The Guitar-Bass Hybrid That Gives Tortoise Its Lonesome Sound

I’ve learned a lot about playing bass just from watching and listening to Douglas McCombs. A couple of years ago, I had the good fortune of hearing him up close every night for a few weeks on the road, him playing in Chris Forsyth’s Solar Motel Band and me in Garcia Peoples. It seemed to me that McCombs was able to get a bigger, more powerful sound out of the instrument than other people, myself included, even when we were playing through essentially the same gear. I confirmed it with a bandmate who was doing double duty in both groups: the stage just vibrated in a different way when he was playing. It wasn’t just the tone, it was the rhythmic energy, the phrasing of the fills, the decisions about when to stick to root notes and when to stretch out. In the years since, while coming up with parts in rehearsal or jamming onstage, I’ve often thought to myself: What would Doug do?

McCombs plays a lot of roles, but he’s best known as the bassist in Tortoise, the pioneering Chicago post-rock band that he cofounded in 1990, who recently released their excellent eighth album Touch. Tortoise has never been afraid to use the studio as an instrument, drawing from the techniques of dub reggae and electronic music on their early albums at a time when most other indie rock bands were taking a more meat-and-potatoes approach. When I heard they had a new record coming, I knew I wanted to revive Gear Me, our sorta-dormant interview series that focuses on particular musical tools as a way of talking about creativity more generally. Given Tortoise’s proclivities, I figured we might talk about something high-tech, a synth or a sampler or the mallet-based MIDI controller they often use live.

It wasn’t until I caught their spellbinding show at Bowery Ballroom this past Sunday—where they shredded so hard the house PA stopped working, then kept playing through it as if nothing had happened—that I realized I wanted to ask about something else: McCombs’ Bass VI. Halfway between a bass and a guitar, it’s an instrument with a cult of devotees, but it remains mostly unknown to the wider population. It has six strings like a guitar, but it’s tuned an octave lower, in the same range as a bass. It looks and plays more like a big guitar, with the strings all set close together rather than the wide spacing you’d find on most basses, which makes it good for playing chords and less apt for thumping out funky lines with your fingers and thumb. And it has a sound of its own, resonant and twangy, with less of the low-end power that you’d need to play booty-moving music. It first appeared around the dawn of the ’60s and has remained a fairly niche proposition ever since.

If you want to get a quick sense of how it sounds, put on Glen Campbell’s country-pop classic “Wichita Lineman” and fast-forward to 1:45, when Campbell plays a brief but indelible Bass VI solo that’s probably the most famous recorded showcase in the instrument’s history. (A quick disclaimer about history and terminology for the nerds: “Bass VI” technically refers to a specific Fender model, but it’s become something like a Kleenex-style generic term for this particular class of six-string bass. Campbell was playing a Danelectro.) Better yet, put on “Vexations,” the propulsive opening track of Touch, whose main instrumental theme—a little triumphant, a little melancholy—comes courtesy of McCombs’ own Bass VI. Or “I Set My Face to the Hillside,” a gorgeously searching ballad from 1998’s TNT that has a reasonable claim on being Tortoise’s single most popular and enduring track. Other players might see it as an oddity, but McCombs has made the Bass VI into a signature of Tortoise’s sound. They wouldn’t be Tortoise without it.  

McCombs was in London when we spoke over video chat, preparing to embark on the UK leg of the Touch tour. We talked about his first encounters with the Bass VI, the seemingly unlikely places where it’s shown up in pop history, and the mysterious reason why it always seems to sound so lonesome.

When did you play a Bass VI for the first time?

Douglas McCombs: It would have been about 1987 or ’88. I saw one in a guitar shop that was sort of like the sister store of this record store that I worked at, in Chicago. The owner, who was also my boss, was like, Hey, have you ever seen one of these things before? And I was like, No, what the hell is that? I played it, and I immediately was trying to figure out how I could get my hands on one. 

It probably took me until 1992 or ’93 to find one that I could afford. The original Fender ones from the ’60s and ’70s were rare, expensive instruments, and they hadn’t started making new ones again yet at the time. Then, in the early ’90s, this guy in Nashville named Jerry Jones started making replicas of old Danelectro guitars, and Danelectro was actually the first company that made a Bass VI-type instrument. You could actually afford the replicas, so I got one of those first. 

