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A VI will seem like more a niche instrument if you don't play a lot of bass, since it's a bass. Guitarists tend to give these things a weird wrap, because they bought one thinking it would be more like playing a guitar than it ends up being. Contemporary trained bass guitarists don't want to adapt to one for the aforementioned physical dimension reasons, and most guitar players don't want to take over as a group's bassist merely for retro toaner-boaner shits & giggles... so it gets more play in "experimental" lineups or retro-fabulous garage projects and is therefore seen as a niche/gimmick by many. I don't think it's any small secret that the '70s weren't kind to their overall reputation/prevalence anyway (literally EVERYONE used to make a VI at one point in the early/mid-60s, Danelectro, Teisco, Guyatone, Gibson... and Gretsch and Schecter do them nowadays).
There's a surprising amount of leway you have on one as the bassist, though. A good set of LaBella VI flats will get you that classic "tic-tac" bass sound with a pick that people used to use Dano and Fender VIs for in the '60s (think Carol Kaye, solo career Jet Harris, Barney Kessel on "Spock's Theme", or see that Nitzsche vid), and with the trem you can almost get a sort of sliding chord cluster sound which few instruments outside of fretless or tremolo-equipped basses are capable of otherwise coming close to. Flatpicked roundwounds, meanwhile, will be more typically Fendabass-ish... so they can really cover a lot of ground across different eras and genres.
You wouldn't need the VI string sets to do what you want, you could just use extra light gauge bass strings as the spacing will be so much different to playing a VI anyway that you won't really lose anything. Intonation will likely be a problem as well, with the short travel of the Talman bridge and the 2-saddle configuation of the Bronco, and with both of those instruments having the bridge situated further back than a VI would. There's only so much gaugeplay you can do with guitars or basses before their bridges aren't in the right spot. And then there's the tuning machines.
+1, always weirds me out when I see early Jack Bruce footage and he's getting it done on a Bass VI playing fingerstyle. I tried that on the Fender Pawn VI in a shop and it felt... weird. He had just switched from upright as well.Fakir Mustache wrote:The classic one has three pickups and a reverb handle assembly, also the strings are closer together. While the strings closer together don't affect the sound, you'll probably play on it differently.
