Thanks. I thought about the spring idea myself. And strings with those stupid caterpillar windings give me grief elsewhere.
Now that I have this beast (Nyx is her name) built to my satisfaction I want to screw it up. Has anybody converted this to a bowed instrument? No doubt the bridge is the wrong shape and possibly the curvature of the neck is all wrong but I like the unique. And fretless possibly would sound more mellow.
The 12" radius neck and bridge will certainly make bowing individual strings hard. A cello typically has a neck radius of around 2 3/4" and a double bass of around 3 1/2". There's no way you'd be able to set up the ESB-4 neck for anything like that.
If you de-fretted it, you could probably sand the fingerboard radius to a Fender 7 1/2" radius, which would help. Any more, and at the edges you'd probably sand through the edges of the fretboard. You'd then have the bridge to worry about and you'd need a replacement with individual height adjustable saddles. Which won't be cheap.
With a bow, to play individual strings, you need either a lot of string height above the body or a very narrow body at the place you are bowing, so you can get the angle of the bow right to select just the E or G string to play. You simply don't have that with the ESB-4.
I really don't think it's a good platform for converting to a bowed instrument. You could spend a lot of time and money making something that still doesn't work well or sound very good.
What luck. I knew it was a silly idea but was just day dreaming.
Now a more realistic question: Adjusting the nut height. If my fingers had the grip of a C-clamp fretting the first fret would be no problem. The strings are way too high. I have the bridge where I want it. How high should the strings be above the first fret? I have seen .020" for guitars and guess it is different for a bass and my strings aren't even close to that, .060" at least. I was reluctant to monkey with it for for fear of undoing all my work at leveling the frets but upon consideration realized the nut height doesn't affect anything past the fingered fret. That is set by the bridge height.
I don’t think I’ve ever measured the final string gap at the first fret as I do it all by eye, but basically as low as you can get without the string buzzing on the first fret. I did try and use a nut file as a gauge/cut stop on my last set-up but ended up with the string flat on the fret, so replaced the nut and went back to doing it by eye. I don’t really like it when a specific height is mentioned, as a lot depends on just how much neck bow is set and just how level the frets are (my fret levelling improves as I do more of them, but I occasionally have to re-do the level when I can’t get the low action I know I should be getting). You can often achieve a much smaller gap. However, the smaller the gap, the more risk there is of a first fret buzz, so if going for the ultimate low action, you may go too far, so you need to be prepared to either fit another nut, or do a slot-filling repair job with super glue/CA and baking soda/bicarbonate of soda.
The thicker the string, the bigger the gap needs to be, but with level frets you should be able to get away with the same distance above the first fret as at the second fret when fretting at the first. You can always add a little bit extra to be on the safe side.
Lowering the nut slot height will bring the overall action down, but unless the nut is very tall to start with, in terms of the risk of buzzing, it’s only that first fret when playing open strings that you need worry about. If the nut slots are very tall, then there can be a greater vertical element to the string tension on the neck (adding some bow), which means that when the nut slot heights are lowered, the neck curve may flatten slightly, so you may need to slacken off the truss rod by a very small amount to get back to the curvature you set up before working on the nut.
But it is the work of moments to adjust, and I generally still play around with the truss rod setting and the bridge height after I’ve cut the nut slots to see if I can get the neck a little bit flatter. But then I do like really low actions, so if you prefer a reasonable gap under the strings so you can really dig in, then you may want to leave it well alone. But even with an action that’s generally on the high side, you want to have strings that are easy to fret at the 1st fret. Also, too high here and the strings will be sharp when fretted.
If you’ve set the intonation up before lowering the fret slots, then you’ll need to check that again. As previously mentioned, lowering the slots will bring the overall action down, which means you need less force to fret a string at the 12th fret. This means less change in string tension between the unfretted and fretted condition, so the 12th fret note won’t be as sharp, so the saddle will probably need to come forwards a bit, especially when you have taken the nut height down significantly.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote