Just as McCartney III was coming out in December, this column's 1967 Hofner 500/1 violin bass came into the shop. And to amplify the kismet, the Beatles were playing on the sound system when the bass' now-former owner brought it in to sell.
This model wouldn't be so iconic if McCartney could've afforded a Fender back in 1961, when the Beatles were literally getting their act together playing clubs in Hamburg. But his first Hofner was only $45. That one was stolen, and in '63 Hofner gave him a replacement, which is the bass we all know and love to hear.
Pardon my grunge: The control panel—three EQ sliders and two volume dials—shows some grit and dirt, well-earned from years in smoky clubs.
The Hofner violin bass dates back to 1955, when Walter Hofner designed the prototype. The small, hollow body and violin shape made it easy to carry and play—especially in comparison to Fender's Precision. The tone aimed for qualities that would appeal to both acoustic upright bass players and the expanding electric bass market—and with flatwound strings, it did just that, creating a fat, thumpy voice the amplified the sound so familiar on pop and jazz records of the '40s, '50s, and early '60s.
Most of what's changed about the Hofner 500/1 over the decades is the electronics, while the maple body, spruce top, rosewood fretboard, and dot inlays have remained a staple. The neck and bridge pickups had many iterations in the '50s and '60s. Originally, Hofner called them wide-spaced pickups, because they were located far apart, as close to the neck and bridge as workable. By '57, the bridge pickup was moved closer to the neck, to about mid-top. And in 1960, the black bar pickups Hofner used were replaced with toaster-style examples. A year later—and on McCartney's '61—the so-called twin-coil Cavern pickups arrived, along with the replacement of the tortoiseshell pickguard with a cream pearloid version. But '62 brought another shift, to diamond logo pickups, called that because of the diamond engraved on their covers. And a year later those were gone—nudged aside by staple pickups. In 1963, two-piece necks were also used on some 500/1s, and the two-on-a-strip tuners began to be replaced by standalone versions.
Here's a close-up look at the '67s neck-slot blade-style single-coil pickup—the seventh pickup variation for the 500/1 model.
But wait! There's more! The year of our Hofner, 1967, marked the introduction of single-coil blade pickups in the 500/1. Until this point, all of the aforementioned changes did little to alter the sound of the instrument. But the blades are different—hotter and more gainy. These pickups have two magnets on each side of a center blade, and they are ceramic, not alnico like earlier Hofner pickups. Their louder, more-forward tone is perfect for recording, and takes to digital tracking and mixing very well. The control set had slight variations over the years, but in 1967 was a sleek array of two volume dials and three responsive tone switches marked rhythm, bass, and treble.
Our 500/1 has an ebony two-piece floating bridge, and the fret saddle inserts have been removed to emulate the mod supposedly made by McCartney to get a more thuddy and muted sound. (A reissue version of the original bridge assembly is available.) The tuners on this bass were replaced with closed-back Grovers, which are a lot easier to turn than the small-button versions that came standard in '67.
Beneath its elegant, curved top, our 500/1's headstock has Grover replacements for the small-button OEM tuners, which went from two-to-a-strip to standalones in 1967.
This bass has been played a lot, and it shows in the finish wear and checking on its body. Plugging in made me want to start banging out some McCartney-style bass melodies and explore those loping, rich tones that were such an important element of the Beatles' sound. In the 1967 Hofner catalog, the 500/1 was listed at $345. Our example is tagged at $2,500. I hope this very collectable bass ends up with a musician who loves the Beatles as much as I do and puts it to work for at least another half-century.
It's pretty common to begin assessing an instrument through its acoustic tone, but how much does this really reveal about the instrument's plugged-in tone? You see it often in reviews, where a player starts out by describing the acoustic tone of a soon-to-be-plugged-in instrument and then draws the first conclusions of what to finally expect.
Think about it: Whenever we pick up an instrument, the first thing most of us do is play it acoustically. It makes sense on many levels, since we want to get used to the neck, overall ergonomics, string spacing, and/or whatever else we need to feel at home before we start annoying (entertaining) our neighbors. The sooner we feel at home, the more likely it is that we are going to like its electric tone. But can we really use an instrument's acoustic tone as a tell for its amplified tone? Not so much! And it's not because we aren't yet familiar with its pickups and electronics.
To be clear, we're talking about solidbody instruments—not acoustics—but the lines can be blurred. With an acoustic bass, the final acoustic tone depends solely on moving the top through the vibrations of the string. With a solidbody, however, only a tiny fraction of the strings' movements or vibrational energy is transferred to the body. Hence, the longer sustain of a non-acoustic bass, since a higher portion of the vibration is kept in the strings.
So, what do we hear unplugged and what can affect it? The first thing to consider is your listening position. The airborne sound of a vibrating dipole consisting of the body and the far more influential and resonant neck will heavily depend on where your ears are. Are they in line with the body's surface in a typical player position or bent over the body with your ears almost in front of it? You can easily hear the difference by rotating the instrument's body on your lap.
Often, the impression of an acoustically loud instrument leads to the conclusion of getting a strong, aggressive, impulsive, dynamic—or whatever you want to name it—electric tone. In reality, there are a lot of construction details that blur the categorical split between an electric and acoustic instrument, so be sure to expect differences in the airborne sound. There could be a regular open pickup routing or a more generous routing that's closed with a floppy pickguard and acting as a sort of a tiny speaker. The same thing goes for a chambered body that—depending how it's done—can give us a sort of acoustic touch, sometimes even with its plugged-in tone.
Fig. 2 — The spectrum of the E chord recorded with a guitar's pickup, with (black) and without (red) contact to the box. Graphic courtesy of “Physics of the Electric Guitar" by Dr. Manfred Zollner
Luckily for us, there are measurements that can show how misleading the direct connection of airborne sound and electric tone can be. A repeatedly played E chord on a guitar is recorded with a microphone, and then via the pickup. In each scenario, the sound is captured while the guitar is in contact with a box, and then without. Fig. 1 shows the acoustically noticeable and measurable change in both the midrange loudness and low-end spectrum of an instrument when in touch with the box, which is caused by the extended radiating area of the box. The graph in Fig. 2 shows the measurements when recording the pickup's output signal with and without the box, where you have to look very closely to see any differences at all.
So, none of the acoustically obvious differences made it into the final pickup signal in a way that even an expert's ear would be able to distinguish. And if attaching a box to a body doesn't alter the electric tone, this gives us a hint of how influential the body wood is, but that's another story for another time.
There are a lot of emotions involved when playing an instrument, so there are surely some qualities one might rediscover in an guitar's plugged-in tone that relate to its acoustic tone. Maybe it's how it inspires you to play in a certain way, how it reacts to bending or different playing styles, or maybe even some of its dynamics. But it's almost impossible to fairly judge an instrument's so-called primary tonal character by just its acoustic tone.