I Should Have Given It a Name
Clayton Thomas
I Should Have Given It a Name
I recently lost my favorite preparation. It was a metal rod, about three feet long. It was hollow, with a 3 cm perimeter. I thought it was aluminum, but on trying to replace it, I realized morosely that it wasn’t. It’s sound was too rich and complex; it’s weight too significant (without being heavy). Maybe it was a fancy alloy. Maybe it was an industrial steel-copper cocktail. I’ll never know. But losing it has meant more than losing an object, I feel like I’ve lost an avenue to a language.
The bar didn’t look particularly special. It was just a long bar. But it had a sound. And the sound opened up a huge array of musical options for me in the 15 years we spent together. How it worked: I have a particular setup, with my bass strings sitting very high off the fingerboard of the bass. The downside of this is that it’s very hard to play conventionally. The upside is that preparations (particularly objects woven through the strings) can resonate without being dampened or hindered by the fingerboard. On a normal setup, this bar of mine was woven through the strings would just hit the neck and not resonate. It might make a dull “thwack”.
But with my setup, the bar and the sound floated. Things I could do with that bar: I could hit it with a heavy soft mallet, and it would resonate like a gong (quite a low foundational tone, with a wide spectrum of overtones), added to the full resonance of the strings of the bass vibrating together through the body of the instrument. I could hit it with a hard mallet and it would have a very high impact pitch, and resonate the strings, creating a cutting, hard, metallic sound, which could compete with a drummer’s snare. I could vibrate the strings of the bass with my left hand, and hold a metal object, or glockenspiel mallet head, against the bar, while it was woven in the strings, and an incredibly fast, high, and loud buzzing sound would emanate from the contact point. I could move that up or down the length of the bar, away or closer to the strings, and the pitch would shift like it had a low-pass filter on it. I could weave another smaller bar further down the bass (towards the scroll), and the two bars would act as added bridges, cutting the string length but without limiting the resonance of the strings. This opened up the possibility of playing with two or more mallets and treating the bass like a drum. Each string length, from scroll to tailpiece would be cut into four distinct pitches. Meaning that I had 16 pitches to play with across the bass. I could move the two bars up or down, or “wobble” them to create variety. Playing with the bow in this setup opened up a whole other range of sonic options: for example, bowing the strings above the rod, while the bar vibrated slowly in the strings, produced an extremely high, wide, and slow tremolo, which could be played simultaneously across all four strings creating a mobile cluster/dense texture. Bouncing the bow on the strings with the bar, or two bars woven through, would create a dense, ghost-like chord, un-played but audible. By contacting the bouncing strings with another stick or mallet, a singular texture, which could shift pitch with proximity to the bridges, could be created. The bar created a set of territories which were distinct but allowed emotional and dynamic range. They turned the very complex possibilities of the double bass into something more fundamental and functional—a folk instrument.
Clayton Thomas is a musician (double bass) based in Sydney, Australia.