Floppy B String on 5 and 6 String Bass

Floppy B String on 5 and 6 String Bass

I noticed that a great many Bass Guitar Forums discuss what must be a chronic problem in the 5-String and 6-String bass world, that is, floppy B strings. (for the newly Initiated, Bass Guitars traditionally come with just 4 strings – and E, A, D, and G. On a 5 String, the extra string is a big fat B String on the low side of the neck. On a six string bass the extra extra string is not an even fatter low string, but a higher string on the other side of the traditional fours strings – a little skinny High B String.)

On a great many postings, people are blaming the particular basses involved. This can be a valid complaint, as long as people are comparing their respective basses only in regards to their Neck Scale. You see, given a string of a particular thickness and weight, or ‘mass’ as we should call it, it will be most ‘floppy’ on the shortest neck. All other things being equal, ‘long’ equals lower, and so to bring up the pitch on a string stretched over a longer distance between nut and bridge, well, it must be made more tight, that is, less ‘floppy’. So we should expect the most complaints of floppiness to come from those whose basses have the shortest neck scales

The different Neck Scales are as follows: – Short is 30 inches, mediums are 32, 34 inches is ‘long (with the proviso that one source has it that while 34 inches is considered ‘long’ for 4 string basses, a five and six string bass are not ‘long’ until 35 inches, but this represents less than a 3% difference in length and so is probably not overly consequential), and extra longs are 36 inches. Oh, scale is measured from the nut at the top of the neck to the saddle of the bridge, so, really, the only part of the string involved in the scale measurement is the part the wiggles back and forth while making the sound.

While Neck Scale helps us to understand the problem of B String Floppiness, it is not really something we can do anything about, unless we want to solve our floppiness problem simply by buying a new bass. Most people would hold off on that particular variable until driven to it as a last resort.

I’ve seen some online forum posts which posit the idea of fixing B String floppiness by shimming or placing spacers between the string retainer and the ball. They no doubt suppose that it is taking some of the slack out of the string. However, we need to remember the basic physics of our equation here – we are only concerned with the strings width and weight (Mass) between the Nut and the Bridge Saddle. You can put a mile of shims and spacers AFTER the Bridge Saddle and it won’t make the slightest bit of difference. Where people say that such things help, well, that is the Placebo Effect at work. After going through all that trouble, they don’t wish to admit to themselves that they wasted so much time and effort, or that they had been taken in by such blunt stupidity. So, it is my guess that if the guitar works after the installation of shims and spacers, then it probably was not in such bad shape before all that useless stuff was added into the mix.

The real important variable in all these matters of B String Floppiness is the actual string. Since we are stuck with our Neck Scale dimension, the only thing we can easily change is the Mass of the string we use. All things being equal, fatter strings are lower and will tune with greater tension then a skinny string. And if the width is held equal, then a denser heavier steel and chrome steel string will tune tighter than those made of lighter materials such as nickel and aluminum (Aluminum plagues the world of violin strings – it gives a nice enough tone but it is so brittle and fragile as to fall apart after only hours of any really exerted practicing).

So look for the specifications of your ‘floppy’ B String. B strings average around .125 inches in diameter, but you can get round wound steel strings all the way up to .145 ( for example, D’addario and DR String), or flatwounds up to about .136 (Thomastik-Infeld, though they are costly… about $45 for just one B string, but you can buy them singly). Now, while the round wounds seem to come in fatter sizes than the flatwounds, remember that the density of the flats are inherently greater, because they are filled in level to the very limits of their width dimension, while round wounds have all those empty spaces within all those little round grooves – they don’t completely fill in their given diameters and so they are actually less dense than their given diameters would imply.

I myself have a Fender 5 String Bass… I think all these Fender 5 Strings come in 34 Inch ‘Long’ Scale. These guitars, given their popularity, are the one’s most often complained about. I strung my particular Fender 5 String in D’addario long scale Flats, and the B String is a .132 diameter and it is wrapped in chrome steel, making it fatter and denser than the industry average. And, yes, while the B String certainly creates for itself a great deal side to side wiggle room when it sounds, the tone is fine.

Perhaps a great many people are concerned that the B Strings seem to take up so much room ‘wiggling’ back and forth. Well, this is all to be expected. I used to work with ‘Accelerometers’, that is, little devices designed to measure acceleration G Forces, and one of the immutable laws of Acceleration is that given similar G Force intensities, lower frequency movement will have the furthest displacement. Simply speaking, for the same sound volume as another string of higher note, a lower note will create more side to side wiggle movement in order to do the same job. Your B String, by its very nature, is simply going to ‘look’ more ‘floppy’ than the other strings.

So do you really have a problem? If you get the right tone and note from your B String, and if it doesn’t buzz on the lower frets and whack against the wood, then you probably don’t really have a problem with B String floppiness… or your problem is merely psychological. But if it really bothers you and you need to do something about it, then look for a thicker string wrapped in steel. The tighter tension of the greater mass will cut down on some of that floppy looking wiggle room that so annoys you.

Oh, there are instances where strings just seem to go crazy – seeming to violate all the rules of physics. One hears of ‘dead’ strings that no longer sound. Well, this probably involves the strings separating within their windings, creating light spots and heavy spots which cause vector interactions – the string wiggles all wrong and sounds funny. But such a string will not even tune, or will rise and fall or ‘warble’ in tone. This is not ‘floppiness’… it is an entirely different problem.

But there is way in which an aged string can become ‘floppy’ over time. It happens more often with violin strings. A string stretches out, slowly over time decreasing in diameter, and as more and more string ends up getting wound up onto the tuner, then less mass is left between the Nut and the Bridge Saddle. The old stretched out string gets thinner and becomes ‘floppy’. So in cases where you have a very old string that starts to buzz on the lower frets or begins to smack the wood, when it never used to before, then it is probably just getting old, and its time to replace the old baby. Now, if you buy somebody’s used bass and you have what you believe is significant B String floppiness, and you don’t know whether to attribute the problem to String Type or to String Age… well, its probably good to get a new set of strings in any case… make the Bass your own with a shiny new set of strings. And make sure you get a set with a relatively high diameter B string. More than .130 for Flat Wounds, and more than .135 for Rounds. And then, as long as everything sounds fine, you will soon enough get used to larger oscillation swings of your B String… that just means its working right.