturally, there's the sex appeal of this massive driver staring at you...after all, bigger is better, right?

 

Oh, and distortion goes up as the cone excursion increases due to non-linearities in the suspension. For musicians, "that's not a bug, that's a feature!"

 

What will change is the mid and high frequency response of the driver. A lot of people mistake lack of treble for increased bass (look at the tone control of a Fender Precision), but now we're trending into psychoacoustics, so let's not take that fork in the road.

 

Once you work your way through all the Thiele-Small math, you can have any two of size, efficiency, or low bass, but you can't have all three. If you cheat and boost the low frequency response electronically, you're still going to run into problems. Since cone excursion quadruples with every falling octave, you're going to have to play at lower volume to keep from destroying the driver. To get your volume back, you'll need more cabinets and heaps of amplification. It's all rather expensive, unfortunately. And your roadie's going to hate you. Don't have a roadie? You're going to hate yourself. Don't forget the larger truck to carry everything. Those don't come cheap.

 

For the record, I own two 18" cabinets: An SWR Big Ben and a Bag End with the Infra Bass module. Love them both, but they're playing games with the math. I used to own an Acoustic 371, which included the 301 cabinet with a Cerwin-Vega 18" in a horn-loaded enclosure. Horn enclosures are a different breed entirely. All you have to do to get the low end cutoff of a horn is look at the mouth area and a 301 is only (roughly) 2' x 4'...it's actually a midrange cabinet in disguise; a sheep in wolf's clothing. That's why the Acoustic 18" cabinets had that distinctive midrange honk. Go listen to John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin) or Jaco Pastorius (Weather Report) to hear "that sound." The cabinets are loud as hell, but deep? Not on your life. Same set of tradeoffs as Thiele-Small.

This could be a really long discussion and we're getting away from the OP relating to the custom bass. I'm assuming it was custom built, or at least special order...ain't seen one in Walmart...

 

Grey

[Larryz]

Most of the comments on the 17 string bass are well above my pay grade and thus please forgive me, but I can't resist posting something LoL! Yep, the bass forum could probably do a great job discussing woods, tuning, pups, etc.  A couple of posters have mentioned keyboards and I think it's not a bad idea to consider how they are set up and how they are tuned.  The lowest note on an 88 key is an A and the highest note is a C.  If I were building a 17 string bass or guitar, I wouldn't change the layout in our standard tuning, much the same way you would not change the layout if you were building a standard piano.  Our lowest note would probably depend on string gauge would go up from there. My tuning would start on B as that is the low note added on normal 5 string basses.  I would use standard tuning to keep the scales and chords in my mind.  The tuning and notes would be:

 

B E A D G B E A D G B E A D G B E

 

The thing is going to weigh a ton, so I would mount it on a stand and lay it down like a dobro, lap steel, pedal steel, etc.  I would try to learn to play it using the Jeff Healey touch concept.  Don't tear this post apart as I said, this stuff is above my pay grade.  Just sharing some thoughts.  Here's Jeff playing with a bass player over his shoulder to look at along with some keyboard piano lead which will show the concept(s) I'm thinking of:

 

😎

[KuruPrionz]

2 hours ago, GRollins said:

Uh...did this thread get moved from one forum to another?

Damned wobbly-assed forums...all these weird resonances that you can't predict! I could have sworn this thread started in the keyboard section....and guitar, rather than bass? Er...I'm confused, but that's not all that unusual.

 

This could be a really long discussion and we're getting away from the OP relating to the custom bass. I'm assuming it was custom built, or at least special order...ain't seen one in Walmart...

 

Grey

Yeah, I read your post and it's a good one. It could be that this thread got moved, there is another one in the Lowdown but not much participation (as usual).

And you are correct, we are wandering off topic. If it wasn't so common on MPN I would worry about it! 😃

Larryz's post above is also interesting - Jeff Healey was an amazing talent, nobody played guitar the way he did but it proves it can be done and very well indeed. 

I don't have any idea who builds these 17 string things, in my opinion they are an abomination as a musical instrument but as we've seen they can be an effective stage prop. 

 

[GRollins]

Okay...I stole a few minutes when I should have been doing other things and did a little research on that yellow bass...

 

The story is tangled. I will try to summarize it thusly:

1) There appears to be a YouTube guy named Jared Dines. I've never heard of him, but that doesn't mean anything. I'm sure he's justly famous.

2) He commissioned a beast-instrument from someone.

3) That someone apparently attempted to screw him over.

