Manually-Operated Pitch Approximator

In our journey to Modiwo’s first album we are constantly upgrading our hardware with different instruments, tools and gadgets that make everything sound more and more amazing. In our attempt to keep you up to date we decided to post from time to time news about what’s new in our gear department.

Our special guest for today and one of our newest instruments trying to hit the stage (metaphorically for now – we’ll see later if Tudor decides to literally hit the stage with it) is the ’Manually-Operated Pitch Approximator’

While most people try to reach their goals in the easiest way possible, our bass player always finds something to make his life a little harder. This is why he’s started playing the fretless bass! For those unfamiliar with this concept, a fretless instrument (like the violin, cello, double bass etc.) is harder to play due to the fact that you can go out of tune if you move your fingers even slightly. This shouldn’t be that much of a problem if you’re playing in a classical, formal setting, but when jumping, head-banging and slapping come into play…you’ll be hearing some strange sounds coming out.

It’s not just the sliding; fretless basses have a very different tone from fretted ones. They sound very warm, fluid, and smooth, and are conducive to beautiful sounding melodies, but they lack the hard, defined punch of a fretted bass, and slapping and popping will sound very different without a metal fret for the strings to bounce off of. On the other hand, you can produce sounds that you simply can’t with a fretted bass, and let’s be honest…it looks great !

As a conclusion of our today’s instrument lecture, we’ll end with a final question: What do fretless basses and lightning have in common? Yes, they never hit the same place twice