Steel Tailpiece with fine tuners

[Strahinja Petrovic]

I went to see my luthier and my friend today and I asked him to fill gap in my tailpiece that I made (tried to adjust string afterlenght). He said he have something for me and he came with this:
http://www.thomann.de/gb/thomastik_saitenhalter_kontrabass.htm
Steel tailpiece with finetuners! He gave me brand new one for 50e!
Anybody here who use fine tuners? How to use them? Is steel tailpiece much different than wooden one? (didn't have ebony one, just some crappy).

[Thomas Erickson]

The steel tailpiece will probably be a good bit heavier than what you had; that might be a good or bad for the sound of your bass, hard to say without trying it.

The fine tuners are kind of intriguing, IMO, because they should allow you to readily tune the afterlength of each string. For a bass that is played only pizz, I'm not sure that it is much of an advantage. Note that unlike the way fine-tuners are used on violins and cellos, on a bass they aren't going to be used for actually tuning the instrument as such.

Personally I think that the adjustable tailpieces like what Kolstein sells make more sense, because they omit the actual tuning mechanism and just use a moveable saddle; probably not as easy to use or quite as precise, but I wouldn't really want the complexity and look of the fine-tuners on my bass as a permanent installation. Maybe a good use for the steel tailpiece with the fine-tuners is to determine what afterlength tunings work best on a particular bass so that a permanent (wood) tailpiece can be fitted and tuned the same way? For all I know, that's what it is intended for anyway...

*disclaimer* - While I have experimented with tuning the afterlengths by modifying ordinary tailpieces, I have not monkeyed around with any adjustable tailpieces. Sheer speculation on my part. I do tend to find that heavy tailpieces sound better on more basses, to my ears - but I'm mostly a classical player and my preferences probably are influenced my that.