30 years, 40 basses – One short scale: What changes at 30 inches
I’ll be honest: I resisted this for a long time…
Thirty years of playing, forty-something basses through the vault, and almost every one of them 34 inches. Precisions, Jazzes, the whole Fender Japan shelf, the Gibsons, the signature models. If you’d asked me a few years ago what I thought about short scale, I’d have given you the standard answer without really thinking about it. Beginner instrument. Toy. Something you buy your kid.
Left: short scale Fender Mustang Bass MB98, Fiesta Red with competition stripes (CIJ, 1999)
Right: standard scale Fender PB70-US ’70 Reissue Precision Bass, Classic Copper
Four inches of scale length, and a lot more difference than that suggests.
Then a Fender Japan Mustang Bass turned up, and I had to try it.
Let me be clear about what this is, because I’ve read enough gear writing that pretends to authority it hasn’t earned. I own exactly one short-scale bass. That’s my whole sample. I won’t tell you whether the Bronco is better than the Musicmaster, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
But here’s what I do have, and I think it’s the more useful thing: I own forty-odd long-scale basses and I’ve played them all for years. So if you’re sitting where I was sitting – long scale for decades, wondering what actually happens if you drop four inches – I can tell you exactly what changes, and by how much.
That’s the question almost nobody answers properly. Most short-scale writing is by people who only play short scale. They can’t tell you what you’re giving up, because they never had it.
The thing I expected to hate
…the tension. Everyone tells you a short scale feels floppy, and everyone is right, but not for the reason most people think. It isn’t the bass. It’s the strings on it.
Same gauge, same tuning, four fewer inches of string length: less tension. That’s physics, not opinion. Put a standard set on a 30-inch bass and the E string in particular goes slack in a way that feels wrong under your right hand. Not unplayable. Just wrong – like the instrument is a bit further away from you than it should be.
The fix is not complicated and it’s the first thing I’d tell anyone making the jump: go up a gauge, or buy strings actually made for the scale. I went for a set of Rotosound flatwounds made for short scale, and that was the end of the problem.
Once that was sorted, the floppiness argument stopped being interesting to me. It’s a setup problem that people have somehow turned into a character flaw.
What actually changed
Reach. This is the difference, and it’s the one nobody measures. Everybody quotes scale length, because scale length is on the spec sheet. Nobody tells you the number that matters, which is how far your fretting hand has to travel from your body to get to the first fret.
That distance isn’t scale length. It’s a combination of scale length, where the body meets the neck, where the strap button sits, and how the whole thing hangs. Two basses with identical scale lengths can put the first fret in noticeably different places.
The Mustang isn’t just four inches shorter than my Jazz Basses. The first fret arrives meaningfully closer to my body, and that’s what your left shoulder actually feels after two hours of playing standing.
What it did to the tone
Less than I expected, and differently than I expected.
The received wisdom is that short scale means woolly, dark, less defined. There’s something in it – shorter string, lower tension, and you do lose some of the tight fundamental you get from a well set-up Precision Bass. But “woolly” is doing a lot of unfair work in that sentence.
What I hear is a fatter midrange, a softer attack, and then the thing nobody warned me about: that mini P pickup growls. Not politely. Dig in and there’s a bite coming out of it that has no business coming from an instrument this size. If you’ve filed the Mustang under “the gentle option”, that growl is what will change your mind.
Same bass, same strings, same afternoon. Two settings that sound like two different instruments.
Two clips, one bass, and the whole “short scale sounds thin” argument has to answer for itself.
The part I didn’t see coming
Here’s what actually converted me, and it isn’t the ergonomics or the tone – It changed what I played.
Forty-odd basses have been through the vault and I know what I sound like on them. You build habits over thirty years – shapes your hand goes to, intervals you reach for, a whole vocabulary you stop noticing because it’s simply what comes out. Pick up another Jazz Bass and you play the things you already play.
The Mustang didn’t let me do that. Something in the spacing, or the growl, or just the unfamiliarity of it put my hands somewhere else, and what came out was a riff I would not have written on a 34-inch bass. That riff became the spine of “Vi Kysser Natten Farvel” with Nü Néon. The track was built around it.
“Vi Kysser Natten Farvel”, Nü Néon “Vi Kysser Natten Farvel” (“We Kiss the Night Goodbye”) is the debut single from Danish pop project Nü Néon, released in July 2022 and picked up by DR KarriereKanonen shortly after. The bass is the Mustang, and the hook the whole track is built on is the riff that came out of it.
I don’t want to oversell that into something mystical. It’s an instrument, not a muse. But anyone who has played long enough knows the feeling of being slightly stuck inside your own hands, and this is the first bass in years that got me out of it.
Honestly, though: I’m not taking this bass to live concerts. On stage I still mainly rely on my PB70 Precision basses. But I enjoy seeing and hearing how many short scales are turning up on stages these days. They’re back, and they’re back for good.
How long it took
Less time than I’d have guessed, and this surprised me most.
