2021 Wildwood 1-String Bowed Electric Spring Bass

Feel free to copycat, evolve, and capture this idea for yourself.

This uses a hardware-store spring stretched over a 58" scale and attached to a bass tuner at one end and a hook at the other end. It's "fretless" and you play it by "pinching" the string at the proper "fret" marker.

It uses a cradle of three "donated-to-science" Strat-style pickups to sense the strings at the playing end and... while you can pluck it... the best way to play it is with a bow. I really wish I had a good cello or bass bow around, but the fiddle bow did the trick for the moment.

It's tuned to a G below bass low E... something like 24 hz pitch? That's right near the "cutoff" of about 20 hz for human hearing. I originally had it tuned to an octave below low E but most amplifiers (and speakers, for that matter) have a hard time making that a sound, so I tuned it up until I could hear the rumble of the lowest note.

It's not pretty, it's not a finished product... but it is an idea. The first "sketch" of this was put together in under 20 minutes... at which point it was "playing." It took me a further half-hour to change the pickup loadout to a three-sided affair and tidy-up the wiring.

The benefit of these junky '80s Strat pickups is that they're cheap, bright, and microphonic so it's very "body sensitive" and, as a result, it has the weirdest, almost-sorta double-bass-like thing going on even plugged into a bass amp.

I win.