So, I wanted to post my experience ordering and taking delivery of a custom bass made by Imanol Egilegor - a luthier working out of Basque country in Spain. Apologies for the length of this, but hoping someone gets something out of it and also hope anyone in the market for something custom thinks about an Egilegor, because I reckon the man's work is exceptional.
I'd been thinking (and also saving) for a few years and going back and forth between my options for a properly nice bass - something from Warwick? A Fender P Deluxe or Elite? Maybe a high-end Yamaha (I have had a long infatuation with their intermediate models)? In the end the P didn't excite me enough. The Yamahas ditto. I adore Warwicks but their custom shop prices are... up there. For what I was interested in I was almost in Fodera territory. Really serious money that I couldn't afford and wouldn't really feel comfortable spending even in the universe where saving it was possible. And I had some specific features I started to feel really invested in: tenor tuning, a single-cut, neck-through construction, a short/medium scale.
Then one day on Instagram I come across a photo of an Egilegor Ardabakar bass. And I was captivated. Have a poke around his gallery of completed basses here. I had a sniff around his website and the prices seemed crazy good - under a quarter of what I'd be paying for a custom Warwick, under a fifth of a Fodera, and some really interesting, off-the-wall options too: check out his pickup designs and you'll see what I mean.
So I took the plunge - I ordered a neck-through five string Ardabakar (his single-cut model). 32" scale, stainless steel frets, birdseye maple board on a maple neck, bubinga wings and swirly bubinga top. Matching headstock, block inlays, birdseye maple pickup covers, luminlay side-dots. Schaller bridge and tuners. Aguilar OBP3. Egilegor's Jazz Humbuckers, which are wired for series/parallel switches and selectors that allow me to pick between each individual coil of each humbucker. The switches and the blend control essentially give me access to sixteen distinct tonal voices, and I'm not counting active/passive or manipulating the three-band EQ - nuts.
The completed instrument looks like this, although this doesn't quite do it justice, I don't think:
Imanol sent me updates and pictures throughout the process, and - in the midst of COVID and my city in hard lockdown - organised shipping so well that it got from Spain to my door in Melbourne, Australia in three days flat. At the start of the process he also gently set me right when some of my ideas were dumb (I ordered neck widths at the nut and twelfth fret that made no sense and he wisely recommended a chambered body to keep the weight down).
I have to admit it's a nervy experience transferring significant sums of money to someone you found on Instagram and and also pretty frightening to spec out a bass in full for the first time (I thought so, anyway). But I've had the instrument for just under two months now and I could not be happier. I grin every time I see it and I find it hard to put down.
I think that the Aguilar OBP is an incredible, poetically beautiful preamp, but on this bass I hardly use it - the passive voice is just... so good. Neck-through construction gives it midrange clarity and articulation like I've never experienced before and the rigid weight of the bubinga (even with chambers this is 4.2kg) has low-end and sustain for days. Imanol makes his necks based on MTDs - it's a compound shape on the back that is incredibly comfortable and in a natural oil finish it's wicked smooth and fast. I'm still getting to know it, but it sounds like this. (This is passive, all EQ flat, tone knob at about 10 o'clock for a touch of brightness, both pickups in humbucking parallel mode - going into Logic with a bit of reverb through a Scarlett 6i6.)
I get that I must sound like a total shill at this point - sorry about that. For what it's worth I'm writing and posting this entirely because I'm super impressed with this instrument and wanted to share my experience here. Be happy to field any questions anyone has but seriously, if you're in the market for something custom and you've got your own individual ideas about what you want I cannot recommend these basses, and luthier, enough.
I'd been thinking (and also saving) for a few years and going back and forth between my options for a properly nice bass - something from Warwick? A Fender P Deluxe or Elite? Maybe a high-end Yamaha (I have had a long infatuation with their intermediate models)? In the end the P didn't excite me enough. The Yamahas ditto. I adore Warwicks but their custom shop prices are... up there. For what I was interested in I was almost in Fodera territory. Really serious money that I couldn't afford and wouldn't really feel comfortable spending even in the universe where saving it was possible. And I had some specific features I started to feel really invested in: tenor tuning, a single-cut, neck-through construction, a short/medium scale.
Then one day on Instagram I come across a photo of an Egilegor Ardabakar bass. And I was captivated. Have a poke around his gallery of completed basses here. I had a sniff around his website and the prices seemed crazy good - under a quarter of what I'd be paying for a custom Warwick, under a fifth of a Fodera, and some really interesting, off-the-wall options too: check out his pickup designs and you'll see what I mean.
So I took the plunge - I ordered a neck-through five string Ardabakar (his single-cut model). 32" scale, stainless steel frets, birdseye maple board on a maple neck, bubinga wings and swirly bubinga top. Matching headstock, block inlays, birdseye maple pickup covers, luminlay side-dots. Schaller bridge and tuners. Aguilar OBP3. Egilegor's Jazz Humbuckers, which are wired for series/parallel switches and selectors that allow me to pick between each individual coil of each humbucker. The switches and the blend control essentially give me access to sixteen distinct tonal voices, and I'm not counting active/passive or manipulating the three-band EQ - nuts.
The completed instrument looks like this, although this doesn't quite do it justice, I don't think:
Imanol sent me updates and pictures throughout the process, and - in the midst of COVID and my city in hard lockdown - organised shipping so well that it got from Spain to my door in Melbourne, Australia in three days flat. At the start of the process he also gently set me right when some of my ideas were dumb (I ordered neck widths at the nut and twelfth fret that made no sense and he wisely recommended a chambered body to keep the weight down).
I have to admit it's a nervy experience transferring significant sums of money to someone you found on Instagram and and also pretty frightening to spec out a bass in full for the first time (I thought so, anyway). But I've had the instrument for just under two months now and I could not be happier. I grin every time I see it and I find it hard to put down.
I think that the Aguilar OBP is an incredible, poetically beautiful preamp, but on this bass I hardly use it - the passive voice is just... so good. Neck-through construction gives it midrange clarity and articulation like I've never experienced before and the rigid weight of the bubinga (even with chambers this is 4.2kg) has low-end and sustain for days. Imanol makes his necks based on MTDs - it's a compound shape on the back that is incredibly comfortable and in a natural oil finish it's wicked smooth and fast. I'm still getting to know it, but it sounds like this. (This is passive, all EQ flat, tone knob at about 10 o'clock for a touch of brightness, both pickups in humbucking parallel mode - going into Logic with a bit of reverb through a Scarlett 6i6.)
I get that I must sound like a total shill at this point - sorry about that. For what it's worth I'm writing and posting this entirely because I'm super impressed with this instrument and wanted to share my experience here. Be happy to field any questions anyone has but seriously, if you're in the market for something custom and you've got your own individual ideas about what you want I cannot recommend these basses, and luthier, enough.
