electric mandobass?

[padawan]

Is it possible.. You have managed to link together the "tune a bass in fifths" and "tune a uke in fifths" threads! Impressive!

I uh... meant to do that.
That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.

[Eddie Sheehy]

I have an F-Bass - an F-style body with a 30" scale and a bass neck - tuned as a regular bass. Piezo under bridge and vol/tone controls...

[mandroid]

So this is about a fretted bass with a peg so you stand to play it , and the peg holds it up?

why not .. tried playing a Fender P bass , that big slug of wood is heavy, on your shoulder.
I don't object to having someone build a different body to use a support peg.

be a Job Creator .. go for it..

maybe like a Steinberger Bass that gets fretted?

[rico mando]

I have my standard bass tuned DAda . not that any one wants to know this

[Charlieshafer]

I briefly played this beast at Rumble Seat Music in ithaca a couple of weeks ago. While it's tuned as a normal bass now, with different strings it'll take the mandobass tuning.

Hagstrom

They actually have two of them, though this one is cooler because it has plastic stuff on it. I couldn't justify buying either, so hey, they're all yours.

[Jim Garber]

The Hagstrom bass, I believe, was originally meant to be tuned with octave strings in all courses.

[Jim Bevan]

My daughter has a Fender Mustang bass (shorter scale than a P-bass) tuned an octave lower than a 'cello.

It actually has one semitone more range than a tuned-in-fourths 5-string bass, if you care to figger it out.

It has a B-string from a 5-string as the low C, the fattest A-string available for the G, a normal D-string, and the thinnest available G-string for the high A.

It sounds great! I've even had to use it on occasion when someone would call me for a bass gig ('cuz I didn't always have a normal bass around).
I'm sure that that much brain-exercise postponed my Alzheimer's by a year or two!

[Charlieshafer]

The Hagstrom bass, I believe, was originally meant to be tuned with octave strings in all courses.

Yes, that's exactly correct, so it's not quite a true paired string instrument. The one thing I noticed that, even with lots of time on a mandocello, I had a heck of a time fretting both strings without my finger slipping between them. The longer scale and looser strings made for quite a struggle. I refused to let them plug me in to spare myself the embarrassment.

[Jim Bevan]

Not to derail the thread, but I've had my nuts replaced (ouch!) on my two 10-string mandos, to get the strings as close together as possible.

Way easier to play, and there's never been any buzzing from the strings hitting each other, even the big low-C strings.

[PT66]

The Manson Brothers built a triple neck mandolin for John Paul Jones with the longest neck a "bass mandolin" tuned 2 octaves below a mandolin. I built an acoustic "double octave mandolin" before I knew about the triple neck. I have tought about restringing a short scale bass to that tuning.

[mandroid]

Once you add a divided pickup to send the signal through a Guitar pitch to Midi synthesizer,
you can make the signal coming out the speakers be a Bass , though the instrument in your hand
is a lot shorter scale..