The Eclectic Electric Basses

                              

  The next is a fretted four string with a hipshot whammy bar, the fretboard is Ooline, the sides Silky Oak and it has a Wilkinson humbucking bridge pickup and the neck one is a Bartolini soapbar.

   I am glad I made it really light because the bridge weighs heaps and it has turned out really comfortable as it has the concave body shape at the back and is balanced really well. The tuners are Gotoh and the veneer on the headstock was Blackwood but I ended up taking it off. The first photo shows the carbon fibre rods I put in next to the trussrod which makes it really stiff so I make stainless truss rods so as to be able to crank it in case it needs to move one day. It has really amazing sustain which I didn't expect from the tremolo and feels, sounds and plays beautifully.

   It just finished being fretted and lovingly hand buffed and a switch put in to simplify the electrics and I hung it in the shop on the easter Byron Bay Blues Festival weekend after playing it once through a guitar amp and it sold immediately; no wonder, the idiots in the shop thought it was $375 dollars! That is about what I spent on the trem and machine heads alone! aaaaaaargh!!?

   Mr Benjamin Blackman from New Zealand is very happy with the deal and loves the bass but hasn't felt any urge to cover the cost of parts for me, which I thought to be a very fair offer. At least it is out there and being gigged I guess. I can't help feeling pretty discouraged having got next to nothing for three basses now and haven't worked on anything much for a while and got into building a solar electric bike instead but I slog on.

Send us a sound sample Ben! It goes here;

  You can see below the double carbon fiber rods and the truss rod rout and the following two show it in the pre fretting/profiling stage.

 
                                    

The electrics got a bit changed and  I still have the whammy bar...

 

There is a Warwick 5-string neck I scored which will have this silky oak and Indian Rosewood body bolted on soon after another coat and a bit of drilling and soldering the J's in etc... 

    The third will be another 5 string fretless and has a much chunkier neck which has the Moody Gum between two rosewood laminates instead. It has beautiful Red Forest Oak sides and a fretboard of Cooktown Ironwood which comes out very bright as it is so incredibly hard and silicous wood. I have tried to glue it down three times but never got a good enough result so I am going with the ooline for the replacment fretboard. Gerard did warn me it was hard to get glue to stick to and when you feel how glassy it is you understand why. The piece I used on the six string stuck fine but was from a different tree... It was a shame because I had cut fret slots, profiled and sanded and polished it, these are the trials one faces budding experimental luthiers, be forewarned!

   It needs a fretboard, a new neck shape, final sanding, painting, assembly, setup and some nice fat jazz Bartolini CB pickups have been waiting to jump right in. I kind of wanted a six string but I couldn't find a six string bridge with close enough spacing and so now I am contemplating making it tuned F#, B, E, A and D as a contra-bass five string bass. I want to see if it could work well at those frequencies way down there sort of like a drop tuned bass, and not get too floppy sounding (a lot of 5/6-strings suffer from this on the botttom B to my taste, I think because they're not solid enough necks, built to get a not too cumbersome feeling neck with the slick modern c profile but it doesn't make for much solidness in the sound. I played an SRV strat which has a chunky V neck and Stevie Ray Vaughan used thick strings on it too, and to modern standards, a high action, but did he get the tone! This one is an experiment in that concept; very solid and thick in the neck so I will get to see how much the tone will differ due to this factor and see if I am right.

   I think it has a good chance of hacking the extra strain of the super heavy strings and sounding solid (trying to hold the nut still) at the same time, It is all about those minute oscillations at the nodes at the nut and bridge and the interplay of the neck and the strings, more experimentation required...   Here is a pic with the Ironwood fretboard;

                          

   They last three are all made with laminated through necks using Moody Gum (the bright yellow stuff) and NSW rosewood (red) which my friend Gummy gave me. He had salvaged it from the wreckage caused by the year 2000 cyclone that hit his place up in Cape Tribulation. The Rosewood was a giant 3800+ year old which fell on the moody gum and took it out too, so these trees were side by side for probably six centuries and hopefully will be for quite a few more in these bass necks. The sides are silky oak in the first two, family (Grevillea,) but the last one has the wood of a more tropical native variety which is harder and redder and has even more amazing grain and larger medullary rays and polishes up a treat;  red forest oak, also from north Queensland.

   Ooline is a very rare wood and is also known as solidwood for good reason. It is a single species remnant of a genus of trees which once covered the earth in dinosaur times and is now rare and endangered.

   A local wood harvester found a big old dead one some thirty years ago and milled it into 4x4 inch chunks and left it in the weather in his timber yard. He recommended it to me and when I asked what it is used for he said nobody has heard of it, but wood collectors sometimes buy it as a sample piece. As it has been unheardof I took it as a certainty that if he recommended it it would work and he proceeded to show me how it cut across the grain, I was convinced. No fluff and a sharp edge like I had never seen. If you can't mark it with your fingernail it is hard enough for a fretboard is a good guide, (said Gerard to me when I asked him) and it passed that test. When I took some home I took about 5mm off the outside and it was pristine and hadn't checked out at the ends more that 7mm either, remarkable for such a dense, hard timber which usually would rip itself to bits in these conditions from internal tension as it dried.

   Cooktown Ironwood is the hardest wood I have ever seen and is very stiff and beautiful but I am disinclined to use it too much as it is a bit hard to glue and even better, the sawdust gives me nosebleeds, good to avoid anything toxic like blackbean and red sirus and I guess there must be others it varies from person to person too in tolerance. Not much is known about sawdust / human physiology it seems but Gerard has polyps in his sinuses from years of sawdust inspired inflammation so it is worth it to spend the money on a good dust mask that works.

   These are all Australian timbers and are all sustainably harvested and rarely to be found used in instruments although they are very stable and well suited.

   Thanks Stan, Gummy and Andrew for these lovely pieces of wood.