I’ve also read that setting the pickups too high can cause the magnets to dampen the string vibration and as a result the sustain, too low and it won’t pickup the strings. There’s a sweet spot.
Also string gauge will be a factor as will be the note played. It takes a lot of energy to produce a high note. C2 vibrates at 130 times a second, c6 at 1046.
My test for sustain is simple. I play the riff from Dazed and Confused, plucking the open E, and letting it ring while plucking the rest on the D and A strings. My MDB5 is my only bass where the E rings for the entirety of the next 8 notes. Without fudging it by attacking harder or something
Yes. When I was playing guitar, I had a Charvel LS-1 that would choke out every note. Those Jackson pickups were super hot. Once adjusted properly, those notes would ring forever. I do miss that guitar. It sounded better than any other I ever had.
Whether or not the body wood will have positive or negative effect on sustain is also a complicated question. For any vibration that gets fed back into the strings from the body, there will be some phase difference induced by it reflecting back from the wood. If it happens to be out of phase with the string, it will kill some of the vibration
You can see this on a string through bass, where the tone is different strung through the body versus strung through the bridge.
I haven’t noticed an affect on sustain but to be truthful haven’t paid attention as I’ve got enough. I will say my strung through Charvel has less sustain in my Dazed and Confused test than the MDB5, but that could be for many reasons
In fact, it’s almost guaranteed that it will be out of phase to some degree, yielding complex waveforms that are likely super specific to an individual instrument/string/player/song combo.
Of course, they all matter. But the influence of any individual factor is really difficult to gauge. My guess would be that the combination of pickup type plus height and string type would be most significant.
Indeed. I should have phrased it as “the reflected vibrations that are out of phase with the string…” since the majority will be unless you get very lucky with density and geometry.
Lucky and unlucky are also relative terms here. If the vibration fed back into the string is perfectly in phase with that of the string, all you’d get is a louder fundamental, or whatever the string is putting out. But that wouldn’t really give the sound a whole lot of complexity or individuality. The character of the bass’ sound really rests in the little complexities of the waveform overlayed on top of the fundamental by the interaction of all the bass parts and the player’s input.
