[Desecrated]

Originally Posted by Shannon

Actually, Skip from Knucklehead did sell at least one of his basses to Meshuggah. Now, wether they chose to use it is another issue.

Exactly.

[Ishan]

Originally Posted by Shannon

Actually, Skip from Knucklehead did sell at least one of his basses to Meshuggah. Now, wether they chose to use it is another issue.

I read somewhere he gave one to them for free haha
on the matter, you can go as low as you want, any good amp and cab will handle the low tuning as you rely on overtones, not the fundamental. If you ever heard some bass fundamental, even from a 4 string, you'll hear almost nothing, just a very low buzz.
My bass teacher tune to drop F on his Noguera 5 strings, his band is into low tunesque fusion/metal. It works perfectly fine with his Ampeg rig

[Ruins]

i tuned my ibanez sr405 to drop F with (B 130 ) and it was playable, it was possible to hear what i was playing. fast stuff though you can forget (i am finger player and i am able to play 16 notes on 200 bpm) its just toooo damn low and the string is too floppy.
so low tunings are good for slow grooves with minimalistic work.
i would say like others said if you need something low better get it with harmonics, overtones, your rig tweaking.

[Desecrated]

Originally Posted by chavhunter

Useful stuff there, cheers mate. 16hz would be fairly pointless since human hearing is about 20Hz-20kHz IIRC...? been playing with tunings a bit more and i think the limit really is f# with the bass an octave lower. anything lower i dont think can really be used tastefully.

You can hear the fundamentals with some training, those 20-20 are just an average.
But you will of course hear the overtones.

[loktide]

Originally Posted by Desecrated

But you will of course hear the overtones.

the low B on 7-strings is at around 60Hz (don't remember the exact value), which is (mostly) cut or hi-passed in a band mix anyway to leave room for the bass-drum and bass-guitar. The overtone fingerprint of a guitar string is what makes it sound like a guitar string and not like a trumpet. I don't think it's critical that the amp reproduces the fundamental frequency nor that we're able to hear it. Ampwise, the biggest issue is probably finding a preamp that reproduces the overtones of such a low pitch with enough clarity...

[Desecrated]

Originally Posted by Ruins

i tuned my ibanez sr405 to drop F with (B 130 ) and it was playable, it was possible to hear what i was playing. fast stuff though you can forget (i am finger player and i am able to play 16 notes on 200 bpm) its just toooo damn low and the string is too floppy.
so low tunings are good for slow grooves with minimalistic work.
i would say like others said if you need something low better get it with harmonics, overtones, your rig tweaking.

You need a thicker string, that way it will have the tension you need to play fast.

[Desecrated]

Originally Posted by JBroll

Really, the limiting factor will be strings and your amp.

Your amp is not designed to go as low as that, more than likely, so you'll want to experiment with a lot of things to find out. Get a TS7 and DON'T mod it - Joe knows his shit, but the mid boost/bass cut is very important for tightening things up and it would be extremely silly to get rid of it... I personally think it's not a good idea to remove it for any application where tightening is required, but here there's no question.

As far as strings, you can go extremely thick with them but there will come a point where they just don't sound good to you anymore.

From the physical standpoint, keep in mind that when you go from one note to the note an octave below it you drop the frequency by half. Physically, there's no limit (except that eventually you won't be able to hear the fundamental or amplify the signal well), because you can take halves of anything and never get to zero.

Jeff

There are amps that goes down to 5hz.

As long as you have long enough scale and thick enough strings you can go pretty darn low, I don't think we have seen the end of the line yet. For me having a .250 string would kill some of the tone, I would need a longer scale

Amping the fundamental is something you rarely do, the low b on a sevenstring guitar is 60 hz and a lot of guitar cabinets don't go under 80hz.

And as always, it's probably a matter of personal taste.

[JBroll]

Yeah, but the 'more than likely' takes care of most people not having the 5Hz amp. You don't even *hear* that bloody note... I suppose you could fuck on the speaker cabinet and have a slightly unusual experience, but I'm not spending that much to try something new when we haven't even used more than two pairs of handcuffs at once.

As far as 'a lot of guitar cabinets don't go under 80Hz'... they'll respond, but the signal will be quite a bit lower. However, proximity effect does tend to pull a lot of that back up when recorded.

All that said, I'd like to have every note that could possibly exist at my fingertips, but some of it just isn't practical enough for me right now.

Jeff

[Desecrated]

Originally Posted by JBroll

Yeah, but the 'more than likely' takes care of most people not having the 5Hz amp. You don't even *hear* that bloody note... I suppose you could fuck on the speaker cabinet and have a slightly unusual experience, but I'm not spending that much to try something new when we haven't even used more than two pairs of handcuffs at once.

As far as 'a lot of guitar cabinets don't go under 80Hz'... they'll respond, but the signal will be quite a bit lower. However, proximity effect does tend to pull a lot of that back up when recorded.

All that said, I'd like to have every note that could possibly exist at my fingertips, but some of it just isn't practical enough for me right now.

Jeff

I think it would be cool to integrate such low notes, if you ever sat next to a 64" church organ you might not be able to hear the notes, but you will feel them, and music to me is a lot of feeling/experience more then just hearing.

[chavhunter]

Originally Posted by JBroll

Yeah, but the 'more than likely' takes care of most people not having the 5Hz amp. You don't even *hear* that bloody note... I suppose you could fuck on the speaker cabinet and have a slightly unusual experience, but I'm not spending that much to try something new when we haven't even used more than two pairs of handcuffs at once.
Jeff

Lol, legend!!

Originally Posted by Desecrated

I think it would be cool to integrate such low notes, if you ever sat next to a 64" church organ you might not be able to hear the notes, but you will feel them, and music to me is a lot of feeling/experience more then just hearing.

64 inches? sounds like an organ fit for a performance of stone henge....