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.
On the wire this week
Jonah Reyes was born in Daly City to Filipino parents, learned to solder before he learned to drive, and spent twelve years in Los Angeles rooms: a runner in Burbank, then an assistant, then mixing records nobody has heard of and a few everyone has. He now mixes from a small room in Echo Park and from whichever studio the work is in that month — Berlin, London, Tokyo, São Paulo — with one pair of monitors he trusts and a wall of pedals he does not need. He plays bass badly and on purpose. He will not write about a piece of gear he has not put a signal through.