Uh, make that five-necked.
No wonder I had such trouble Googling it.
I did live sound and recorded some demos for Michael before he left Baltimore for fame and fortune in California. He didn’t have any of those harp guitars back then.
Those things are seriously cool looking. I’d like to hear the way they sound.
Okay, I’m only thinking of taking up playing the bass, and this shit is scaring me off.
I think I’ll just start off with 4 strings. I have little girly hands.
heh. well, while i can’t imagine how you could possibly know a -thing- about my attitude from a webpage written about 10 years ago, your post was hilarious. 
thanks for reading the site, btw.
one last thing, the touring bassist with vanessa williams, al caldwell, plays a benevente 11 string, and has a cool picture of her goofing on it too. hardly fusion wankery, that gig.
btw, neat forum 
Well, It’s common knowledge that great virtuoso violinists and cellists, arguably the most technically accomplished of their artform (yes, I’m restricting that comment to western art music), often find the need to add 3 or more strings to their instrument to be able to . . .
wait, no they don’t. They learn to move. Y’want an arpeggio that spans 4 octaves? well, that’s why God gave you an elbow joint.
I can see adding the fifth string (low) on a Bass - there has been a trend to use lower and lower frequencies. I’d personally just consider reintonating a 4-string a 4th down and losing the top G instead. After all, there’s this instrument known as a Guitar whose range kicks in midway up my neck.
I recognize that Funk bassists have different requirements, and I can sort of accept the 6-string bass as a child of that music form - but IIRC there are still a bunch of Funk guys who do it with the usual 4.
Count me in as one who thinks 11-string basses and similar ilk are a gear-head stroke off. Kind of the musical version of Tim the Toolman Taylor.
(Oddly enough, a guitarist I work with has permanently removed the high-E from all his guitars: he’s getting RID of strings!)
Thanks for coming onto the forum, John. How did you find it? It’s like you magically appeared as soon as people started making fun of your picture.
Doesn’t Keith Richards do his magic with a five-stringed Telecaster?
heh heh. i look at the website stats for our site. you’d be surprised at how many folks link to my pics. i’m so e-kewl. :smack: rarely do i actually participate anywhere - usually it’s the same old cracks that have been done -to death- 10 million times before, but ogre’s post was so darn funny i had to give some props. besides, this seems to be a pretty cool site, so far, been surfing around.
to answer the person who mentioned about classical players (misery loves co) you might want to investigate your facts a bit. while they aren’t “en vogue” now, >4 string classical instruments have been around for a long long time. even one of the famous bach cello concertos was composed specifically for an “extended range” cello. franz joseph haydn composed many (over 100) baryton duets and trios, specifically commissioned in the early 19th century, that can’t be performed properly now. (barytons had 6+ primary strings, and up to 22 sympathetic resonating strings). google baryton, viola de gamba or haydn. cool stuff.
then again, you gotta love folks using half-baked misinformation and unreasoned bigotry to insult other folks for their instrument choice on a site with a byline “fighting ignorance since 1973” :dubious: 
w00t for int3rw3b ir0ny!!!
http://www3.nbnet.nb.ca/m2esectr/cmhdn.htm
granted they are midi files but these are a few of the haydn barton trios written while in the employ of Prince Nikolaus Esterházy. note the string makeup of the instrument - 7 bowed/pizz strings along with sympathetic ringing/plucked strings ala a harp.
don’t have speakers here, so i can’t hear the midis - they may totally suck heh - but the pieces, of which fewer than 10% of haydn’s total catalog of baryton pieces are represented - are all very interesting works.
some folks think it’s all about the instrument, but really it’s not. it’s all about the music. people either believe that or they don’t, but that’s the way it is. period. -shrug-.
1st off: exception, rather than the rule. The lion’s share of post-baroque rep is for instruments in standard tuning with a standard number of strings. And the pedology has always promoted this. (Hence why you can’t play some of it any more). There’s no common system for handling notes below low-G in the Violin rep. The music you describe is abherant.
Let me rephrase, to make my point clearer: Some of the most virtuosic music ever played was done without deviating from a standard-tuned 4 string instrument. Note this important word “virtuosic” (I used “virtuoso” in my original post"). I’m attacking the notion that string-number and virtuosity are linked. The most difficult (virtuosically) music in the rep is (virtually exclusively) in standard tuning. Note that your examples are Classical or Baroque - definitely before the advent of the “virtuosic musician”. And the instruments they were composed for were more likely holdovers from the pre-Baroque. That’s a different set of circumstances than creating a new instrument because the old one is “insufficient”.
2nd off: Baryton? Have run into references on Baritone instruments, which are (generally) instruments in a dropped range (a baritone violin has 4 string (GDAE, but an 8va lower). I’m guessing from context that the instruments you’re refering to are something else. Do elaborate!
Back to the subject at hand, however.