I expected weeks of recalibration. It was closer to a few hours. Your hand adapts to the spacing faster than your head expects, because thirty years of muscle memory turns out to be more about relative distance than absolute distance.
Going back is the odd bit. Pick up a 34-inch bass after an evening on the Mustang and the first fret feels like it’s in the next room. That wears off in a few minutes.
Who this actually helps
Not beginners, or at least not only beginners. That framing is the thing I got wrong for twenty years and it’s worth naming properly.
Short scale is for you if you’re a guitarist who plays bass on your own recordings and has never been comfortable. If you have small hands and have spent years quietly assuming that’s your problem to solve rather than the instrument’s. If your shoulder, wrist or back has started sending you invoices after long sets. If you record at home and want something that doesn’t fight you at two in the morning.
None of those are beginner problems. Several of them are the opposite. They’re what happens after decades of playing.
Some of the short scales worth knowing about
Scale lengths first, since this is the number everything else hangs off:
- 28.6″ – Ibanez Mikro, Squier Mini Precision. Ultra-short, often bought for kids and quietly kept by adults.
- 29.75″ – Danelectro Longhorn
- 30″ – the main event. Fender Mustang, Bronco, Musicmaster, Höfner 500/1, Squier Jaguar SS, Sterling RaySS, Ibanez TMB30
- 30.5″ – Gibson EB-0 and EB-3, Epiphone Viola
- 32″ – medium scale, a category of its own. Ibanez Mezzo, various Fender and Lakland models.
- 33.25″ – Rickenbacker 4003. Not short, not quite 34, and the reason I stopped trusting round numbers.
- 34″ – standard. Everything else in the vault.
And the six that matter most if you’re orienting yourself:
Fender Mustang Bass (30″, from 1966). Split “mini P” pickup, offset body, and the model that most people picture when they hear “short scale Fender”. Mine is a Fender Japan MB98, a Crafted in Japan reissue in Fiesta Red with competition stripes.
Höfner 500/1 Violin Bass (30″, from 1955). Hollow, feather-light, and permanently attached to Paul McCartney. Probably the most recognisable short-scale bass on earth, and the one non-bass-players can name.
Gibson EB-0 and EB-3 (30.5″, from the late 1950s). Jack Bruce. Tonally the opposite argument to a Mustang – big humbucker at the neck, enormous low end, a completely different idea of what a short scale is for.
Fender Musicmaster Bass (30″, 1971-1981). The budget option of its era and the gateway drug for a generation of players who couldn’t afford a Precision.
Fender Bronco Bass (30″, from 1967). Single pickup, Musicmaster’s sibling, and now living on as a Squier.
Danelectro Longhorn (29.75″, from 1958). Masonite, lipstick pickups, and a body shape that looks like nothing else. Genuinely strange, and by all accounts genuinely good.
If you’re buying new rather than hunting, the current-production short list is short: Squier Classic Vibe Mustang, Fender Player Mustang PJ, Höfner Ignition, Sterling RaySS, Ibanez TMB30. I haven’t played the two latter in the list.
Short-scale questions people actually ask
Easier isn’t quite the word. Less physically demanding, yes – the reach to the first fret is shorter and your fretting shoulder notices it over a long set. But you’ll trade a little string tension for it, and you’ll want the right strings.
This is the strongest single argument for one. But check reach to the first fret rather than scale length, because they aren’t the same number and only one of them is on the spec sheet.
Yes, but less than the internet suggests. Fatter midrange, softer attack, slightly less tight fundamental. On the right song that’s the point rather than the compromise.
Either go up a gauge or buy a set made for the scale. This is the single most common mistake and the reason so many people conclude short scales feel floppy.
No. McCartney, Jack Bruce, Bill Wyman, Tina Weymouth, Trevor Bolder. The beginner framing is a marketing accident, and it cost me twenty years of missing out on the short scale experience.
30 inches, against the 34-inch standard.
What I’d tell you if you asked
Buy strings for it. Measure the reach, not the scale. And drop the idea that it’s a lesser instrument, because that idea cost me twenty years of not trying one.
I still own one short scale and forty-odd long scales, and I’m not about to tell you the ratio is wrong. Most of what I play is still 34 inches and probably always will be. But the Mustang has earned a permanent place in the vault, and it earned it by writing something none of the others did.
The instrument itself is here: Fender Japan Mustang Bass MB98, with additional details and photos.
It’s all about the passion!
Henrik Bonde Hanfgarn aka. BassGarn has played bass for thirty years and documents the forty-odd instruments in the Bass Vault – photographs, specs and stories, with particular depth in Fender Japan MIJ and CIJ reissues.
He plays live in Denmark with Bad Boys of Boogie and Foo Fighters Tribute. The bass hook on Nü Néon’s “Vi Kysser Natten Farvel” came out of a short-scale Mustang from the vault. He talked about the collection with Danske Bassister.
Main Gear TC Electronic Blacksmith, Fender Bassman ’67 (AB165), Ampeg cabs, and the Line6 HX Stomp when it calls for quick and compact.
Instagram · More about Henrik
Explore basses in unexpected locations or The Bass Vault Playlist.
