If your bass is weak, meaning your pickups generate only an average amount of voltage, you will be tempted to play hard to make your bass heard and felt, and this will strain you and especially your plucking hand.

On a BITE bass, with its high-output pickups generating 1000 millivolts, a soft and easy stroke is enough to unleash all the bass power you want. We can hear you going, hell, why would I need a powerful bass, I got my amp, duh! Breaking news: amplification often makes everything worse.

Turning up the amp also amplifies all the unwanted noise that creeps in along the signal chain: residual bass hum, cables, pedals, DI, mixer, speakers. As a result, your original signal loses definition and clarity, and you often end up with a loud but muddy bass, like a throbbing headache. Such a poorly defined bass is easily drowned out by those pesky high frequencies in the mix: the voice, the guitar, the snare.

Instead of relying on amplification, it is way more effective to start at the beginning of the signal chain with a passive high-output pickup. The stronger and better defined your original pickup signal, the less amplification you will need, and the less noise and mud will blur your sound.

What is high output? Pickup output is defined as the voltage generated by string oscillation in the magnetic field of a pickup, it is measured in millivolts. Bass builders and pickup manufacturers mostly do not advertise their output for the simple reason that average output is nothing to write home about. What they often do advertise instead is DCR (direct current resistance) which is a pretty meaningless parameter as it ignores pickup magnets. Two pickups can have identical DCR readings but wildly different outputs and sounds.

Our BITE 1000mV pickups deliver a record output of 1000 millivolts. Let's put that in perspective: in comparative measuring the industry average of passive single or split coil output is ard. 300 millivolts. High-output pickups, some call them 'hot' pickups, typically deliver up to 700 millivolts, this is usually achieved either through an active design with a preamp or through large-diameter pole pieces, both of which alter the sound.

And why passive? A passive bass has no on-board battery, and that's the traditional bass design. An active bass has a battery for preamplification which intensifies but also alters the audio signal, whereas a passive bass has a natural and undistorted signal which is only generated by string vibration: pure, bassy, no preamp, no delay, no doctoring of your sound.

What's unique about the BITE 1000mV sound? We achieve 1000 millivolts of output without any preamp, purely passive, and without large-diameter pole pieces. Normally, high output is achieved at the expense of definition, this means powerful pickups usually sound muddy. At BITE you're getting a super-powerful but still well-defined natural bass tone that will cut through the mix with little amplification. This pickup performance is unique.

What's a 1000-millivolt sound like? It's not that your house will come crashing down, it's not three times as loud as your average 300mV bass but it's noticeably more assertive. We liken our sound to a roaring motorbike where you can feel the power thundering out of the tailpipe: chunky, crunchy, punchy, that's the BITE understanding of bass fun. For sound samples, you best head over to our youtube channel where you'll find tons of videos of all our different BITE pickups (single coils, split coils, humbuckers) in all sorts of recording setups, played by many different artists.

Pickup design is not all in BITE sound design, there's more to it. Firstly, BITE basses have special passive circuit components and, secondly, we pay explicit attention to structural stiffness.

Stiffness matters. The stiffness of your bass between the bridge and string posts determines the vibration behaviour of your strings. Imagine a limp bass where the whole structure is kind of weak and flexible. Will your bass have a strong and powerful tone? No way. Will it have attack and sustain? No, it won't. A tuned 4-string set exerts a pull of 1000 newtons (100 kilograms). If your bass structure gives in to that pull, your tone will be weak, no matter what strong pickup you have.

BITE basses have a fortified structural stiffness. We've put special considerations into the bridge, the neck-body joint, the neck itself and the headstock heel (that's the thinnest and weakest part of any bass). As explanation gets a bit technical, there's a separate link below.

If you put too much effort into your strokes as you feel not heard enough, your timing can easily get messy. Some bassists want to force it eagerly, they strike a bit early. Others have a more restrained playing style, their suppressed urge to be heard and felt results in a tendency to strike late. Either way, what messes up their timing is the excess amount of effort.

The BITE remedy once more is 1000 millivolts of well-defined bass power plus our fortified structural stiffness. No need to play hard, a soft stroke will get you through the mix, and your timing will be just fine.

Your low bass frequencies by nature have a hard time against the higher frequencies, the voice, the guitar, the snare, they all drown your bass. And turning up the gain again often makes it worse as it also amplifies the unwanted noise creeping into your signal chain and blurs your bass signal. 

With 1000 millivolts of articulate passive BITE bass power plus our fortified structural stiffness your tone will bite through the mix and you'll find your way around the groove precisely.

On the fretting hand, the culprits for hurting fingertips are sharp fret ends. A BITE bass goes easy on your fingertips, our fret ends are smoothly rounded and undercut. This means we manually remove the fret roots, called 'tangs', which often protrude on fretboard egdes of factory basses. As a result, your slides are a smooth pleasure.

On the plucking hand, it is once more insufficient pickup output which makes players overdo it. No need on a BITE bass, a soft stroke is enough to generate all the bass power you want.

