Kala U-Basses come in fretless varieties.
I play an Ashbory, but they’ve stopped making them again. Also, they’re very idiosyncratic instruments, I wouldn’t really recommend them to a beginner. Intonation is all over the place, even with uke bass strings in place of the originals.
Actually, I find that fretting accurately at the long end of the scale is far easier. A poorly placed finger is still almost spot on when playing a low G at the third fret, but try the sloppy fingering around he twelfth fret zone and intonation gets very hazy.
It still sounds cool anyway, and if you have a good ear you can pull it in.
I have never tried a double bass, but I bet that the low notes are probably a breeze to get right.
Ah, OK, it sounds as though you and Shakester are talking about the same thing, then, which is the exact opposite of my first guess.
So I guess the explanation for this effect is that, at the 12th fret, any slight deviation from the correct finger position represents a large fraction of the distance to the next semitone, and therefore a substantial change in pitch? I guess that makes more sense…
[QUOTE=Shakester]
I play an Ashbory, but they’ve stopped making them again.
[/QUOTE]
Why, was there a public outcry?
Kidding, of couse. That thing looks great. Like a sex toy for a porcupine. 
That’s right, with a short scale length if you’re a little sharp on the E you’re pretty much playing an F. Which can lead to other band members frowning at you.
Mine’s black. It’s a good way to make friends with other musicians at gigs: “What the hell is that thing?”
I have seen someone using that at a gig once. Given your comments on intonation, I read the Wiki you linked to. Why the heck weren’t they adjustable? Seems like a worthy feature to include. What do you like about yours?
minor7flat5 - yeah, the longer scale = better intonation on a fretless seems to math out. Man, I can’t imagine playing a fretless; I have enough difficulty with a fretted guitar. Heck, I am loving my old guitars made with bar frets, where the cross-section is not a T but rather a bar, a rectangle.
The intonation wouldn’t be fixable with an adjustable bridge. It’s more a problem with the scale length and the nature of the strings, which are a kind of rubbery nylon. It plays flat in some parts of the neck, sharp in others, and tuning is more of an art than a science. You have to play it a fair bit and get to know its idiosyncrasies. The “fret” markers are printed lines on the plastic fingerboard 
What do I like about it? It sounds very cool, a huge thick slab of low end. It’s really not much like a bass guitar, closer to a double bass. But without the woodiness and detail you’d get in a real DB. It is, however, a heck of a lot easier to get on the bus than a full sized DB. Or even a regular bass guitar. Portability counts for a lot.
Other than that, I like playing something that makes other musicians freak out. And I like getting real music out of something that many people would consider a toy. I like a challenge.
ETA: I usually use my regular bass guitar for recording, though. Less messing around.
Here you go, in action: Brittle Sun: Inhale - YouTube
Hey - you guys sound great! A slow, bluesy piano ballad - she is a wonderful singer; almost a Nelly Furtado look and sound The bass filled-out the low end with the pianist’s left hand nicely. It is kinda funny to see such a small instrument sound so big.
Thanks. I’m clean shaven again now, it’s a bit weird to see hairy-faced me
So after a day with the new bass I realize it was a bit of an impulse purchase. My gigging is pretty much limited to playing light Christian rock every week at church, and when I went through a few songs last night with my wife on piano I realized that the Carvin’s sound is a bit thin for the part–after a half hour I grabbed my P-bass.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t an awesome instrument–for me it’s a pure jazz instrument, and jazz is where my heart really is. Nothing like a cool walking bass line on an upright, or on my new fretless!
I’ll see what I can do to beef up the sound. It has an aluminum Hipshot bridge on an alder body; I might swap out the aluminum for brass. For some reason the original owner ordered it with the body holes in the bridge, but didn’t actually run the strings through the body. I have seen this before, any ideas why someone wouldn’t pass the strings through the body if they can?
Also, the pickups (J99’s) aren’t impressing me. Not that I know anything about pickups. If I dial either back, it hums like a Strat, so I imagine they are wired in some humbucking orientation that loses its effect when one is dialed back.
I am happy with it, and would have been sad to see it slip by.
Stupid question: how much have you fiddled with the tone knobs? I had a bassist who had a bright bass but he dialed the tone to 0 or near to it and got a good thud, once you scraped the highs off the top 
I fiddled with everything. The knobs are crappy, and research on the 'net seems to support that Carvin guitars are great, but their electronics suck. I may have a project.
With that said, I think it’s a bit much to plug in this fretless bass and then a p-bass and compare their tone: they are entirely different instruments, and I would definitely prefer this instrument to the p-bass for a jazz standard.
