May 31, 2011: My Ashula hybrid fretted/fretless bass arrived today. It plays well and sounds good. I don't like how it looks. The fretted strings play and sound like a good regular fretted bass. The fretless strings play and sound like a good fretless bass. One question is how beneficial it is to be hybrid, as opposed to having two basses, or even a double-neck bass.

It is possible to play triads with the bottom two voices on the fretted strings and the top voice on a fretless string.

This sounds good and feels natural. It isn't too hard to get it in tune. In contrast, on a pure fretless, three-voice chords are extremely hard to play in tune.

On the Ashula, you can play unison (not octave) using the two D strings or the two G strings. When doing this, the fingering is quite natural. For example, you can play a G on the fretted D string with your index finger, and a G on the fretless D string with your middle finger.

The middle finger can be about half-way between the frets while the ring finger should be on the fret line. The natural spacing of the fingers results in this spacing, so it is quite comfortable to play.

Sunday, June 5: The fretted and fretless strings have separate tone and volume controls. The tone control for the fretless strings is very sensitive. If we say that the tone control goes from 7 o'clock to 5 o'clock, I'd say that the best fretless tone is at about 3 o'clock. If the tone control is too low, the fretless strings lose their distinctive tone.

Since on the Ashula, the same note can easily be played on two strings at the same time, it is quite possible to have one string in sympathetic vibration with another strings. Interestingly, this sometimes happens by accident when I'm slapping on the fretted strings. By accident, my finger bars the fretless strings and when they are pressed to the fingerboard they start sympathetic vibration, which sounds really strange and interesting. I'm not sure whether that effect can be harnessed as a musical technique, but I think it might. It can also be disabled easily by simply turning down the volume of the fretless pickup.

Wednesday, June 15: One of the frustrations I have with fretted instruments is the way major thirds tend to be out of tune (sharp) due to the equal-tempered scale. On the Ashula bass, you can play a chord with the root and fifth on fretted strings and the third on a fretless string. This allows you to get the pitch of the third where it sounds best, which tends to be quite a bit flatter than the fret line. I like the contrast of the timbres between the voices. Here is an example recording of a C major triad played this way. It is recorded direct from the bass into an external USB soundcard.

Tuesday, July 5: Listening to other bass players, I notice how good slides sound when used well. I never got into slides, particularly on fretless where they are difficult to do in time and in tune. So I came up with an exercise that involves a whole bunch of slides on the fretless strings of the Ashula. It would work on any fretless bass. This is what it sounds like: slide1.mp3 I don't quite have it in tune and in time yet. I'll work on it.

Sunday, July 31: I tried Ardour today for the first time. It is a good multitracking program for Linux. Here is my first Ardour doodle. It is just bass, direct into the soundcard, no processing. My playing is sloppy.