I think I made the bass in my avatar in 2005 and put it on the forum here in 2012. There’s a build thread here if anyone’s interested:
5-string Electro-acoustic
It has TI acoustic bass guitar strings on it because that’s what Rick Turner put on his Renaissance basses which inspired mine, but I’ve been thinking I’d like to try the TI Jazz Flats on it. The problem is it’s a fixed bridge so changing nylon cored ABG strings for steel cored flats would probably throw the intonation all to cock. The solution to the problem is to build another bass. I haven’t built a bass for myself for quite some time so I quite fancy building another.
I’m a plonk-along bass player and the groups I’ve played with are the equivalent of barn dance bands (Bal-trad in France). Covid knocked it all on the head but recently a group of (very amateur) ‘musicians’ started up again so I went along and joined them. It’s a sort of folk orchestra for people who would never get to play in a professional band, but get together to practise and put on a barn dance once or twice a year. It’s run by a woman who is a professional musician but, apparently, has a horror of electric guitars, so I go along with the above bass which at least looks sort of acoustic. She hasn’t thrown me out yet.
All the above is to partially explain what I’m going to build. I’ve decided, just for the fun of it to make it look as much like an acoustic guitar as possible. I have a few sets of wood to make acoustic guitars and the mould and bending form for an OM size guitar so it will look like an OM but only about 2” deep. It’ll have 5 strings and a 35” scale because I’ve had a 35” slotted fingerboard for years that I’ve never used. The neck will meet the body at the12th fret which should make it small enough to fit into an acoustic guitar gig bag. I know 12 frets to the body with no cutaway sounds ridiculous for a bass but I never get above the 9th so it’s good enough for me.
It should look something like this:
5-string Electro-acoustic
It has TI acoustic bass guitar strings on it because that’s what Rick Turner put on his Renaissance basses which inspired mine, but I’ve been thinking I’d like to try the TI Jazz Flats on it. The problem is it’s a fixed bridge so changing nylon cored ABG strings for steel cored flats would probably throw the intonation all to cock. The solution to the problem is to build another bass. I haven’t built a bass for myself for quite some time so I quite fancy building another.
I’m a plonk-along bass player and the groups I’ve played with are the equivalent of barn dance bands (Bal-trad in France). Covid knocked it all on the head but recently a group of (very amateur) ‘musicians’ started up again so I went along and joined them. It’s a sort of folk orchestra for people who would never get to play in a professional band, but get together to practise and put on a barn dance once or twice a year. It’s run by a woman who is a professional musician but, apparently, has a horror of electric guitars, so I go along with the above bass which at least looks sort of acoustic. She hasn’t thrown me out yet.
All the above is to partially explain what I’m going to build. I’ve decided, just for the fun of it to make it look as much like an acoustic guitar as possible. I have a few sets of wood to make acoustic guitars and the mould and bending form for an OM size guitar so it will look like an OM but only about 2” deep. It’ll have 5 strings and a 35” scale because I’ve had a 35” slotted fingerboard for years that I’ve never used. The neck will meet the body at the12th fret which should make it small enough to fit into an acoustic guitar gig bag. I know 12 frets to the body with no cutaway sounds ridiculous for a bass but I never get above the 9th so it’s good enough for me.
It should look something like this:
