A increasingly bigger Periphery fan, and older output Meshuggah fan; I would prefer JP to stay away from an 8 string. I embrace 7 strings fully, and the basses that can accompany them. 8 string guitar range just pushes it too far, and really nullifies the bass. At the end of the day, a big role for bass in harder rock is to double guitar riffs. My one knock on Myung is he does this too much. Yes yes, bass can do so much more and so on. But a heavy riff is heavier doubled by a bass. And the point of the bass was to fill out that lower frequency, not have it taken over by guitar.
Meshuggah sounds mostly like garbage since Nothing IMO. Some of that is tone, but another is actually the limitations I feel they impose by using 8 strings all the time. Their riffs are mostly single note, octave based stuff, with some random notes to make it atonal. I mean, Dehumanization, Rational Gaze, and Demiurge all have pronounced octave riffs. In the case of the last two, they dominate their songs. They ride the low F so much, vs. using maybe low B or the either low E string from time to time. Their song "I" is actually a better usage of 8 strings, in that they mix in riffs on different strings. But songs like "I" are more of the exception to them IMO.
The strange thing is that Periphery is not really heavier vs. Meshuggah when they go 8 string, considering Nolly tunes an octave lower as mentioned. Certainly Nolly has some in depth mixing with his tone.
https://youtu.be/lMxbP1V3WBo?t=4m40s. But to me, it shows that enough is enough- we cannot easily discern the difference between an F1 guitar and an F0 bass note with the Periphery approach compared to the Meshuggah same octave approach. Especially when distortion is thrown in. The other problem is chordal options are limited as well. Bass players have known this for a long time, low chords are used very sparingly. So what is the point?
Between Jordan's left hand and JP's 8-string, I think JM might as well not show up anymore.
My fear exactly. His bass went out during the Astonishing show I saw, and I could not even hear a difference.