So how does a bass guitar actually work and what makes a £2000 guitar better than one costing £200?

Just like the electric guitar, the electric bass works by the movement of the strings being detected by ‘pickups’ - devices underneath the strings that send an electrical message to the amplifier. Traditionally these are magnetic - the strings disturb a magnetic field generated by the pickup, the magnitude of which is captured and converted into an electrical signal.

Other types include the optical pickup which uses light to sense the movement of the strings and the piezo pickup, which registers the vibrations in the strings through the disturbance of crystals.

Piezo pickups have a different sound and are generally quieter - they don’t suffer from magnetic interference and are often used on orchestral string instruments such as the violin.

“A piezo pickup,” says Chris, “is very reflective of the wood so it sounds like an acoustic instrument. A magnetic pickup engenders some tonality in itself. You can nearly always tell the difference by hearing it.” 

Flat Response

Overwater basses generally use magnetic and even design their own: “Our pickups are no different fundamentally from the basic pattern, we just refined our own little versions of them. A lot of that is about purity of sound - I’m a great believer in a hi-fi, flat response.  I don’t like things that are heavily voiced.

"I’d rather the voice was that of the player and maybe the instrument, and that they’re technically quieter because we work with a lot of studio and pit players and I’ve put a lot of effort into the noise reduction, flat response elements of it without making them sound too clinical.”

If you pluck the guitar at different points it will have a different tonality, so the pickups are positioned according to the area of string that you want to detect: too close to the bridge, the sound will be too “hard” and too far away means it will be “woolly’.

The purpose of the iconic shape of the electric guitar is ergonomics as well as beauty. Yes it could be made with a square block of wood, but it would be heavy and dig in to the player as well as restricting the arm.

A good guitar is an extension of the player: it should fit nicely to the body and be perfectly balanced that it hangs from the neck in an ideal playing position.

The weight depends on the wood and, according to Chris, different types will give a different type of sound - for example, mahogany will sound different to maple because the grain structure, the density and the weight all transmit sound differently. Chris is looking for natural even decay - so that the note swells and dies in a natural way - as well as being pleasant. The tricky part is balancing tonal requirements with the size and weight requirements.

“If an instrument is a bit heavier, it tends to sound more solid, because of the resonance at the low end", says Chris. "The farther you go down, the more that becomes critical. If you want to make a super-lightweight instrument you will lose some low-end punch. It’s one of those compromises that you have to balance.

"It’s also about mass - a bigger body you can use a lighter material, but there’s more of it. If you make a small body then you need to have a denser material in order to compensate. So all of these things come in to play.”

A Question of 'Feel'

There has been some conjecture in the guitar world about how much the body of an electric guitar really affects the sound. If the sound is produced by the movement of the strings, then surely it doesn’t matter what the body is made of.

“No,” says Chris, “the big thing that a lot of people get wrong with electric instruments is they think it’s down to the pickups and the electronics. It’s not.

"The fundamental tone comes from the instrument. It’s not just the wood, it’s the metal in the machine heads. It’s the bridge. It’s every part of that instrument. A brass bridge as opposed to an aluminium bridge - both are good, but one will weigh more than the other and will subtly affect the sound.”

Dr Andrew Elliott, research fellow at the University of Salford’s Acoustics Research Centre, says that science is not conclusive on the question.

“One issue," he says, "is that two measured sounds can appear to be almost identical when presented graphically, but differences may still be perceptible. Perception is individual and difficult to measure.

“From the point of view of someone in a crowd watching a band, the choice of wood is probably not going to make a noticeable difference.  To the guitarist though it does seem to matter and whether that be due to visuals, feel, balance, quality of workmanship, haptic feedback [the feel], etc, is something of an unknown I believe.”

X-Factor

There is an x-factor at work here. Dr Elliott, a guitarist himself, says that two guitars constructed the same, from the same materials, can feel very different to a musician. Chris confirms that a guitar is a very personal thing. What feels right to one person won’t feel right to another. Whether or not the body can be heard in the sound, the musician can feel the vibrations through his hands and this is unquantifiable.

Engineering this ‘feel’ is part of the reason the price of an Overwater guitar begins at £2000. Not only is time spent choosing the best materials, but the musician’s size, finger length and playing style are all taken into account. If you are tall you might need a bigger guitar. If you have an aggressive playing style, where you vigorously pluck the strings, the strings can be raised, and if you have longer fingers they might be spaced further apart. 

Putting all this together takes years of experience and, says Chris, a little bit of black magic, because measurements are just the beginning. “It’s about understanding the balance between one end and the other, the curve and the neck, the tension of the strings, and what the player is going to do. 

"If he’s going to hit it really hard, and play all at one end, you set it up very differently to someone who has a very light touch and who is going to play all over the place. It’s about giving the musician a voice. That’s what you’re doing.”

What people might not understand is that, alongside the construction of a physical object, Chris is also building the intangible connection between player and instrument. “A professional musician could go and buy a £200 bass guitar from a guitar shop and they could go and earn a living from that and most people wouldn’t know the difference between that and an instrument that maybe cost them several thousand. But they know the difference.

"It’s about comfort, it’s about a relationship with the instrument, and it’s about drawing the best out of them.”