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BassPlayer.com >> This Month >> Demars Long Trail
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Click on the Images DeMars Long Trail| December, 2007 Having spent years helping serial innovator Ned Steinberger run the business side of NS Design, Vermonter Dan DeMars learned from the one of the best. Now Dan helms his own small company, DeMars Guitars, which sent two examples of its inaugural model, the Long Trail Bass. Thin like solidbody electrics, the chambered Long Trails are designed for plugged-in acoustic music and have the looks to match. Unlike uprights and acoustic bass guitars, the Long Trails are designed to be structurally resistant to temperature and humidity changes, and can go from the car-trunk or airplane straight to the stage. The basses each have a ribbon-style piezo transducer under the bridge saddle—not unlike similar instruments—but they also have a disc-style piezo under the neck heel, an application for which DeMars has a utility patent pending. There’s just a single volume knob on the bridge, but the control cavity contains a K&K PowerBlend preamp, whose mini-pots allow tone adjustment for each pickup and balance between the two. The Long Trails are handsome; I particularly liked how the elegant rosewood binding accented the flat, creamy-looking tops and the rounded body shape. The fretless 5 came with a shimmering flame-maple top, which contrasted nicely with the neck’s deep-toned ebony fingerboard. Though it’s hard to reach the highest notes, I liked the small, right-angled treble-side horn. However, the basses are slightly neck-heavy, and the smallish waist worsens the problem when you rest the bass on a thigh. The bass-clef-shaped soundholes are the instruments’ most distinctive aesthetic feature. They are indeed strictly for aesthetics, since the Long Trail tops don’t vibrate like soundboards and the instruments produce little acoustic tone. Musicians I showed the instruments to were divided on the clef: Some loved it, and some laughed. One bandmate pointed out that when the instrument is held upright, as when taking it out of a gig bag, the symbol looks like a sad Muppet face. (I wish he hadn’t; I haven’t been able to see bass clefs the same since.) I thought the bass clef flew the flag proudly, but its statement was too literal for my tastes. I’d love to see a version with a more modest soundhole or just a simple thumbrest, as I sometimes missed having a place to anchor my plucking hand. The two-hole headstock design was similarly divisive. I liked the gentle arc at the end of the tuning head, which Dan notes is a subtle homage to Steinberger’s NS designs. I also dug the DeMars Guitars logo, but I’m a sucker for rotational symmetry. The test basses had Gotoh tuners, but Dan now builds using Hipshot Ultralite tuners, which now makes the instruments not only built in the U.S., but sourced entirely of U.S. parts. Both necks felt wonderful under my fretting hand, with their gently rounded profile and natural-feeling finish. DeMars says they were going for the bare-wood feel of a used upright’s neck, and they just about nailed it. The 4-string’s fretwork was faultless, and both instruments played evenly and balanced across and up the strings. The fretless fingerboard had edges that were a tad sharp, and the trussrod covers looked cheap, but overall, I could find few flaws on either instrument. Still, neither bass exuded the transcendent vibe, clear signs of fine craftsmanship, or just-plain-wow factor I’d expect from a $3,000 bass guitar. Under My HeelForget the soundholes for a moment; what really makes the LT basses distinctive is that second pickup in the neck heel. Dan’s idea for it was in part inspired by a quote from luthier Philip Kubicki in founding BP editor Jim Roberts’s Backbeat book, American Basses. There, Kubicki asserted that a string instrument’s neck vibrates like the exposed tine of a tuning fork, which can’t be ignored as a factor in tone creation. DeMars thought about this for months, then hit upon using a disc-style transducer similar to the K&K Sound transducer on his mandolin. Working closely with K&K’s Dieter Kaudel, Dan developed and refined the application of the neck-heel transducer. The pickup can’t be soloed—DeMars notes that it wouldn’t sound like much by itself—but it can be blended with the bridge transducer to add a richness to the sound. In the control cavity, the K&K preamp has trim, bass, mid, treble, and master-level controls for each pickup. DeMars thinks of these as set-and-forget settings, so the company ships the basses with a “sweet spot” dialed in. However, our test basses arrived with overly bright settings that conveyed too much finger-and-string fussiness and output levels that occasionally distorted. When I first brought the instruments to a rehearsal studio, I forgot to bring the included a" allen wrench to get in the cavity and make adjustments, but I could tame the basses’ trebly-ness with the optional DeMars XLQ preamp or by turning amp highs all the way down. What remained was a solid, rotund tone that was pretty groovy. After checking with Dan, it became clear our basses didn’t arrive with DeMars’s intended sweet-spot setup, but he quickly got me on the right track. I admit I started out skeptical of the set-and-forget idea, though I can see how it might appeal to coffee-shop players and other electro-acoustic low-enders. But after some experimenting in the cavity I dialed up tones that I’d gladly leave as the standard. On the fretted 4, I achieved a voice that spoke remarkably deeply, with a strong and well-defined midrange and a mildly biting top-end edge, courtesy of the neck pickup. It sounded big and bottomy, but with a touch of acoustic-like zing that could cut through a cavalcade of strummers. On the fretless, I dealt up a deep and sugary bottom by slightly boosting the bridge transducer’s bottom and turning the neck pickup’s treble all the way off. Generally, the crisp character of piezo pickups is not my preferred flavor, and both Long Trails seemed especially bright when the treble controls were set at the midpoint position. Hence, most of my cavity adjustments involved taming the gain and tapering off the top end, which produced a rich and detailed, flavor-balanced result. The neck pickup did seem to add a dimension to the tone, almost as if it were a more profound blend of two distinct voices than one expects from a typical two-pickup bass. The result is that the Long Trails have a unique sonic vibe, especially for an instrument powered by piezos. I give props to DeMars for following through with a new, interesting, and well-considered idea. The company has magnetic-pickup versions planned for 2008; I’ll be interested to see what else Dan comes up with. DeMars Long Trail 4-StringList $3,300 DeMars Long Trail Fretless 5-StringList $3,600 SPECSWeight 4-string, 6.5 lbs; 5-string, 7.5 lbs Made in U.S.A. CONTACT(802) 649-2098 |
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