We’ve been talking about how human decisions and things that can’t really be quantified are central to every step of the creation of our double basses. We’ll take a moment to dive in deeper on the setup process. Measurements can get you close, but what takes you the rest of the way is something harder to write down and has everything to do with experience and communication.
That’s what we’re talking about in these two videos.
In the first video, Gary walks through setup on a bass configured for both jazz and orchestra. He uses a pencil and a business card to illustrate distances that are typical on such a bass: roughly eight millimeters under the E string, tapering down toward five under the G, with relief in the board no thicker than the string itself at the midpoint.
But the numbers are really just a starting place, and the setup has a lot to do with personal preferences. Gary himself prefers a higher, heavier setup. A two-millimeter string height on the G isn’t just low; it’s unforgiving. One warm day, a tiny bit of neck movement, and you can get in trouble fast. The tolerances are incredibly tight. Good ebony, a well-cut bridge, a sound post in the right position, and a fingerboard with no high spots along the string path – all of it has to be right for these low numbers to hold.
To dig deeper on this topic, we bring Jack Hanlon into the conversation. Jack has been doing setups at Upton for 20 years. By Gary’s rough math, Jack has logged somewhere around 15,000 to 16,000 hours on fingerboards alone. There are very few people anywhere with that kind of expertise, and there’s a wide range of needs to respond to. An orchestral player who never hammers hard pizzicato gets a different setup than a jazz player chasing growl, and some players want those incredibly low string heights, where there’s barely any wiggle room, literally and figuratively.
What’s striking about watching Jack work is how little of it comes down to measurements in the end. He has reference tools and he’ll use them when something isn’t right, but sight and feel are central to the process – reading the board, listening to what the player needs, making small adjustments that compound, and being open to the fact that a player who spends hours every day on their instrument will find things that aren’t immediately obvious.
The takeaway from this conversation isn’t a set of specs but a way of thinking: listen hard to the player, and chase the marginal gains that add up to something a professional will feel every time they pick up the instrument. We often ask customers for video of them playing, to get a good idea of what kind of player they are. Every bass that leaves our shop goes through this process. It’s something that could never be automated, and it’s how your bass becomes an extension of you as a player.
