Gallery - Wal MB5 5-String Midi Bass

The Wal Midi Bass has always been a bit of a rare beast. So when one turned up for sale at Bass Direct in Warwick with a sumptuous shedua/hydua top, a Mk II 5-string body and some stunning photos attached it seemed like the perfect excuse to feature this beautiful bass on the blog. Many thanks to Mark Stickley at Bass Direct for permission to use these photos. Whoever ends up purchasing this bass is in for a rare treat!

MB4s were on the more obscure and exclusive end of the Wal catalogue and were only available for a limited period of time. That said, over that short period from around 1990 they gained a reputation for being just about the only midi-bass that actually worked.

That was largely down to the genius electronics provided by Australian Steve Chick. The stroke of genius was to remove the need for the bass to midi converter to rely on a hexaphonic pickup to sense the pitch of the note being sounded. The beauty of a keyboard synthesiser is that the keys are effectively just switches. As soon as they are "on" they are "on" - there is no delay in getting them engaged. Hex pickups, on the other hand, take a few cycles of the note to sense what note is being played. For the loser notes on the bass that could potentially take more than a tenth of a second. Definitely noticeable for the listener, positively off putting for the player. Add to that the potential that overtones in the note could be interpreted as an entirely wrong note. For this reason midi basses gained a reputation for being tricky to play and badly glitchy. At the very least they demanded a very precise playing style.

Wal MB4 midi bass

The Wal MB4 MIDI Bass.

The Wal MB4 midi-bass was a relatively short lived collaboration between Electric Wood and Australian bass player/designer Steve Chick.  The system allowed a bass player to control a midi synthesizer directly from the bass with both accurate note tracking with immediate sounding notes.  A common problem for early guitar and bass to midi converters was the so-called "midi-delay" – the almost imperceptible (but still noticeable and distracting) delay between hitting a note and the note sounding. This was down to the physics of the leading technology used at the time for sensing the notes.

The main sensor on most synth controllers at the time was the so called "hex pickup". These thin pickups could usually be seen squeezed in between the bridge pickup and the bridge itself - indeed, kits were available allowing you to stick a hex pickup on your own favourite guitar. The triggering delay was caused by the time taken for the midi hex pick-up to sense the note being played. All the information about that note was conveyed to the midi converter by the hex pickup and therein lay its weakness. To sense the pitch of the note, the pickup needed to listen to a few full vibrations of the string. This wasn't such a problem when shredding away at the top of a guitar neck. The time taken for the string to vibrate a couple of times was minimal and imperceptible.