People know you as a bassist, but you’re a great guitarist too. Were you initially approaching Bass VI from more of a bass or a guitar perspective? 

I hadn’t played a lot of guitar yet back then. I strictly played bass. And I was trying to figure out how to use the Bass VI as a guitar, mostly. I was imagining it as a gateway for me to perform some ideas that I had in my head, which, it turns out, had kind of existed already. Like in the ’60s, there were Duane Eddy and Glen Campbell using it as a guitar. I was thinking about Ennio Morricone, I was listening to Ry Cooder’s Paris, Texas soundtrack. Moody guitar stuff. And I wanted to try to do some things like that. I was trying to expand my horizons as a bass player, but the Bass VI was my gateway into playing guitar also. 

Before I even had one, I borrowed one to play on an Eleventh Dream Day album called El Moodio. Those tracks all had a regular bass already on them, and I was using the Bass VI to augment those parts in a more chordal way. And then I used it on one or two songs on the first Tortoise album. In the early days, we didn’t have a guitar player, so I was using it to bring some guitar-ness into the record. The whole collaborative, collective idea of that band is just to explore whatever ideas anybody has, and I was really interested in the Bass VI at that time. 

All the stuff you just mentioned—Glen Campbell, Duane Eddy, Ennio Morricone, Paris, Texas—has a particular Western feel to it. And when you’re playing Bass VI in Tortoise, it often has something of that feeling as well. What is it about that instrument that lends itself to that kind of spacious, desert-like atmosphere? 

I essentially think of it as lonesome music. Duane Eddy has this album called Lonely Guitar, and it turns out that there's a lot of Bass VI on that record. There’'s something about the combination of the low, resonant quality, but with the twanginess of a guitar. Even on the early Cure albums, like Faith and Seventeen Seconds, Robert Smith was playing a lot of Bass VI, and that also figures into the weird, moody, lonely kind of thing. It’s super great, and it’s not in a twangy way at all. It’s still between a bass and a guitar, but more of that Joy Division-ish melody-driven bass line thing that a lot of bands were doing at that time. 

There’s a Jack Nietzsche album that I really like, with a couple of originals but mostly covers of movie and TV music, called The Lonely Surfer. There’s that lonely thing again. Almost all the melodies on that album are played by Bass VI at some point, and then they’re layered with all this orchestration. 

And then there’s the famous Angelo Badalamenti Twin Peaks theme. I’m not sure if that’s Bass VI but it sounds like it could be. (Author’s note: According to arranger Kinny Landrum, it’s a sample of a “Duane Eddy twangy guitar” pitched down into the range of a Bass VI.) I don’t know why, but there is something about that instrument that makes you want to play slow, melancholic music on it. 

Other than “I Set My Face to the Hillside” and “Vexations,” what are the big Tortoise Bass VI moments?

I think the first really identifiable thing this was “Gamera,” a 12-inch from right after our first album. [Founding Tortoise member Bundy K. Brown] had this arpeggiated guitar figure, and he doubled it on Bass VI, and that was the basis for the whole song. And then on Millions Now Living Will Never Die, my first breakthrough composition that I did for any band, what I consider to be the first really good song I ever wrote, was called “Along the Banks of Rivers.” And I wrote that on the Bass VI. After that song, guys in the band would keep asking me to write things like that, and bring that feel into the band. I didn’t want to overdo it, but that was when I wrote “I Set My Face to the Hillside.” 

The interesting thing about “Vexations” was that I played that Bass VI melody as a blueprint—here’s this melody I have and here’s where I think it should go—but I thought it should be on synthesizer or something. I was imagining the Bass VI as a placeholder that would go away. But then over the course of mixing it, everybody just felt like the Bass VI should be in there.

Why do you think it has remained such a niche instrument? 

I’m not sure. It’s shocking to me, the amount of people I encounter who have never heard of the instrument, professional musicians who don’t know that it exists. It’s becoming more popular recently, and there have been reissue campaigns by different companies. I do notice more and more people playing them. And then there was Get Back, that Beatles documentary, where they show John Lennon and George Harrison both playing Bass VI, which is apparently something they did when Paul McCartney was playing something other than bass. And I think people were like, What’s that thing? The Beatles played it, I’d better check it out.