Rough strings make it worse on both hands. By default we install D’Addario® EXL170 strings, the smoothest roundwounds in widescale testing. If you prefer flatwounds, our standard is LaBella Deep Talkin' for the genuine fat Motown sound.

However, we're also happy to install any other strings you prefer, you can select them from the world's largest string assortment at Thomann on our website. We will individually file your nut slot and set up your bass according to your string choice.

Your bass hums? No wonder, electromagnetic radiation interferes permanently from all sides. That mess of cables on stage, the neon tube in your rehearsal room, the notebook on your desk. Or, here in Vienna it often is the overhead lines of the electric tramway, Vienna is full of it, good luck if your rehearsal basement is in a tramway street. All of this can cause disturbing noise.

What can you do? You can try your luck with installing a so-called notch filter in your signal chain, it removes a narrow band of frequencies but this will amputate your sound.

The real reason why your bass captures noise very often is simply poor shielding and grounding. Shielding means that your conductive parts need a protective barrier that catches unwanted signals. Grounding means diverting these interferences to the ground where they can do no harm. This is the 101 of bass building, all the more surprising that poor shielding and grounding is still quite common in factory basses.

There's a simple way of measuring the quality of your shielding and grounding, a continuity check with a multimeter. The lower the resistance, measured in ohms, the better. The most common shielding variant is graphite paint in the electric cavities. Resistance typically ranges from 200 ohms to 2 kilo-ohms. Will it surprise you when noise from such a bass drives you mad? No, it won't, these are poor readings.

A typical BITE reading will show a single or lower double digit resistance. We use a high-performance shielding paint that was developed for airplanes and life support equipment in hospitals, it is way more conductive than conventional graphite paint.

Let's look at the grounding.Shielding and grounding always go hand in hand. The best shielding is useless if it isn't properly connected to the ground. Are the strings connected to the ground? The shielding paint? The control plate or pickguard cover? On a BITE bass you can be sure of that, every one of our basses is checked against 83 quality items before we release it for dispatch. Shielding and grounding are indispensable for us.

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Bulky body shapes in electric bass building go all the way back to its origins. BITE bodies are downsized to make them light and handy. We took away some wood in the waists, slimmed down the horns and we also took some fat off the butt, the so-called lower bout. The overall smaller frame lets our Punch and Jawbone basses rest snugly against your body, especially when seated.

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The BITE premium 24-fret Evening Star model was designed ergonomically from scratch. 

Trying to set up a bass can be a traumatizing experience. At first you're proud of the perfect intonation you've reached by shifting your bridge saddles back and forth a while. (Intonation is the accuracy of pitch across the fretboard)

Next, you try to get your string action a bit lower for comfortable fretting. You do this with the setscrews in the bridge saddles and maybe by tweaking the truss rod. (If you do this by yourself, do it in eighth turns or let your local guitar repair shop do it.) But as soon as you slightly change your string action you're getting fret buzz and your fine intonation will also be gone to make things worse.

Trying to balance intonation, neck relief, action and fret buzz resembles a whack-a-mole. If you change one paramenter, another parameter is bound to rear its ugly head and you will end up shouting at your bass. Ultimately, many just give up and play with high action or fret buzz or a sloppy intonation or any combination of these.

That's why at BITE we take extra time to set up your bass precisely, this can take us up to an hour or sometimes even longer. We let your bass rest for 72 hours and repeat the setup as often as it takes so you can plug & play it straight of the box. 

What's the use of a perfect setup, if it doesn't last? Tuning instability can be the result of low-quality tuners or other adverse factors: If your neck is made of weak wood, has a weak truss rod or a small cross-section at its weakest spot, the headstock heel. Your setup will lack autonomy and you will need to retune your bass several times during your show, whenever temperature and humidity change.

Our tuners have not caused a single complaint in all the years. We install a compact design made of lightweight fine zinc alloy. Its die-cast precision gear has a 1:17 gear ratio and sits well-protected inside a closed casing, where it is lifetime-lubricated. You can individually adjust the ease of rotation by an adjustment screw at the tip of the tuner button, as some prefer easy turning with little resistance, others prefer to feel more resistance.

Our neck construction is all about our fortified structural stiffness, we give you the ins and outs here:

BITE manufactures without the use of tropical wood unless you have some specific wood requirements, in which case we are happy to procure from FSC certified sources. We also care about carbon neutrality. Your BITE bass travels quite a distance until it reaches you. Wherever possible we ship carbon neutral or contribute to adequate carbon compensation.

For our dark fretboards we mostly use roasted black locust (robinia pseudoacacia) from the Vienna Woods as an ideal rosewood substitute (hard, beautiful red-brownish and machinable). We've been using it since 2019 and never had a single manufacturing problem or customer complaint. Alternatively we also install roasted hard maple fretboards upon client request, mostly in beautiful flamed or birdseye variations. Also roasted hard maple necks are quite a popular choice we are happy to make.