A bass is born

[brian64]

This is my new baby.

And a baby she is with a 496mm scale length and total length from tail to tip of headstock about 77cm. But size isn't everything. She plays in the octave of a double bass.

Body- mountain ash with goncalo alves front and back.
Neck - mountain ash with pau ferro fingerboard with goncalo binding. fret slots filled with wood filler. black and brazilian rw laminations between the fingerboard and neck to give a sort of purfling look.
tailpiece is pau ferro with black fibre/brazilian rw/ and goncalo, brige is goncalo with black fibre and braz rw laminates.
Knobs are a bit of everything with goncalo/ash/black/braz rw.
nut is goncalo with black and braz rw laminates.
gold MOP inlays.

The electronics are from Ashbory bass, the strings - which give the deep sound from a small scale length are polyurethane.

This was meant to be a quick and easy build while my next electric guitar build was on hold during our house renovations. It was neither quick, nor easy. Some of the mistakes led to a much better result than planned, others I hope will never be noticed.

[matthew]

[brian64]

Here she is from the back.

Lots of nice features which came about from rectifying mistakes:
The neck and body were originally one piece. After making a dog's breakfast out of the headstock, I decided to cut the neck off and make a separate neck. The new headstock is scarfed and laminated on the front with goncalo, and on the back with black fibre sheet and brazilian rosewood.

I decided to highlight rather than try to hide the neck joint, so some black fibre sheet and brazilian rosewood laminations make the join stand out.

Originally the body wasn't going to have a goncalo back, but the body was so thin that I couldn't get the jack in, so I planed it down to where I'd destroyed the rear cavity and put a new back on it. It looks much better.
I also put in a bit of a "wedge" to make the body tilt back toward the player. (clickable thumbnail). Unfortunately you can see some of the less invisible corrections around the jack.

The cavity cover is as planned. It's retained with magnets. It's much bigger than it needs to be as a cavity cover, but this gave the design feature of a shape that fits with the body. I'm really pleased with the aesthetic result.
Here are clickable thumbnails of the inside of the cavity cover, and the cavity.

[Allen]

I really like the look of that, but I think Matthew has gone out for a beer.

[matthew]

A whisky, actually ...

Fantastic idea to make a weeny bass, but I have to ask - how does it sound?
Don't those strings thud and rattle like mad?

What pickup are you using? I'm guessing that must be a piezo bridge pickup if your strings are synthetic.

As for the look - I find it grotesque, but compellingly so. I can't stop staring at it!

[brian64]

Thanks for the comment Allen.

Matthew, I'm not quite sure I like the description of "grotesque", so I'll ignore that and concentrate on "compelling".

The pickup is in the saddle - yes, a piezo pickup - that is a replacement part for an Ashbory bass. It comes on a combined bridge/tailpiece which is black plastic and I didn't want that, so I dismantled the saddle from the original bridge. The pre-amp/pcb is also from an Ashbory bass.

I originally had Ashbory bass strings on it, but didn't like the look (white with a very slight blue tinge) or feel (a bit sticky). I found these polyurethane strings from a guy who makes bass ukes.

The sound is deep and woody. Not too much rattling. I'll try to put a sound clip up - any idea how to do that?

[matthew]

I meant grotesque in the broadest sense. I know its a challenging word but your shapes in that lil bass are just that for me. I didn't say I didn't like it I'm just a bit gobsmacked cos my thing is to make instruments as big as I possibly can to get that nice low tone!

I have often wondered how small you can go with a bass. I know that shortscale basses like the EB0 basses don't do it for me.

Easiest way to put a clip up is to convert to a video and upload to youtube. maybe with some pics of the bass as a visual. or film it as a movie on your camera and put that up on youtube.

[Runn3r]

hmmn

i do like the tulip body shape but perhaps a bit larger in future cos proportionally a lil too small with the neck the size tht it is

interesting bass

[brian64]

Here it is with a earlier iteration of the shape in a full size electric guitar for size comparison. The proportions on the full size are certainly more what our eyes are used to seeing. This bass is built as a compact instrument, but the neck still needs to be big enough for strings and fingers.

[Allen]

Hey, I don't know what it is about it, but I just really like it. So different from anything I've seen before. If you do manage to get a sound clip, I'm keen to hear it.

Well done for trying something so very outside of the norm.

[brian64]

Here is a sound-clip. Please keep in mind that I'm not a bass player, let alone a fretless bass player. Hope you like it. (you may need to turn up the volume on the badongo player)
http://www.badongo.com/audio/16223823

[Nick]

Funky Dunky! A little bit more 'edgier' than I had anticipated but it's bottom sounds as though it has the balls to be quite boomy. No good for popping & slappin'
An admirable Job Brian. Not sure I'm in love with the shape but if you're gonna do something different....it may as well be DIFFERENT! and you have achieved that.

