The Guitar-Bass Hybrid That Gives Tortoise Its Lonesome Sound
Bassist and multi-instrumentalist Douglas McCombs has made the cult-favorite Bass VI a staple of the post-rock legends’ palette.
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.
Get access to everything we do at Hearing Things—including weekly album and song recommendations along with our ever-growing archive of interviews and reports—with a free 30-day trial!
