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Life With A Hagstrom H8 8 String Bass |
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The Hagstrom H8 was the third bass I bought and the first of only two instruments I’ve owned that I bought second hand. Not the most exciting bass I’ve ever owned, this Swedish bass is probably more famous for it’s incredibly straight neck than anything else. The reason the neck is so straight is that Hagstrom put an ‘H’ rail under the fingerboard rather than a truss rod. The bolt on neck has 21 frets with dot markers and is bound. The body is not too dissimilar to that of the Gibson SG guitar and sports a fairly large black scratch plate with 5 switches, 2 volume knobs and a ‘stratocaster’ type jack plug socket. The instrument is strung with four normal long scale (34 inch scale) bass strings and four very hard to find extra long guitar strings. Lucky me – I played in a band with three guys who all worked for James Howe Industries (Rotosound) and they made my strings for me. The instrument is strung as four pairs with the guitar string above the bass string. Used as an eight stringed instrument, this bass is very restrictive and should only be kept as a second or third instrument to your main axe. It can’t be used for any type of finger style technique because as the fingers come up to pluck the strings, the only one they catch is the bass string – slapping is totally out of the question. The only technique you can use is plectrum down strokes. Simple lines are the order of the day. You can hear this instrument being used on many Genesis tracks where the line is just a slow descending jingly jangly run. I was probably the only bassist on the London pub rock circuit that used one of these basses as his main axe – I couldn’t afford a Fender at the time so I took the guitar strings off and used it as a four string. This excercise is not recommended however - the main problem I experienced by doing this was that due to the fact that the nut and bridge are set up for 8 strings, the bass G string is precariously close to the bottom edge of the fingerboard and accidental pull off’s were the order of the day – this didn’t exactly make me very popular with band mates!!!!! |