4) Someone named Ormsby stepped in and said, "Don't worry, we'll build that guitar for you."

5) And they did.

6) A Chinese company made a POS copy of the Ormsby beast-guitar.

7) Somewhere in this same general time frame, the ZZ Top gang happened to see a photo of the beast-guitar and started making jokes about it. The bass player thought that was the end of it, until...

😎 He shows up for practice one day and that yellow thing is sitting there. It's the Chinese POS, but they had another good laugh about the matter and decided that maybe it would be fun to take it out on stage once or twice.

9) They did. It went instantaneously viral. The bass player has a sense of humor about it, admitting that he could play the bass line for the entire song on one string and that the 17-string guitar is just a gag.

 

What the Chinese knockoff is made of is anyone's guess, but the Ormsby's neck is Tasmanian blackwood and mahogany. The body is Tasmanian blackwood with a stone(?!?) front. WTF??? What, that thing's not going to be heavy enough already? I have never worked with Tasmanian blackwood and know nothing about it, but I have reference books that may shed some light on the matter. My opinion on mahogany, at least for bass necks, I've already made known.

 

I've yet to find any information on tuning.

 

I watched the video of Under Pressure. He does fret the upper (lower pitch) strings a few times by reaching over the top. He also plays them open, a la harp guitar. I don't recall him doing much of anything with the inner dozen strings or so, but maybe I blinked. Nevertheless, he admits it's all just in fun, so my hat's off to him.

 

No, the sight of these guitars, either the Ormsby or the Chinese one, does not inspire me to recreate such a thing. I have some ideas that I might want to try for an 8-string bass (four courses of two strings, not eight individual strings), but I've got a number of other things I want to build first, so it will be a while before I get to that, if ever.

 

Now, an electric harp guitar...that has tempted me ever since I first saw a picture of an old Gibson Model U. Do not be surprised if I pop out one of those, time permitting.

 

Grey

[GRollins]

I hate computers sometimes. That smiley face was supposed to be #8, but apparently I ran afoul of some sort of keyboard shortcut for an emoji.

 

<sigh>

 

At least it didn't post the turd emoji, right?

 

Grey

[Caevan O’Shite]

On 11/15/2022 at 8:30 PM, GRollins said:

At least it didn't post the turd emoji, right?

Indeed. I don't think that thing needs to be listed among emojis. (I say that in spite of my 'screen name' here. )
    
   

[Winston Psmith]

I can almost see it as a novelty Instrument, but I have to agree with the general run of criticisms.

 

One Scale Length does not fit all, to start with. I really have to wonder about the intonation on some of those Bass strings?

 

The resonance & sustain on that thing would be monstrous, as you accidentally triggered open strings and harmonics. OTOH, it would be a great Feedback Machine. Maybe play it with a Bow from a Bass Viol, or sit it in your lap and drive individual strings with an E-Bow?

 

The only way to approach that fretboard as a whole is as a Tapping Instrument, unless you're consigning entire sections to Drone Strings, or Sitar-like Open Sympathetic Tunings, which are still just enharmonic Drones.

 

If someone gave me one, of course I'd try to figure out how to play it, but I'm not sure how grateful I'd be . . .

[Caevan O’Shite]

4 hours ago, Winston Psmith said:

I can almost see it as a novelty Instrument, but I have to agree with the general run of criticisms.

 

One Scale Length does not fit all, to start with. I really have to wonder about the intonation on some of those Bass strings?

 

The resonance & sustain on that thing would be monstrous, as you accidentally triggered open strings and harmonics. OTOH, it would be a great Feedback Machine. Maybe play it with a Bow from a Bass Viol, or sit it in your lap and drive individual strings with an E-Bow?

 

The only way to approach that fretboard as a whole is as a Tapping Instrument, unless you're consigning entire sections to Drone Strings, or Sitar-like Open Sympathetic Tunings, which are still just enharmonic Drones.

 

If someone gave me one, of course I'd try to figure out how to play it, but I'm not sure how grateful I'd be . . .

Leave it plugged in on a stand and on with some long decay reverb while playing another guitar to trigger droning sympathetic overtones... Roger, over, under and out!
   
    

[KuruPrionz]

9 minutes ago, Caevan O’Shite said:

Leave it plugged in on a stand and on with some long decay reverb while playing another guitar to trigger droning sympathetic overtones... Roger, over, under and out!
   
    

Or, tune it to E7 and play Who Do You Love for an hour and a half.