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This 6-string fretless bass is my latest design.
It has a bolt-on maple neck with highly polished ebony fingerboard. The sleek wax-finished body is made of alder and is partly hollow, which gives the sound very nice double bass like acoustic character, further enhanced by Thomastik Infeld's JF346 Jazz Flat Wound strings. This distinctive sound is picked up by a B-Band transducer integrated in the floating ebony bridge.
The bass has also a magnetic pickup, an EMG 45-PAX, which works extremely well together with the B-band. The two pickups are connected through a blend pot, which gives you all variations from the warm and woody acoustic sound to the full, accurately defined electric fretless bass sound.
In addition to great sound quality, two other main objectives of this bass design were good ergonomics and playability, which are not necessarily self-evident features in a 6-string bass. The long heavy neck, wide fingerboard and relatively light body, together with the urge to make the bass comfortable and perfectly balanced both sitting and on a strap, lead to some distinctive solutions like the heavily contoured body shapes, curved neck-body joint and the special knee rest.
Finnish musician and gear reviewer Martin Berka wrote an article about this bass in his blog Kitarablogi.com. You can read the article here (only in Finnish).
I designed and built this 5-string bass for myself, to be used in my home recordings.
It has a neck-through-body construction of maple and walnut with ebony fingerboard and body sides of ash, all finished with oil and wax. The bridge is a floating, non-adjustable piece of ebony and the tailpiece is a black-painted piece of brass plate. The pickup is an active EMG-35P.
You can hear this bass in action in all my recordings on the Music page.
Heidi built this 5-string Jazz Bass shaped instrument for her father's cousin as the final work of her studies.
Like the bass featured above also this one has a neck-through-body construction and very similar materials, except for the finish, which is cherry red stain with high-gloss lacquer, and a more conventional Schaller bridge/tailpiece. The pickups are passive Seymour Duncans.
It has a bolt-on maple neck with highly polished ebony fingerboard. The sleek wax-finished body is made of alder and is partly hollow, which gives the sound very nice double bass like acoustic character, further enhanced by Thomastik Infeld's JF346 Jazz Flat Wound strings. This distinctive sound is picked up by a B-Band transducer integrated in the floating ebony bridge.
The bass has also a magnetic pickup, an EMG 45-PAX, which works extremely well together with the B-band. The two pickups are connected through a blend pot, which gives you all variations from the warm and woody acoustic sound to the full, accurately defined electric fretless bass sound.
In addition to great sound quality, two other main objectives of this bass design were good ergonomics and playability, which are not necessarily self-evident features in a 6-string bass. The long heavy neck, wide fingerboard and relatively light body, together with the urge to make the bass comfortable and perfectly balanced both sitting and on a strap, lead to some distinctive solutions like the heavily contoured body shapes, curved neck-body joint and the special knee rest.
Finnish musician and gear reviewer Martin Berka wrote an article about this bass in his blog Kitarablogi.com. You can read the article here (only in Finnish).
I designed and built this 5-string bass for myself, to be used in my home recordings.
It has a neck-through-body construction of maple and walnut with ebony fingerboard and body sides of ash, all finished with oil and wax. The bridge is a floating, non-adjustable piece of ebony and the tailpiece is a black-painted piece of brass plate. The pickup is an active EMG-35P.
You can hear this bass in action in all my recordings on the Music page.
Heidi built this 5-string Jazz Bass shaped instrument for her father's cousin as the final work of her studies.
Like the bass featured above also this one has a neck-through-body construction and very similar materials, except for the finish, which is cherry red stain with high-gloss lacquer, and a more conventional Schaller bridge/tailpiece. The pickups are passive Seymour Duncans.
We built this
5-string Explorer-shaped bass for Heidi's brother Mika.
The Explorer shape is somewhat problematic for a bass, especially for one with more than four strings. With a long heavy neck and no upper horn on the body the strapped balance is far from perfect. We tried to compensate this by choosing relatively heavy material (beechwood) for the body, which makes the overall mass of the bass quite big. This bass requires strong shoulders to play through a gig, but it looks great on stage!
The body is finished with metallic red paint and lacquer. The bolt-on neck is of maple with rosewood fingerboard and "fading moon" dot inlays. The pickups are passive Kent Armstrong humbuckers with splitting switches.
The Explorer shape is somewhat problematic for a bass, especially for one with more than four strings. With a long heavy neck and no upper horn on the body the strapped balance is far from perfect. We tried to compensate this by choosing relatively heavy material (beechwood) for the body, which makes the overall mass of the bass quite big. This bass requires strong shoulders to play through a gig, but it looks great on stage!
The body is finished with metallic red paint and lacquer. The bolt-on neck is of maple with rosewood fingerboard and "fading moon" dot inlays. The pickups are passive Kent Armstrong humbuckers with splitting switches.
