Steve Swallow on the Lifelong Search for His Electric Bass Tone

Steve Swallow has one of the most recognizable voices on the electric bass, but it’s not a finished product. Over five decades since switching from the double bass, he still practices every day to refine every part of his sound, from his gear to his technique.

He’s long been associated with custom hollow-body basses built by master luthier Harvey Citron. His latest instrument is their tenth collaboration, and he’s got some unique strings to further shape his sonic character.

In this second part of our interview, Swallow discusses his ongoing effort to recapture the warmth and earthiness of an upright bass with gut strings on the bass guitar.

Steve Swallow’s new album Winter Songs is out now on CD and as a digital download (Apple Music, and Amazon Music). Catch up with part one of our interview.

We have to talk about gear and tone, because you have one of the most distinct tones in music. Most people know you’re a pick player. How has your pick playing changed over the years? I know you’ve gone through a couple of iterations of what type of pick you use.

I have, and it’s an ongoing work in progress, if ever there was one. I still play the bass every day. Lately, in fact, my attention has been more on my picking hand, my right hand, than on my fingering hand. I’m trying to recalibrate my picking technique.

I’m working very deliberately, and I’m working hard on it in the hope that my sound will improve as a result.

To backtrack a bit, for many years I played a copper pick that was made by a company called Hot Licks, and I loved it dearly. But then I discovered BlueChip picks, which are some kind of plastic or another. I have no idea what their composition is, but it was love at first sight, and I abandoned the copper picks in favor of a BlueChip pick.

In doing so, I sacrificed some brightness and clarity in my sound, but I picked up some warmth and some depth.

The issue that I’ve been confronting for the last while involves the position of the pick relative to the string. I’m trying to reduce the angle at which I pick and to pick more deliberately, in such a way that the pick is at about a perfect right angle to the string.

Again, I think the effect of this is to introduce more of the fundamental and to further solidify the sound. The more the pick is angled, it seems to me, the more brightness and clarity you’re going for. There’s been a kind of movement on my part toward accenting the fundamental in the sound.

I felt that way listening to Winter Songs. It does feel a little bit warmer and deeper. Not that your tone wasn’t deep before, but it had a rounder sound or something.

I think so. That’s what I’m working toward. In doing so, I think I’m just doing what I’ve always done, which is to work backwards toward a fundamental sound on the instrument.

Of course, when you’re working on aspects of technique such as these, what’s hovering over you the whole time is making sure that your new techniques still allow you to get a good groove. You have to absorb these changes you’re making in a very fundamental way so that you’re able to play, when the moment comes to really play, with abandon, without conscious effort.

That takes time. It takes time and patience. You need to wait as what you’ve learned settles deeply into your reflexive self when you get to the bandstand.

Is the Citron bass still your go-to instrument?

Yes, it sure is. It has been for some time. The bass I’m playing now is the tenth one that he’s made [for me].

It’s been a wonderful process. I’m so lucky to have had Harvey as a willing co-conspirator throughout all of this. It’s been a constant process of making an instrument and evaluating what we’ve got, and then beginning to plot the next one.

I’m really lucky to have found somebody who’s willing to persist in this fool’s journey with me. Luckily, he lives about 20 minutes away. I can call him in the middle of the night if I have to.

He’s incredibly patient with me. But I think we’ve moved relentlessly closer over the ten instruments toward what I’m looking for, which is, in its way, the opposite of what the Fender Precision achieves.

And I say that with all due respect to the Fender Precision. I think it’s a miraculous instrument. I think it’s miraculous how much Leo Fender got right at the beginning of his career as an instrument designer and manufacturer. The Precision is a magnificent instrument.

But what it achieves – the clarity and the sustain and the consistency from register to register – is good for what it does. I’m hoping to play the electric bass in another context, in a jazz context.

I had a lovely life as an upright bass player and was 30 years old when I discovered the electric bass. When I fell in love with the electric bass, I took it on, for better and for worse. That’s the way you do it.

Immediately, I had to address the issue of tone. I had to acknowledge that I needed to get a kind of sound out of the instrument that satisfied the jazz musicians I’d been working with and hoped to continue to play with.

