Talk:Eight-string bass guitar

Work to be done

Quite a lot of work to be done to this article. Some issues:

• Lots of unsourced statements, some of which sound more like music shop jive rather than verifiable facts (sorry, guys, but some salespeople are great and others will tell you whatever they think will either make them feel big and/or will clinch a sale... I've often been told that electric 12-string guitars don't exist for example... it just means, they don't have one and aren't interested in doing a special order).
• The article as it stands is really about any multi-course electric bass, not just the eight-string. Rename? I'd prefer to develop some separate articles and then do a major refactor of this one. I think we do need an article on the eight string bass. See Talk:Twelve-string bass#Eight string bass article.
• Name format:
  • See Talk:Twelve string guitar#Requested move.
  • Should the word guitar be part of the name?

Lots of others I'm sure, but that's a start. Andrewa (talk) 17:00, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Also, I am interested in the issue of string tension on eight-string basses. Twelve-string guitars have historically been tuned lower to reduce string tension - why has this not been the case with eight-string basses?

Have eight-string basses typically - as I was once told in a music shop - had shorter scale lengths to reduce tension? If so, this should be discussed.luokehao (talk) 10:05, 21 July 2010 (UTC)

Twelve string guitars are now most normally tuned to concert pitch. The once almost universal tradition of tuning them a tone low arose from the difficulty in tuning the G octave string three frets higher than guitar strings are really designed to go, and the difficulty in keeping the action stable with the extra neck tension in the days when 12 string guitars were often just versions of 6 string models with extra machine heads and double slots in the nuts. Neither of these reasons apply to modern guitars and strings; Even the cheapest student models in a music shop you'll now find tuned to concert pitch. The "D tuning" is now mostly used by advanced players who want to capture its particular sound.

Beware of what music shops tell you. I used to have a standard joke of asking in any music shop I entered for the first time "Do you have any electric 12 string guitars?" and was normally told (no kidding) "they don't make them". This started in the early days of my learning electric 12, when I already owned two of them (the Magnetone and a Shergold) and hadn't they heard of the Byrds? It was particularly hilarious when touring with a band (in which I was playing the Shergold), we'd all go in to a country town music shop to buy strings or just to have a look or whatever and the guys would wait for me to ask my standard question and we'd all dissolve into laughter in the poor shop assistant's face when I got the standard answer... which really meant "we don't have one so we'll try to sell you what we do have...".

The Internet has improved things a bit but still beware...!

That said, the six-string bass I now own has a very short scale. But from the photos, most eight and twelve string basses look quite long. It's a very good question. Andrewa (talk) 18:29, 21 July 2010 (UTC)

Article structure

Much of the material about 15-string basses etc belongs somewhere else IMO.

Where? Possibilities:

• Bass guitar tuning.
• Bass guitar.
• A new article... to be called what?

Other suggestions? Andrewa (talk) 17:52, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Mutation tuning

I suspect that this edit is just based on the naive assumption that courses are always tuned to unison or octaves, which is of course (;-> normal but not universal, one of my guitar reachers often tuned his twelve to just intonation major thirds and it worked well, a bit like a mutation stop on a pipe organ. But I'll do a little more checking before I revert it. Andrewa (talk) 06:13, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

http://www.bookrags.com/wiki/Reginald_Arvizu confirms the mutation tuning. Andrewa (talk) 06:17, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

In that nobody speaks, I'm reverting the edit. Andrewa (talk) 07:25, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

A bit off topic, but in July '86 in Berlin, my 2nd home for 4-5 months a year from '83-'84 - '90, my dearest friend from '81 in San Francisco, something of a piano prodigy (besides being the most outrageously beautiful Creature I have ever seen in my 58 years), after a grueling 10 month preparation with a Czech instructor, passed her audition for the Berlin Music Conservatory, part of the glorious Berlin Philharmonic, 1 if not the toughest gigs in Classical music even though she was 1) An American. 2) Of Japanese ethnicity. 3) Female. But I digress. 1 evening, we saw a Pianist (senility obscures his name) played a sonata, a fugue & a divertimento on a piano in Just Intonation & best of all a Whammy Bar (don't ken if it was a Bigsby or not). Quite an invigorating evening. Vol-Tear (talk) 15:03, 19 June 2017 (UTC)

Suggested move

This isn't an eight string bass guitar, it's an eight-string bass guitar. Article should be moved there. --Walter Görlitz (talk) 15:16, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

External links modified

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needs pruning

Um, hi. Seeing as this article is entitled Eight-string bass guitar, I propose removing all the stuff that deals with all other string counts. Anyone who wants to save it should move it to an appropriate article.

Really, there's no justification for Eight-string bass guitar or Twelve-string bass to be on their own. They don't belong in Extended-range bass because they don't inherently make tones that are any lower than a standard bass. They should be shut down and their content packed into Bass guitar#Strings and tuning.
Weeb Dingle (talk) 21:03, 10 February 2019 (UTC)