What I find obnoxious about the amazing growing bass-necks is the perception that the “bigger” the neck, the better the player. . . In the same way that 10 years ago a metal drummer wasn’t a drummer unless he had 2 kicks, 8 toms the size of 50 gallon drums, etc. I ultimately find it hard to believe that the choice to add more and more strings to an instrument is grounded in anything but that “more gear” mentality, which I find more geeky than artistic.
So long as virtuosity and neck-width are popularly linked, I’ll take exception to it. While the OP questioned “is this practical - can he play it”, I’d ask “why can’t he get that from a 4 string?”
In contrast, I actually appreciate your desire to have a 2bl neck bass. It don’t matter how virtuosic you are, y’can’t gliss (like that) on a fretted bass, and I’ve never heard a fretted bass “sing”. On the other hand, a fretless sounds more . . . mushy. They’re two different instruments, with 2 different sounds. If the music doesn’t give you time to swap mid-song, then you’re SOL unless you’re willing to strap that much wood on. Hence, I have no problem with a 2bl neck anything, since they’re commonly used for convenience and the “wank factor” is. . . more subtle.
I rest my case That’s neither a cello, nor a violin, and has more in common with a viol than any of its cousins. It’s another branch. . .
Actually, I think that people are questioning whether the player is as concerned about the music as they are about their instrument. (yes, that statement is rife with double-entendres). Of course, defending your choice to haul out a bass guitar that requires a dolly to get it on stage and a ladder to work the neck as a musical decision can be as hard as answering “so have you stopped beating your wife yet?”, so sympathies there.
mainly a range constraint, in my case. i play arp’ed chords that are impossible on a 4 string - 5 and more notes arpeggiated. i also play stuff that’s over an octave lower than a standard bass. i guess i could get a bunch of 4 strings with a bunch of different tunings, but to be honest, i like the feel of a 7, it feels more like the instrument i was born to play than a 4 did, even though i played 4’s for 10 years before i got my first 7 in '93.
as for the string number/virtuosity element, while i don’t see those directly linked as often as you would think, the simple fact of the matter is a 7 string is more difficult to play at the same level of facility as a 4 string, mainly due to the greater number of strings to keep from ringing out while you’re playing. beyond that, it’s pretty much the same.
that was the point of the instrument, really, the point i was trying to convey in the “40 minute piece” blurb, not anything about how long the music is. you guys are welcome to check out some of our stuff if you like - there’s links to a bunch of mp3s on lordonly.net , and although the 40 min stuff piece (actually a collection of 4 different pieces that all seque into each other) there is a 12 minute instrumental on there :).
picking nits doesn’t validate an argument ;). the fact of the matter is that barytons and viola de gambas were common and established instruments from the 16th century to the early 19th, composed for by many composers from bach to haydn. interestingly enough, the composers demanded greater range and more involved instruments to compose for, but the luthiers gave up on it. it was a lot easier to make a standard cello than it was to build a 7 string viola de gamba. basically henry ford syndrome - ease of manufacture outweighs any efforts toward innovation.
whether they should be considered the exception or the rule is up to interpretation depending upon one’s point of view. i wouldn’t consider franz j. haydn an “abheration” - many consider him the father of the symphony, and i wouldn’t consider the baryton works in his repertoire aberrancies either. maybe if there had been only a few, but he did over 125 seperate pieces for the instrument, solo, duet and trios.
i’m glad that you can at least recognize the no-win there - believe me it’s very present, and in turn requires the extended range bassist to be all that much more skilled. mediocrity is much more tolerable with a 4 string than it is with an extended range bass.
the instrument presented in the op’s post belongs to al caldwell, the bassist with vanessa williams, and a personal friend. he’s a touring pro, he’s played that bass and others like it on the david letterman show and the tonight show with jay leno, backing vanessa up, along with touring the world.
http://www.benaventeguitars.com/al_caldwell/index.htm
he’s a monster bass player, one of the best musicians i have ever heard (instrument independant) and a real musical innovator. he’s also a seriously cool individual that folks who can’t get passed the string count without the steel traps of their minds snapping shut will totally miss out on ever knowing. that’s a shame.
he is so far beyond the “i’m a wanker check me out” insinuation that is rife in many posts in this thread that it’s actually humorous.
there are people out there making good music - and a living - on unconventional instruments. they are worth the effort to understand their motivations, if only so that they(we) can be made fun of with a bit of originality, as opposed to the usual tired old cliches that, believe me, we (the extended range bassist crowd) have all heard before. often. y’all owe it to yourselves to broaden your horizons and check some of them out. :).
http://www.mdw.ac.at/I105/orpheon/Seiten/Instruments/other/baryton.htm
here’s a cool site that shows a baryton along with some pics of how it was played. haven’t actually seen this one before, so that’s cool. i love google.
John, getting back to the Benavente basses, I am struck by the fact that the body of the bass extends along the neck on the side (instead of a “horn” as in the more conventional style of guitar body.) You know what I mean. This seems like an awkward design. Is it not comfortable for the left hand on the upper frets? It would seem to prohibit comfortably gripping the neck while playing the high notes. And doesn’t it make for weird weight distribution?
