Jimmy -
Coolest bridge EVER...
I like my bird, but this makes wonder if there's an interesting variant of the regular bridge where the tailpiece is cantilevered out over the back (instead of having it's own screws). Maybe that would be making the bridge screws have too many functions - height adjust and deal with all the attachment force too.
I've often wondered about the sound of different sustain block materials - something light like titanium or aluminum, wood, or even something like cast urethane to reduce sustain. The attack of the bass depends a lot on the string transferring energy into the instrument. When you have a relatively light string's motion being transferred into a super-heavy bridge, there's a physical impedance mismatch - I think you'll get energy reflected back into the string. Of course, the pickups are hearing the string, not the body, so maybe that's what you want.
adriaan - When Superwound was around, they actually had a couple of different models. Some of them had fixed ball ends for a standard Fender or Rick bridge, then there was the adjustable version for other instruments. The bare core strings are totally awesome on a Rickenbacker, but many bridges were so gummed up that you couldn't raise the tailpiece enough to make up for the lack of windings.
The attraction of PSD strings is that the core wire is less stiff than the wound string would be, so in theory, the intonation should be better. But I can see on Jimmy's bass that the B string is still pulled all the way back! Of course, we're kind of looking at (literally) the very first 5-string bass in that picture, so things like the required amount of intonation range probably wasn't quite sorted out yet.
David Fung
