[chavhunter]

Bit of a noob question, but how low can guitarists tune before bassists are unable to keep up with them? Ive started tuning my 7321 down to drop G, F#, F, and there's got to come a point where a bass wont be able to go an octave down from there...is there?

[FortePenance]

Nah, Variant has a bass tuned to F#0 IIRC.

Also, the Vampyre dark lord is tuned to that too.

FS - Warwick Dark Lord bass(Low F#)

[chavhunter]

wow, you must need some pretty beefy string on that! so i imagine thats the sort of thing meshuggah would use, i got told they just had 2 8-stringers, one distortion and one clean. but then the guy who told me that was a drummer

[Desecrated]

"tuning; C0-C8"

If I remember correctly it's a .230 string that goes down to 16 hz.

apparently yves tunes to the B under that with a 250 string, but I can't find any link or picture.

[Desecrated]

Originally Posted by chavhunter

wow, you must need some pretty beefy string on that! so i imagine thats the sort of thing meshuggah would use, i got told they just had 2 8-stringers, one distortion and one clean. but then the guy who told me that was a drummer

Meshuggah has 2 8-string guitars tuned to F, and their bassplayer tunes his normal bass up one step to F.

[MF_Kitten]

Originally Posted by Desecrated

Meshuggah has 2 8-string guitars tuned to F, and their bassplayer tunes his normal bass up one step to F.

which i find kinda sad... i wanna hear them going the full octave down with the bass too! :P

[Desecrated]

Originally Posted by MF_Kitten

which i find kinda sad... i wanna hear them going the full octave down with the bass too! :P

I can not understand why they don't use the knucklehead octave bass.

[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

[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.

[Shannon]

Originally Posted by Desecrated

I can not understand why they don't use the knucklehead octave bass.

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