Lowe

Lowe writes the bass coverage on Change Your Strings. The remit covers bassist profiles (Geddy Lee, Mike Dirnt, James Jamerson, Jaco Pastorius, etc.), bass-string product reviews (Rotosound Swing Bass, La Bella Deep Talkin' Flats, Fender Super 7250, Ernie Ball Hybrid Slinky), bass-tuning gauge math, and the bass-amplification reference content that adjacent producer pages cross-link into.

CYS has a hard editorial rule: bass jokes don't belong in bass reference pages. The four-string-vs-two-strings, you-only-need-three-notes, bassist-with-the-band-stickers humor lives in archived meme posts. Reference pages stay accurate. The reasoning is straightforward — a player came to the page to learn what gauge Mike Dirnt uses, not to read a punchline. Cutter's territory is humor; Lowe's territory is the recommendation.

The bass community is in on the jokes. Bass beginners who land on a CYS reference page are not. The line stays drawn.

Bass-string voicing breaks into three roughly-equal-sized camps that map to player intent, not necessarily to genre:

• Round-wound stainless (Rotosound Swing Bass 66): bright, harmonic, cuts through dense rock and prog mixes. Steve Harris, Geddy Lee, Chris Squire territory.
• Round-wound nickel-plated steel (Fender Super 7250, Ernie Ball Hybrid Slinky, D'Addario XL Nickel): the modern default. Punchy mid-range, P-Bass split-coil bark, balanced everywhere.
• Flat-wound (La Bella Deep Talkin' Flats, Thomastik-Infeld JF344): warm, thumpy, dark. James Jamerson, Carol Kaye, vintage R&B and Motown.

Within each camp, gauge selection is a tuning decision. The bass-string voicing decision is upstream of gauge.