Brady Muckelroy! and you will be able to sell it easily if for some very odd reason you dont love it..imho. Pretty long wait time probably, but you never know.
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Can Anyone Sell Me A 33" Scale Bass?
- Thread starter Gare Boo
- Start date
Thanks for having referred me to Randy Robinson. Even though it took a really long time when everything in the country was shut down for COVID-19, he built me a superlative 5-string 33-inch scale neck that is my #1 gig bass. One answer to your question about why 33-inch scale: my hands just don't like 34-inch basses anymore. My Rickenbacker is a 4-string; I needed a gigging 5-string. And I have the tuners arranged 2+3 with the B tuner far enough up the headstock I can use conventional and readily available long scale strings without binding the B string over the nut or tuner post.
I, too, would love to know why a 33" scale length is so important.
Not much to see: the body is an Ibby 2010 SRA305 I got in 2012; the neck is by Randy Robinson. I really liked the feel of the stock neck, with my hands it just got to be one inch too long to be comfortable anymore. So I told him to duplicate it one inch shorter and get the B string tuner up from the nut. Because the pickups are a tad closer to the bridge than on many other basses, the slightly shorter neck didn't affect the overall tone, probably helped it. I use standard long scale D'Addario XL170BT with a 130 B string tuned to C with EMG soapbars: 40CS in the mid; 40JX in the bridge, flipped so the coils are in the "60's" position, wired ABCX-MV-EXB-MT. Hipshot UltraLite tuners so the neck doesn't dive with the light weight Asian mahogany body. Big tone, <-100dB noise floor, which makes my sound man happy. The EXB is a variable scoop, which I find more useful "on the fly" than separate active pre T & B controls, and I keep a master tone to tame new string zing and dump the last bit of residual hiss. Single 9v battery. This has been my #1 gig bass for the last decade, and I look forward to many more years of gigging with it.
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EDIT: My band is playing its 30th anniversary show this weekend. Of course, we are pulling some songs out of the book that we haven't played in years - retrospective as well as current songs. At rehearsal yesterday evening, I started getting some stress in my left hand. I then looked at my fingers, and they were spread for the old 34-inch scale neck on which I had last played the songs, and I scuffed a few notes, all from muscle memory still intact. I had to make myself relax the hand and run through the songs again to realign my left hand to the 33-inch scale neck and fret placement. Rehearsal went well; we are ready for the gig; and it was a great reminder of why I commissioned the custom 33-inch neck for this bass. Again, instead of my hand being stressed and could have had pain, I was simply normally fatigued at the end of rehearsal.
