I was learning some songs last night with my Elan strung with D'addario Chrome Flats. (Still trying to convince myself I like them). However I started to notice that there seemed to be reverb coming through the sound. The room is not huge and the cab was in the corner. 

Anyway on closer inspection I found it was a harmonic being sounded as I lift off from notes. I tried playing in different spots in the fret and it seems to be more evident when either playing on top of the fret or just behind it and much less as you place your finger further away from the fret.

Is this something to do with the action/setup or the bass showing me my bad technique? I was playing reggae with the filter fully closed and sound biassed to the neck pickup and the treble rolled off on my F-1X preamp. 

Yikes.

all the frets or just certain ones?  i use roto RS66's on all my fretted basses and they all have different harmonic sensitivity/playability.  the dragonwing being the brightest, i can sound a harmonic on almost all the frets up and down the neck.  surprisingly, the SII hardly pings at all on the 5th fret.  maybe you have some weird phenomenon caused by that string and bass combination?

HTH

This is pretty hard to diagnose without being there with you Jazzy, but I know from past posts you have excellent hearing and I trust it. It could well be an "all of the above" answer; if the setup is just right, little harmonics can be played at intervals on a string. Playing right on that fret is actually kind of a technique to achieve that. Trying not to isn't usually hard on a fretted instrument, becomes a bit tricky on a fretless. I call that "spot the landing"... doesn't really apply to your Elan here. I expect you're just hearing a very responsive bass picking up either a sympathetic note, a harmonic, or something. 

I can tell you, when I'm listening for it, I too often hear little artifacts and unwanted sounds that are just the result of physics and the techniques used to play. I think these things when combined with the hypersensitive electronics we use, interact to produce all the sounds we're used to hearing. And sometimes we hear things we'd rather not... like you have in the course of practice here. Personally, I would never have time to hear them or worry about these at gig volume, much less react to them. If I can't hear them, are they still there? Well, yeah... 

You could always change out the Chromes for another set and see if the issue changes in some way. It'll only cost you a set of strings. I hear good things about the LaBella low tension flats. 

Thanks Greg. As for the listening, that reminds me of when I picked up my Series II from Mica at the Santa Rosa place and she advised me then try not to hear the, i think, 4th Harmonic as it will drive you crazy. Now i'm wondering if I have accidentally not heeded her advice. I am a tone geek and always listen intently to that aspect music as well as everything else. Maybe it's always been there but whenever I pick up that particular bass i'm always trying to convince myself that flats are the right thing for a bass with P-style pickups so focuss on trying to find my P-style sound. 

I expect you are right that it won't be heard on a gig as when I listened back to my practice recording playbacks on my phone I couldn't hear it.
I will try a bass with rounds on later and see if it's just the Elan.

Hey Jazzyvee,

As others have pointed out and you've discovered yourself, our basses pass a lot of sound down the cable. That can sometimes include unwanted noises which force us to fine-tune our technique.  Since you've recently gotten into opening up your filters you're hearing more of these extra sounds.

You described this as happening "... as I lift off from the note."  So I'm wondering if this is what you mean:

As an example, if you play a 12th-fret G on your G-string with your finger just behind the fret - and then simply lift that finger, the note will keep ringing because that's the harmonic which sounds at that point when you DON'T press the string down to the fret. 

Your question made me pick up the bass and experiment.  If I need to play a short note at that fret I think I automatically mute the string with my right hand.  In fact, my right hand seems to be in charge of keeping everything quiet!  But I now see it IS possible to play that note further back behind the fret - closer to the 11th-fret - then lift off without the harmonic sounding.  But my left-hand technique is not nearly accurate enough to play that way consistently without buzzing out all over the place. 

I think the full-range sound of our Alembics forces us to be better players! 

Cheers!
Jimmy J

PS: the overtone Mica hates is the 6th (I think) in the series which divides the string into 7 parts.  On your G-string, the 5th in the series is about 1/4" above the 3rd fret which sounds a high-D pitch.  If you move your finger towards the nut to about a 1/4" below that 3rd fret you will hear the nasty out-of-tune high-F.  (You may need to move your plucking hand to make these speak.)  Now you must un-hear that!!!

Update. I have put back the previous rounds on the bass and the difference in tonality is night and day. No more pinging harmonics on lift off either. I will check the setup in a couple of days once the neck settles in to a different string tension.

