Hi friends and family,
Here’s more pics from the new prototype bass guitar build. It’s coming along nicely. The body and neck have been sculpted to close to their final shapes. Some modifications may be done just before staining/finishing.
I’ve installed the tuners, drilled the neck ferrule pockets and attached the neck to the body. Now, I have the bass strung up and tuned and I’ve been adjusting the neck so the strings are pretty close to the frets. Final adjustments will be done with the electronics installed.
Next, I will put the electronics together and we can hear what the bass sounds like. I expect it will be very punchy. She seems to have a tight kind of resonance with good sustain playing it acoustically. The tap tones, tapping various parts of the bass are pretty resonant. The Swamp Ash body has a nice solid thump. The neck is Roasted Canadian Rock Maple and sounds very solid when tapping it. The body plate (top of the body) and head plate are Spruce which is used for the top of acoustic guitar bodies, in fact the wood was purchased from an acoustic guitar wood supplier and I attached cross-braces to it like an acoustic guitar, have a very sharp tone when tapped. The combination of tone woods and chambered body make for a very resonant guitar. I hope the electronics can tame the resonance. I think they will do fine.
The pickup is a Delano “Ray-Jay” which is a combination of Music Man Sting Ray Humbucker neck pickup and a Fender Passive Jazz bass bridge pickup. It uses a two-way switch and a blend knob with treble attenuators to control it. A Dark Glass preamp will do the tone work. The controls are Bass, Low-Midrange and High-Midrange tone controls.
Wait till you see the finish I’m planning!
I’m building this bass to be an all original design. I’m hoping it will be well received in the bass playing community. I hope to have it done before Thanksgiving so I can debut it at a special gig the band is playing the day after Thanksgiving which should have lots of musicians attending.
Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy the pictures.
Love to all,
David T
p.s. Comments are very welcome. You can comment at the end of this article.
