Black Nylon Tape Wound Strings on 3 Basses – La Bella 7710N & Warwick Black Nylon – Bass Practice Diary – 22nd September 2020

This week I’ve been experimenting with putting black nylon tape wound bass strings on my basses. I’ve tried playing black nylon strings on bass guitars before, but I’ve never tried putting them on my own bass guitars. And this is my first time trying tapes on an upright bass. In the video, the double bass is strung up with La Bella Jazz Strings and both the fretless and acoustic bass guitar are using Warwick Black Nylon Tapewounds.

The advantages and disadvantages of tape wounds?

The advantages of using nylon tapewound strings over roundwound strings include, lower tension and less friction. The lower tension can be advantageous for your left hand, because it doesn’t need to press the strings down as hard. And the lower friction (the strings are very smooth to the touch) means that you potentially get less unwanted noise than you would get from round wound strings.

I have to say that my opinion was divided when it came to bass guitar vs double bass. The strings really give you surprisingly good sustain considering the lower tension. On the upright, I loved the lower tension and the greater sustain. However, I felt that on bass guitar, with the shorter scale length, the tension was too low. I’ve never liked the sound of loose strings on bass guitar, which is why I don’t own a short scale bass.

A significant disadvantage of changing your bass strings from steel strings to nylon, is that it will significantly change the setup on your bass. The neck will be under much less tension with nylon strings. So, if your bass guitar is set up for roundwound strings, then the action will completely change under the lower tension. The strings will almost certainly rattle an buzz and you’ll need to setup your bass properly for tape wounds before you can use them. This wasn’t a huge issue for me with the electric bass, because it’s easy to setup. But acoustic instruments don’t usually have adjustable bridges, which makes it more of a problem.

My Conclusions

I really liked the tapes on my upright and I’ll be keeping them on for the foreseeable future. I’ve made another video demoing these strings on this bass. You can find it here.

I quite liked them on the fretless electric bass. The lack of friction is really nice when sliding between notes. However, I miss the brightness and the added string tension of roundwound strings.

Nylon tapes are very popular on acoustic bass guitars, but I have to be honest, that I didn’t like them on mine. I’m sure it would help if I got the bass professionally setup with them. But I don’t like them enough to justify doing that. I’m going to go back to using either bronze round wound strings or half rounds on my acoustic bass guitar.