the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi

I'm the hedgehog masque replica guy

嘘だらけ塗ったチョースト


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the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi
@the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi

youtube wants me to watch a video about the nature of the acoustic bass guitar and why it sucks and as a guy what studied the physics I can give you the cliffnotes

The acoustic bass guitar (of the sort that has a normal guitar body but 4 bass strings like an electric bass1) is simply too small to be bassy. You look at other bass instruments and they are large, and that is because the fundamental frequencies of the bass notes they are meant to play are, well, low. Low frequency means long wavelength, which means that the space necessary to, in a sense, hold a wave in place2 has to be big.

This is a general rule with instruments: if you look at an instrument like a violin or a clarinet or a drum, the bass version of it is just going to be bigger, because it has to be in order to get the sound out without amplification and filtering. The reason bass guitars can be so low is that the thing that gets to be big is the string gauge; all the sound of the bass comes from that amplification and filtering.

If you have a smaller instrument, the long waves that should be resonating basically hit the edges of whatever that instrument uses for resonance (i.e., the main body of a guitar) and it gets reflected back and starts interfering with itself in a way that cancels out most of the sound. The acoustic bass guitar is too small to prevent that interference, and thus can't produce the same low tones an upright bass or amplified bass guitar could provide, and if you're going to amplify it anyway you may as well use a body that's designed primarily for that with proper pickups and tone controls which an acoustic bass guitar is not going to have.

I appreciate that an acoustic bass is more portable but being 1:1 with the design of an acoustic guitar means that it's not going to sound sufficiently bassier than a normal acoustic guitar. It's almost not worth bothering with, because those bassy tones won't come through well at all.


  1. I've spent most of my life in states that share a border with Mexico, and so I have some knowledge of what Mexican acoustic bass guitars are like. You will notice they are, spoiler alert, quite large! I won't spoiler the punchline of what the name of the instrument translates to in its most literal sense in English; I encourage you to click through if you're not familiar with it.

  2. While it may not be immediately obvious from the way that the notion of the standing wave is initially formulated in the essay or introductory physics concepts, a standing wave is what you get when you pluck or strike a string of fixed length like those on an instrument. The fundamental frequency of that standing wave is tied to the length and tightness of the string, hence our ability to tune strings and to press down on a string to change the pitch of it.


the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi
@the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi

This was the video, by the way. And, yes, covers basically everything I said (there's even a bit at the end about the big Mexican guitar!) but also has playing examples that makes the comparison more concrete


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