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The GASS THE GASS
First of all, it's pronounced Gace. Like, y'know, a bass, only partly a guitar, hence the G.You can hear MP3 files of songs featuring the gass at www.reacharms.com: "I Just Found Out", or "Separation of Church and Spirit". These songs are both by my band, ARMS. The only string instrument on "I Just Found Out" is the Gass, and just one track of it. If you think there's guitar or bass, you're wrong. The choruses of both songs feature Gass distorted by another homemade gadget, my foxxtone clone. "Separation of Church and Spirit" has overdubbed bass on the verses, and a little guitar on the choruses, but it's pretty subtle - when we play live it's all gass.
I swear one of these days I will actually post a picture of the Gass.
If you could see it, you'd probably say either "So what? It's a guitar, right?" - or WHAT THE HELL IS THAT THING?
Well, in the early days of ARMS, we needed a way to make a big sound with just me and Benson (on drums), 'cause that was all we had. So I started thinkin' and, as usual when that happens, something weird resulted.
I played around with putting some bass strings on a guitar to make a hybrid instrument. I liked it, but the bass strings were so big and floppy on the shorter-scaled guitar that I started planning a move in the other direction: putting some more strings on a bass.
First I bought an old Univox 31-inch-scale bass guitar that I liked. This is a cheap clone of a cheap 60's guitar, the Moserite. The Ventures used 'em. Wossname Ramone plays a Moserite too. With the "vintage" craze in full bloom, Moserites can fetch prices well over $1000 US, but you can still find nice Univoxes for a couple hundred.
Then I invested maybe thirty bucks in hardware: a cheap Strat-style guitar bridge and a blank nut. I mounted the bridge in a really ugly fashion that did the trick; it's shimmed up on some washers, which stick out visibly. The strings are anchored on the back of the guitar, and since I did the drilling with a hand-held varispeed drill, the holes didn't come out in anything like a nice neat line. But it works, so - fork it!
Cutting the nut was a huge pain in the ass. Hours of fiddling with a couple of small files, a hacksaw, and some sandpaper resulted in a nut of the right size with six smooth slots in about the right places.
So I've just about finished making a really long 6-string instrument. Problem is, I need two more tuning pegs up there! I took off the lower two bass tuners, stuck two guitar tuners in the holes, with some hardware store junk to fill up the extra space in the holes, and drilled two more holes on the headstock for two more tuners. Fortunately there was plenty of room (that was one thing I looked for when I bought the instrument). The tuners I already had; I got 'em off a broken electric guitar neck someone had left in the closet of a house I moved into once.
Now it's time to string it up. It's strung like a guitar - E A D G B E from low to high - except that the lower two strings are bass strings, an octave lower than the rest of the strings.
Fun With Big Instruments
Well, I like it. It's great for punk-rock improv: chunkin' along on barre chords with the bass following the chord. It also lends itself to a little call-and-response playing with yourself. The octave-and-a-half jump from the A to the D string makes for nice wide-interval two-note chords ("double stops" to you music school types), which is something I already liked exploring on guitar.Quirks and Foibles of the Gass
The Gass is certainly not a cure-all. You can't really play independent guitar and bass parts unless you're the kind of player who can do that anyway... like some whacked-out jazz guy like Charlie Hunter or something. Stretching your fingers to play chords on this thing can really tire out your left hand (I have a capo pretty much permanently on the first fret to make it just a little easier).The pickups I have are not quite ideal. The bridge pickup is a Seymour Duncan P90, actually it's a "neck" model, but that was all they had in the cheap bin at Manny's so I took it. It works pretty good except it's a little nasal for my taste. The neck pickup is the bass pickup that came with the Moserite. It sounds f---ing gorgeous, loud and punchy with tons of lows and sparkly high end ... except that since there's no polepiece anywhere near the B string, the B is pretty darn quiet. I'm just used to it now.
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