It’s a process that’s going on to this day: trying to bring the kind of warmth and earthiness that the upright bass possesses to the electric bass. That’s not to denigrate the electric bass. There are so many things it can do that the acoustic bass can’t. It’s full of tradeoffs.

I’m trying to exploit what makes the electric bass remarkable on its own terms, but at the same time to bring it along into the world of acoustic music.

You’ve had ten iterations of this bass. What has been the biggest improvement or change?

That’s a very hard question.

It’s little incremental things, like the wood. We’ve vacillated back and forth between several woods for the top of the instrument, and finally, Adirondack Spruce seems to be the best.

We’ve gone through various neck configurations. The present neck is a mahogany neck with a rosewood fingerboard. We’ve messed with the scale of the neck. For several of its iterations, it was a 36-inch scale, but this latest one is 34, I believe. We’ve been vacillating between 34 and 35 for the last couple.

It’s an ongoing process. One of these nights I’m going to wake up and call Harvey at three o’clock in the morning and tell him it’s time to crank it up again.

I must say, I’m very happy with Bass Ten now. Of course, at some point, you have to concede that the sound is in your fingers and just shut up, never mind the instrument, and practice.

That’s probably something most bass players should consider.

Probably. I’m trying to do that exactly. This whole issue with the right hand, the picking motion, is an acknowledgment that Harvey’s done his work and that the ball is firmly in my court right now.

What kind of strings do you use?

Almost all of the basses I have, and I have an embarrassing number of them, are strung with La Bella standard roundwound nickel-alloy strings. I play a five-string with a high C.

But this bass, Bass Ten, is strung with strings that are made by a guy in Berlin named Gerold Genssler.

Is this the same guy who makes upright bass strings?

Yes, he does. In fact, I learned about him from Larry Grenadier, who lives not far away and uses the strings made by Gerold.

Again, you can see a kind of pattern emerging. Gerald is particularly interested in the sound that gut strings achieve. He’s looking for ways to achieve that by modern means.

I really don’t know a whole lot about what his strings are made of and how they’re made, but they do remind me very much of the strings I played as an upright player.

Until my last days as an upright player in 1970, I was a holdout for gut strings. I played strings that were called Golden Spiral. They were made by the Kaplan String Company, and they were a plastic-wrapped gut string.

I loved the sound and response of gut. I was really resistant to the widespread trend to metal strings that almost all other bass players were moving toward. I also never had a pickup on my acoustic bass to the day I laid it down. I had never succumbed to the pickups of that time, mostly Barcus-Berry pickups.

The unfortunately nasal and trebly sound of the pickups, and for that matter of metal strings, was anathema to what I loved and was trying for myself. There were a few of us who held out, most notably, I guess, Charlie Haden in addition to me.

That made my decision to forsake the upright bass and play electric bass even more shocking to me, as well as to everybody else. I couldn’t believe I was doing it.

Since that time, which was in 1970, I’ve been trying to work back toward not just an acoustic sound on the instrument, but a specific kind of gut-string sound. These strings by Gerold Genssler get me another decisive step further down that road, which is, as I said before, kind of running backwards as fast as I can. They’re wonderful.

What kind of amp are you using?

I’m using a Gallien-Krueger head and some Hartke speakers. An old 4×10 Hartke cabinet and a Gallien-Krueger Fusion 800S but it has a tube preamp stage. It’s a nice amp, I must say. For many years, I played a Walter Woods amplifier and loved it dearly. I’ve still got it. Walter was a friend I valued.

But at some point, I was looking for an amp that colored the sound less. The Walter Woods had a distinctive voice all its own. I came to this Gallien-Krueger because I felt it was rendering the sound of my instrument more accurately than the Walter Woods was.

That’s interesting because part of your tone is just a purity and cleanliness. Once you’ve got the bass worked out, thinking about how to amplify that is such a big part of it.

That was something that took me a few minutes to understand when I switched from the acoustic instrument to the electric instrument: that the amp and the speaker were indeed a part of my instrument, a part of my sound, as clearly as the strings and the bass itself.

I’ve come to realize over the years that I need to have the same intimate relationship to my amp and my speakers as I have to my strings and my bass.