Basslift (or “bacial”)
KeithHandy posted in Instruments on April 6th, 2008
Since my studio has the approximate brightness of a cave (after sundown anyway), my best bet to get a pic of my newly painted bass tonight was to take it out in the hall, under the flourescents. (Having flourescent lights inside my studio is something I’m sort of dead set against, though I would like it to be brighter overall.) What you probably can’t tell from this picture is that the body is a shiny metallic silver. The black parts are flat (not glossy). The head was originally going to be silver too, but it wasn’t flattering to my shitty putty job. The back of the neck is still a dark woodgrain, not an ideal match for the black and silver, but I didn’t want to mess with it and risk making it harder to play.
It’s still an “old generic piece of shit” — I paid $50 for it, and told the clerk at House of Guitars I was doing them a favor by improving the overall aesthetic of their store — but it’s my workhorse for bass lines, and I’ve gotten tons of great use out of it. I took it to Buffalo this weekend while visiting my parents, along with some spray paint, masking tape, and wood putty to fill some of the cracks. My father got involved with the project, and was very helpful. I did all the preparation, and he did all the actual spraying. My mother was then gracious enough to let me boil the strings on her stove, even though I’m not sure she understood my explanation (I’ve been boiling bass strings to revitalize them for as long as I can remember).
I wanted to document the whole thing, but just doing it was satisfying enough. Expect to see the newly improved bass in YouTube session videos in the future! You can of course check out my existing bass vids to see what it looked like before.
April 20th, 2008 at 10:20 am
Niiiice. Very slick looking.
I have to ask though, what’s the deal with boiling your bass strings? (Just curious, because I am completely string-inept and have no concept of what that would do.)
April 20th, 2008 at 10:52 am
When strings have been used for an extended time, their tone changes from “dang dang dang” to “thup thup thup”; that is, the higher harmonics in the sound lose their prominence, and the note doesn’t sustain as long. This is partly from accumulation of hand gunk, and I have particularly gunky hands. Boiling them is one effective way to clean them so they sound newer. This is only a temporary extension of their life.
If you do a Google search, you’ll find a few heated arguments in which purists refuse to do this because it “ruins” the strings; but since you’re going to ultimately throw them away in the end, I’m not sure I understand why this would be a problem.