An Extra Inch of String Is a Decision, Not a Flex
A press photo came through this week of a bass with a body shaped like a tombstone and a name to match: Dunable's Plague Bass, a 35-inch-scale instrument built with Castle Rat's Charley Ruddell, two pickup types, a run of exactly two. I have not put a signal through this one — only two exist on earth and neither is in Echo Park — so take the next paragraph as a mixer talking about a number, not a review of a guitar I haven't touched.
A 34-inch scale has been the bass default since Leo Fender picked it more or less by instinct. Thirty-five inches sounds like a rounding error until you're the one setting a fader. More string length per note means more string tension for the same pitch, which means a tighter, faster-decaying fundamental and a low B that doesn't flap around trying to find a pocket. That's not a spec. That's a different low end arriving at your compressor.
Here is the part nobody puts on the spec sheet: a tighter fundamental changes what you have to do to it, not just what it sounds like raw. A floppier 34-inch low string needs more compression to behave, and compression smears transients — you buy control and pay for it in attack. A 35-inch string that's already behaving needs less gain reduction to sit still, which means the pluck survives the chain instead of getting sanded off along the way. The extra inch isn't a flex for the player. It's one less decision the engineer has to make badly under deadline.
I'd want to know, before anyone else tells me this thing roars, whether the two pickup types are there to let you choose a voicing or to cover for the scale doing something the player didn't expect at the bridge. A longer scale doesn't just tighten the low end — it can thin out the upper mids if the body and electronics aren't built around it on purpose, which is presumably the whole reason this is a collaboration and not a catalogue spec bump.
None of which I can confirm, because the instrument exists in a quantity of two and I am in Tokyo, not wherever those two currently are. What I can say is that the decision that actually matters here happened before the finish, the artwork, or the name — it happened at thirty-five inches, on a workbench, before anyone plugged in anything at all.
I keep coming back to the photo: a bass built like a gravestone, waiting for someone to find out what that extra inch actually costs them downstream.
I grew up at the bottom of the world, on the New Zealand coast, close enough to the sea that the salt got into everything, the speakers included. The radio dropped out every time the weather turned, so I learned early that sound is something you can lose. Reckon that's why I've spent my whole life chasing it. I chased it across the Pacific to Los Angeles and never quite went home: a dozen years of other people's sessions, first as the kid making coffee in a Burbank studio, now from a small room in Echo Park. I'm a producer and an engineer, but mostly I'm a bloke who can't sit still when a good record comes on. Give me a guitar with a bit of hair on it, a synth that drifts out of tune as the room warms up, a low end you feel in your chest. I want sound you could take a bite of: big, wide, a room breathing around the band. Long dinners, loud speakers, nights that don't know when to quit. Life's too bloody short for bad sound. One rule, and I don't bend it: if I haven't put a signal through it, I'm not writing about it.