Quote from: jazzyvee on October 02, 2026, 12:49:31 PMUpdate. I have put back the previous rounds on the bass and the difference in tonality is night and day. No more pinging harmonics on lift off either. I will check the setup in a couple of days once the neck settles in to a different string tension.

Strange that the flats have more harmonics than the rounds!

Quote from: JimmyJ on October 01, 2026, 08:23:42 AMHey Jazzyvee,

Your question made me pick up the bass and experiment.  If I need to play a short note at that fret I think I automatically mute the string with my right hand.  In fact, my right hand seems to be in charge of keeping everything quiet!  But I now see it IS possible to play that note further back behind the fret - closer to the 11th-fret - then lift off without the harmonic sounding.  But my left-hand technique is not nearly accurate enough to play that way consistently without buzzing out all over the place. 

I think the full-range sound of our Alembics forces us to be better players! 

Cheers!
Jimmy J

PS: the overtone Mica hates is the 6th (I think) in the series which divides the string into 7 parts.  On your G-string, the 5th in the series is about 1/4" above the 3rd fret which sounds a high-D pitch.  If you move your finger towards the nut to about a 1/4" below that 3rd fret you will hear the nasty out-of-tune high-F.  (You may need to move your plucking hand to make these speak.)  Now you must un-hear that!!!

Hi Jimmy, thanks again for sharing your wisdom. I decided to check out some of the youtube videos which had some closer shots of your right hand technique and it seems like you are multi-tasking with your fingers having two roles they either have to pluck strings to play notes, or they have to actively damp strings either side of the ones that are being played. It seems like twice as much work and incredibly effective. Probably essential with the tight string spacing you enjoy. 👍🏾

Doesn't have much of anything to do with your original issue Jazzy, but tangent to your post above^. 

One of the technical things about playing bass guitar in bluegrass and string bands goes beyond the visual, cultural, and yes, traditional idea that it should be an upright bass in that role. Bass guitars just plain don't sound like upright basses, but there are techniques you can employ to help emulate them. And I believe, well... I know, it comes easier if you already play them. That's how your brain wants to hear bass in that space anyway, so your hands go to work making it happen. I don't know how much of it is a conscious set of decisions, but one of them is definitely right-hand/left-hand string muting to prevent or allow notes to sustain a fairly precise amount of time. 

See, in my gig, there is no kick-drum and snare. There's a guitar strum and mandolin chop to fill out a rhythm section, but the bass is the root and the timekeeper. So the length of those notes matters a lot. Learning to control them is a key component whether playing the upright or the bass guitar. It's also why I struggle so with other music... playing with a drummer instead of the band following me is hard to process. It happens, but slower. 

Thanks for that Greg, I think most of my muting comes from my fretting fingers mainly and occasionally thumb round the neck if i'm on a 4 string. My right hand thumb moves vertically to mute on 5 stringers and strangely my right hand little finger rests on the underside of the B string when not playing that string and the rest of my hand kinds of pivots around it. Bad technique i'm sure. That happened unconsciously with my first Alembic and i haven't tried to un learn it yet.
But for certain i'm noticing more since i've been playing with the filters more open than previously. Also i'm enjoying and playing the Elan much more with rounds than flats.

In my opinion there's no wrong technique.  Whatever works for you is right!  There's no need to "unlearn" anything unless it stops working.    Whatever you do to get the notes to speak the way you want - that's the way to go. 

But Greg has brought to light an important thing about playing bass; the length of the note!  It took me a while to understand that in many musical situations the moment where you STOP the note is almost as important as where you start it.  That can help the groove in a big way. 

Playing bass in a Bluegrass band with no drummer is a big job because you're driving the time.  The traditional upright has a very fast decay so that percussive "thump" is almost as important as the pitch when there's no kick drum helping out.  As Greg said, it makes sense in that situation to provide a more muted emulation of that relatively short driving sound.  But the beauty of it is that we have the option to occasionally play long notes - without reaching for a bow.

I also realized at some point that the great pop-music bassists I was listening to would often stop the note on the backbeat.  A full 1/4-note on the downbeat, stopped with the snare on beat-2, followed by an 1/8th note pickup to a full 1/4-note on beat 3, stopped on beat-4, etc...  That seems so simple but that "space" is the DEAL. 

Jazzy I love hearing that you use your right-hand little finger to mute the B-string.  These are the detailed techniques we develop as we need them and they are what set us all apart.  Great stuff!

Jimmy J