[Runn3r]

Here it is with a earlier iteration of the shape in a full size electric guitar for size comparison. The proportions on the full size are certainly more what our eyes are used to seeing. This bass is built as a compact instrument, but the neck still needs to be big enough for strings and fingers.

yeah ...the full size electric body is more like it, imo

but the bass sounds like a bass ...to me

good job imo

[matthew]

Brian, good to hear the clip. Sounds sort of like I thought it would. Actually, it would certainly solve my dilemma of what to take on the camping trip for those fireside jams! No more driving for hours with the girls crammed into the back seat ... no more broomhandles and upturned buckets ... just a pygmy bass and a pignose amp. Now I think I'll have to try to make something similar

[Stu]

Well done, Brian

I must admit had I not seen who was posting the Bass, I would have thought it was one of yours, such is the heavy influence of the Dyskin teardrop shape.

Got your workshop in order yet ?

[stopper]

Inspirational stuff. Reckon I might have a crack at one of those myself.

cheers
Steve

[brian64]

Thanks for all the comments.

Stu, you're absolutely right about the teardrop shape. If nothing else, my builds are recognisable as mine. The workshop is still a work in progress. (as is the house), but it has a nice layer of sawdust and wood shavings on it.

Here are a few more clickable thumbnail pics:


The nut came out well the second time. It came out well the first time too, but as if the project was cursed, I lost it.
This is my second inlay. The first was better, but after sanding through it to even up my compound radius, I had to redo it. It's a real bitch trying to inlay on a radiused surface - especially when you don't have much experience doing on the flat! The tailpiece had 2 changes to the original design - the first was that there wasn't enough space for the string ends, so I had to create a recess in the body under the tailpiece. That went surprisingly well and quickly with a hammer and chisel. The second was that originally I had the tailpiece screwed in from the back. I had suspected that this may not hold well, and indeed it flew across the shed the first time I brought the strings to pitch. Luckily neither I or it were damaged. The inlay on the top of the tailpiece is to hide the screw heads. At least that surface was a bit flatter than the fingerboard.

For those who have mentioned making one of these, you might want to look at other pickup/pre-amp combinations than the Ashbory. For the next one I do (somewhere on the ever growing list of instruments I intend to make) I'll do a fretted semi-hollow with a K&K pure bass pickup. If I make something different enough from what I've done before, I'll make a whole new set of mistakes to learn from

[Gaby]

What sort of machine heads are they?

Where did you get the strings?

[matthew]

Note that on a fretless instrument, a "compensated" bridge is entirely un-necessary. Straight across is fine.

The strings look like "weedwhackers" to me. That big string looks like a bugger to wind around the little tuners (hipshots?)

[Nick]

The strings look like "weedwhackers" to me.

The low E looks more like a power cord to me! What sort of diameters are we talking of Brian?

[Clancy]

Matthew, you could build the pignose amp into the bass - just like my little pignose travel guitar.
The onboard amp is battery powered.
Having the speaker just behind the strings makes for some interesting feedback situations & can be a lot of fun.
You can play through the onboard speaker or plug in some headphones, or even plug into a proper amp should the need arise.

[matthew]

Here's another take on how you can build a bass, (just posted on talkbass)



its quite the opposite approach!!!!!!!!

[Allen]

Do they show you how to get that bass into a Camry Matthew?

[brian64]

Gaby - The machine heads are Fender/DeArmond Ashbory machine heads from Largesound- http://www.largesound.com/buy/

I originally got the strings from there too, but then found nicer looking (and as it turns out nicer feeling) strings from roadtoadmusic.com, which are the ones that you see in the pics.

Matthew - I know that the compensation is unecessary, but since I had the fret-line markers, I wanted the fingering to be as close to the markers as possible, so I compensated the bridge. The E isn't so hard to wind if you pull it to stretch almost to pitch before inserting into the slot. It doesn't stretch too much more after the intial tuning. The D and G are actually harder as they stretch more in the first few days so you just keep winding and winding. After about a week I unwound them, stretched them as much as I could before inserting in the slot, so I had much less winding on them. I still had a few more days of retuning for the D and G.

Nick - the diameters of the strings as per the manufacturer are E- .210", A-.187", D- .156", G- .103" - sorry for the inches measurement. The strings get a lot thinner as you tune them.

Craig - that's a cool idea to build the amp into the instrument. Maybe I'll retrofit something like those "cigarette box" amps into it some day.

Allen - I think you can put some wheels on the bass Matthew posted and use it instead of the Camry.