When the Bottom End Takes the Melody
Stephen Bruner — Thundercat — plays a six-string Ibanez bass, most visibly the SDGR series instruments that give him a low B string below and a high C string above the standard four-string range. That extended range is not decorative. On Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly (2015), recorded partly in Compton and partly across Los Angeles, Bruner's bass lines move through harmonic territory that a conventional four-string cannot reach without retuning — rapid chord voicings, upper-register melody, and simultaneous root movement that would require two instruments if the setup were orthodox.
The six-string layout gives him a speaking-string compass of roughly four octaves on a single neck. The low B anchors the track; the high C lets him run melodic figures that sit above the midrange of the mix without abandoning the bottom. On Pimp a Butterfly cuts such as "Wesley's Theory" — produced with Flying Lotus and Thundercat both credited — the bass functions as rhythm section, harmonic instrument and lead voice inside the same four bars. It does not stop being a bass because it is doing something else on top.
Right-hand position sets the tone before any amplifier does: over the pickup is round and thick, back at the bridge is hard and nasal.
Photo: ANTONI SHKRABA production / Pexels
His work with Flying Lotus, Stephen Bruner's longtime collaborator, runs through records including You're Dead! (2014), where the six-string bass on jazz-influenced material sits closer to electric piano than to what Ampeg built the SVT to handle. That is a deliberate choice: Thundercat studied at the Musicians Institute and came up through the gospel and jazz circuits before his work with Erykah Badu and Snoop Dogg placed him in a session context where the instrument's upper register was a tool, not a novelty.
The Ibanez SDGR six-string — part of the Soundgear line Ibanez has produced since 1987 — is a relatively thin, lightweight instrument with a fast neck profile, which matters when the playing demands the kind of scalar and chordal movement Bruner deploys. A Jazz Bass nut width is already narrow; a six-string SDGR is narrower still per string, suited to hands that think in piano voicings.
What Thundercat demonstrates, across the Lamar sessions and his own records beginning with The Golden Age of Apocalypse (2011), is that the bass can reclaim a melodic prominence it held briefly in the 1970s — in Jaco Pastorius's fretless work, in Stanley Clarke's upper-register runs — without surrendering its structural role. The low B is still there. The track still has a bottom. The difference is that everything above it is also the bass player's territory now.