It’s most likely wired like a Fender Jazz. If it is, yeah, the two single coils are a large humbucker. If you turn one down, you can hear the fluorescent lights pretty fast. WordMan’s advice on the tone knob should be heeded. You can get most Jazzes to boom if you turn it down. If you can live with the hum, you can also just use the rhythm (is that what we call it on a bass, maybe neck?) pickup, and there are lots of ways to kill the apparent volume of the hum. Also, if this is a Carvin with an active preamp (how many knobs/switches does it have, any battery box?), they have a reputation for being anemic. You see reports of people being happy with replacing the preamp, the pickups or both; I cannot vouch for them, though. I lusted for years at the Carvin catalog when I was a kid, and they had a reputation for well built instruments. Nice catch!
You are far more wise than 16 year old me. I filed the frets of a perfectly good lawsuit Jazz Bass copy in order to play fretless for awhile. I found out that I don’t have the attention or natural intonation to play fretless unless I’m sitting there watching my left hand. Even though I put a good replacement neck on it, I’ll always feel dumb for doing it, and for eventually trading it away for an EB-0 (heh, that could only boom). I traded it to a guy who did live sound, I hope he kept it.
I severely missed that bass until this weekend. I tried out maybe a dozen different Jazzes. Most of them sounded too bright and hi-fi, to my ear. The only one that sounded like that old lawsuit bass, or a 60’s Fender Jazz that I played and got stuck in my memory when auditioning for a country band, was a Squier 70’s VM. But it played horribly due to a bad set up. I hemmed and hawed for a few days, but decided that I owned allen wrenches, so I got it. After giving it just a basic adjustment, it plays as well as my lawsuit bass did. I’m still kind of debating using it at a show this weekend, since I haven’t used it in a practice. I’m probably going to bring it and decide during the sound check.
That sounds about right. It’s one big humbucker then. So I cranked them both up and all is good. It doesn’t have an active preamp–I took off the back plate to see if there was a battery hidden in there somewhere, and found none. I’m not a fan of active basses, so this is what I was hoping for.
I’ll dial the sound in at the amp, not necessarily a boomy bass, but perhaps a little fuller. The sound really fits a certain style, and I just pulled up some jazz standards in iRealBook and felt the joy. I did a walking line to “Just a Closer Walk With Thee” that might be the excuse I need to get this instrument to church one of these days.
I was checking the intonation and found that it was way off–perhaps that’s why the thing is almost new: even though it surely dates from 10 years ago, the guy might never have had the intonation set right.
Pro tip #1 (learned today): if you have to move the bridge saddles a half inch on a black aluminum Hipshot bridge, loosen the strings first, otherwise you will get eight long silver gouges in the black finish from the height adjustment screws 
Pro tip #2: A sharpie fixes the situation encountered in pro tip #1 
You are exactly correct there. The higher you go on the scale, the less margin for error. The shorter the scale, the less margin for error.
However, on longer scale instruments, like a double bass, the tradeoff is that you have longer distances to cover when you have to move. So with those big movements it’s harder to be accurate.
Imagine what a violinist has to do to nail intonation in the high register. Fractions of a millimeter are audible differences.
Just the thought of it caused my fretting fingers to start twitching, literally. Probably nothing to worry about - just a little psychosomatic focal dystonia. :eek:
BTW, CWG, anytime you feel like posting more of your playing would be just fine with us (lest you think nobody remembers).
[QUOTE=Shakester]
Here you go, in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmbYPOiPeWU
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It’s easy to see why you like that contraption - it’s unique and actually sounds great.
Two thumbs up.
Very nice of you to say so. Actually I don’t remember myself. I don’t do a lot of posting of my own playing but I’ll poke around.
Ervin Somogyi is one of the American Masters of handmade guitars. He has a wait list for years and his starting prices are huge - these days, at least $30,000. This is a link to a used one - apparently the owner had some surgery and can’t play it as much. You don’t see them come up that often.
Enjoy.
I thought that was why I often see string players almost always apply some left hand vibrato for 1/4 notes and longer. I understand when they were recording strings for the tapes for mellotrons, the musicians had to have the precise note pumped into headphones for them.
I played violin in my school’s Junior High and Senior High schools orchestras. Don’t recall too much being said about exact pitch. But the better players were put in the First violin section and the rest of us got dumped into the second violin section. I learned to listen to the people around me and matched their pitch and rhythm. I think everyone else did the same. So our teacher/conductor chewed out the entire section if a mistake was made.
As second violinists, we usually played in first position anyhow. Occasionally in 2nd position. First violinists played the harder parts. A lot of those kids started younger than me. 1st or 2nd grade. I started in 6th grade when we moved to that town and I started attending school.
I’m surprised bass players want to play a fret less bass. I love the frets on my guitar. I have no desire to ever play an instrument without them again. Its like tuning my instrument with a pitchfork. I did that for too many years. Never again. I threw them out after digital tuners hit the market.