Loud, Bad Guitar

Back in March I wrote about wanting to shift from guitar to bass. Since then I went ahead and made the jump, picking up a beautiful, used Yamaha bass at a ridiculously low price given the materials and workmanship. (For more on why I chose a used instrument, read my Eco Guitar Ponderings post from back in 2010). The choice of a used instrument was easy compared to the back-and-forth thinking that I did about whether to get a standard 34" scale bass or to opt instead for either a medium scale (32") or short scale (30") bass to give my aching wrists a break. I've written a few times before on this blog about guitar scale length and its relation to pickup placement and fret placement, tuning, and intonation . It's a topic that I'm pretty comfortable with in terms of the underlying physics and how they make the instrument sound and play. I've also gone through a couple of months in the past when I was unable to play much because of shoulder and wrist pa...

Last post I explained a bit about what scale length was and how it worked and why shorter scale lengths weren't automatically easier to play or snappier sounding. (Short version: because [on an electric, anyway] you can easily increase the string gauge to increase string tension, making the shorter scale guitar feel more like a longer scale guitar). This time I want to move on to the bigger differences that a guitar's scale length make. But first a quick review if you have not read the earlier post: A guitar's scale length is the length of the string from where it leaves the nut towards the fingerboard to the place where the string crosses the bridge saddle. This distance is (more or less) the same as the "speaking length" of the string -- the part that vibrates when the string is plucked. One thing you should notice here is that scale length only refers to the length of the open string, and that the basic way that a guitar works is by pushing down on strings in ...