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Bass with guitar body

R

rsx667

Feb 6, 2009
8
0
GREECE CHANIA
#1
Hi,
I am thinking of starting a project ,but it's kind of difficult to find a bass body ,so i am thinking of buying a guitar body instead.Has anybody tried it or seen it??? Will i have technical difficulties (Will the neck fit...)????Will i be able to able to use floyd rose tremolo (I want normal bass string spacing not 10.2 guitar spacing)???
Will it worth the time spent (or my sound will be dead)???
Any advice is welcome... Thanks in Advance..


P.S.:I want to make a full size bass 4 or 5 strings
 
#4
Do your math and see if a neck can fit. I guess a 4 string neck might just be narrow enough. But, you'd need to make the neck yourself if you want it to intonate properly, and be prepared for a lot of neck dive. You need to think about pickups as well.

Not worth it IMO. Make the body yourself, or buy a cheap bass for parts only.
 
#7
I've seen it done, to good effect before. The trick is, you probably won't be able to use the same bridge placement as a guitar would. Look at an average guitar, and the bridge is about 4 or 5 inches from the butt of the guitar, and on a bass, it's usually as far down as it can go. There's a reason for that. If you're willing to do the work to fill in some unwanted holes and cut some new ones, and make whatever modifications need to be done to make the neck fit, sure you can do it. It'll be a lot of work though.
 
#9
I made a tele bass for my girlfriend's daughter last year. I used a standard telecaster body pickups and all. I modded the stock bridge, and added a mustang bridge at the correct scale length. I used a 30" scale bass neck. I was surprised at how good it sounded and played.

It would be tough to use a full scale neck. It's going to be neck heavy, and the bridge would be really close to the edge of the body. The neck pocket won't accept a bass neck so you will have to route it to fit. It's not impossible, but it can be done. I'd surf ebay for a bass body instead. You should be able to find plenty there.


DSCF1126.jpg
 
#11
ThaLowEndTheory said:
I made a tele bass for my girlfriend's daughter last year. I used a standard telecaster body pickups and all. I modded the stock bridge, and added a mustang bridge at the correct scale length. I used a 30" scale bass neck. I was surprised at how good it sounded and played.

It would be tough to use a full scale neck. It's going to be neck heavy, and the bridge would be really close to the edge of the body. The neck pocket won't accept a bass neck so you will have to route it to fit. It's not impossible, but it can be done. I'd surf ebay for a bass body instead. You should be able to find plenty there.
Click to expand...


Beautiful! WANT!!

You make a great point that a lighter body like that of a guitar will only balance well with a short scale neck.
 
#13
i got one of those!

heres an epiphone les paul guitar body that was taken apart to build a epiphone les paul shortscale bass :)

Picture023.jpg


up close if you look you can see where someone put wood putty in the old pickup and pickup switch holes it actually played quite well mind you and sounded pretty awesome for what it was 35$ and made of decent parts. bought it at a garage sale :)
 
#17
ryognbass said:
how much would you charge if i had asked you to recreate this again? :D
Click to expand...

The hard part would be finding the neck. If Rondo starts selling them again it wouldn't be to hard. I assemble and finish for fun. It would depend on if you wanted it finished and all, or just assembled on a prefinished body. It's not hard, and I'm not a pro so I wouldn't charge much. I could easily talk you through it if you wanted to do it on your own. I've wanted to build myself one since I made the first one.

Oh and to correct myself, it was a Musicmaster bridge. I had to mod it for top loading, but that wasn't bad at all.
 
#18
Thanks for the advices.I think i 'll try to go for a bass body ,because the main reason i wanted a guitar body is the floyd rose tremolo (bass tremolos are very expensive for me). But to go longscale (34") I will have to move the bridge so it's gonna need a lot of work (and i don't know if i have all the tools needed).So i will possibly find a bass body and mod it the way i want.Is there anyway of converting a floyd rose tremolo from guitar to bass and will it fit the bass body (For the first part i am thinking of mixing a bsss bridge with the guitar tremolo)????
 
#19
rsx667 said:
Thanks for the advices.I think i 'll try to go for a bass body ,because the main reason i wanted a guitar body is the floyd rose tremolo (bass tremolos are very expensive for me). But to go longscale (34") I will have to move the bridge so it's gonna need a lot of work (and i don't know if i have all the tools needed).So i will possibly find a bass body and mod it the way i want.Is there anyway of converting a floyd rose tremolo from guitar to bass and will it fit the bass body (For the first part i am thinking of mixing a bsss bridge with the guitar tremolo)????
Click to expand...

Given what I know about the tremolo bridges I've worked on, I'm just going to say that if it's not impossible, it's damn close. Guitar trems are made to accommodate six light gauge strings at the spacing preferable for a guitar. You would have to modify it to the point where you'd almost be building it from scratch. Not worth it.
 

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