Are these things that the player of a Benavente has to gradually overcome and get used to, or is the bass actually intutitive and comfortable even to a first-time Benavente player?
Keep in mind that most of the common musical instruments evolved for hundreds of years before standardizing in the configurations we know today. The bass guitar is only 55 years old. It’s still evolving. Sure, it was invented to replace the upright double bass, but it’s a still guitar.
Still, there is room for jokes. On a bass guitar forum I used to frequent, somebody started a fun thread about making a bass player’s dictionary. Somebody came up with the following:
4-string bass: for people who know they’re not good enough to play guitar
5-string bass: for people too lazy to move their hand up and down the neck
6-string bass: for people who don’t know they’re not good enough to play guitar
Seriously, though, there are many good reasons for playing an extended-range bass. I’ve primarily played a 5-string for the last several years. Honestly, I very rarely use the low B string. But it’s very handy in certain situations. For example, when playing with a piano player. Piano players just love to play in flat keys. Guitarists and bassists prefer sharp keys. It’s just the nature of the instruments. When a piano player decides a song needs to be in the key of E-flat, a 4-string bassist effectively loses the use of the bottom end of his instrument. Sometimes the song calls for that low note, but if that note is lower than low E, the 4-string bassist is forced to play the note an octave higher, and that doesn’t always sound right. By playing a 5-string bass, the bassist can now play that Eb where it sounds best.
6-strings or higher? Why not? Sometimes the bass player likes to take a solo. Have you ever noticed how most of the time, when a song has a bass solo, the rest of the band pretty much stops playing? That’s because a low-pitched bass solo tends to be a kind of muddy and rumbly, and if everybody else was still playing, the solo would get buried in the mix. Most listeners might not even realize the bass player is soloing, and think he’s just playing a really busy bass line. By adding higher strings to the instrument, the bassist can take his solo into a range where the notes sing out clearly even if the rest of the band is still playing. Does this start getting into the range of the guitar? Sure it does. But a bass still sounds distinctly different from the guitar. It’s the same way a sax and a trumpet play in the same range, but you don’t mistake one for the other.
I’ve recently started playing a 6-string bass. In the same way I don’t use the low B string a lot, I don’t use my new high C string much, either. When I play the songs I learned on the 4-string bass, I use those same 4 strings on my 6-string bass. But there will be times when it is appropriate and useful to have the 6th string, and I will happily use it when it’s needed.
that body style is called a single cut-away, (ala les paul guitars). the innovators of that style bass were actually fodera , www.fodera.com, but lots of folks make em now. one of the true innovators of extended range basses, anthony jackson (played with chaka khan, played the famous “money money money money” bass line, first guy to get a 6 string bass) had fodera make him the first, to my knowledge, 6 string single cut bass that became his signature instrument. the rationale behind it was to provide added neck stability to the bass side of the neck, where a more rigid neck would contribute to low string tonality. (believe it or not, the larger, lower strings actually have less tension than the rest, so the greater the neck rigidity, the better the lower note performance and audibility - sound more like a big 500 pound duck (good) as opposed to a 3 day old burrito fart (Bad)). heh
anyway, the single cut doesn’t impact the play style because the back of the neck is contoured as usual. when playing the instrument you can’t tell where the single cut starts because the neck profile (aka cross section) doesn’t really change from it. i’ll try to find a nice pic of the back of the single cut of a bass to better illustrate what i’m trying to say.
when playing bass it’s essential to keep the thumb on the back of the neck somewhat centered - you don’t grab the neck with your fretting hand like you would a baseball bat, but rather you “pinch” the neck with the tips of your thumb and fingers, with the thumb and fretting fingers being directly opposite each other, through the neck. the jimmy page guitar style of gripping the neck and wrapping the thumb over the top really doesn’t work well even on 4 string bass, and is a great way to get rsi damage to the wrist and forearm. so the single cut really doesn’t get in the way of playing.
the good single cutaway designs, like the fodera and benevente (which incidentally is patterned after the fodera style) are well balanced - the body shapes are similar enough to double cutaways (the more standard bass guitar style) that they are well balanced, as well balanced as any extended range instrument is going to be. with bass necks being so long, and the 7 and more string instruments having so many tuning keys on the headstock, a bit of head-heavy imbalance is sorta expected. i get around it by using a belt leather strap, with the suede-y side down, so it sorta grips my shoulder, except on the double neck. use a padded deal on that one.
bad single cuts are almost like banjos as far as how poorly balanced they are. then again, i’ve played poorly balanced “standard” instruments too. it’s all a question of craftsmanship.
ultimately, the idea is to make an instrument that feels the way the player expects it to feel, or close enough that they won’t have to “unlearn what they have learned”. these instruments are all custom made for folks, so it’s not like they are off the shelf, take it or leave it.
a few other cool builders of beautiful basses (some of which have a lot of strings heh) are
www.conklinguitars.com
www.ritter-basses.com
www.beebasses.com
www.jerzydrozd.com
are just some of a very few. these guys are real craftsmen, that just happen to make musical instruments.
anyway, i hope that answered your question :).