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20" scale second octave bass

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Chris P.:
Ow, yes, I played the Alembic of Armand Sabal-Lecco once with those strings. But there was another tiny bass you had to play with an octaver. Let me think...

ilan:
A friend of mine once pulled the frets off an Ibanez SDGR series bass, strung it with piccolo strings and tuned it in fifths. He got something between piccolo bass and cello guitar. Cool sounding instrument but the fifths drove me crazy trying to play it.

Dave W:
"piccolo bass" -- not a bass.

Doesn't matter that is has the scale length of a bass guitar. Bass is a tonal range. If the instrument isn't tuned to the bass range, it's not a bass.

ilan:
Piccolo bass is in fact bass register. What we call "bass guitar" is really a contrabass register instrument. It's written like a bass instrument but actually is transposed an octave. 5-string basses (and of course multi-string monstrosities with an F# string) go into subcontrabass register.

Dave W:
Details, details. Technically you're correct but you know what I mean. It's not in the note range commonly identified as the range of a bass instrument.

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