Hey @Tomm Stanley what are the average weights of your basses? I took a look at your website and find them interesting though I didn't see anything that would move me to look at them over what I'm already interested in. You say they are deeper I'm thinking you mean in body thickness, correct? If so what in particular do you think that brings to the table? Is the body chambered or semi hollow? The only bass I've played that is deeper shall we say than most other basses that I thought was great was a Skold bass owned by Damien Erskine, it was both deeper and lighter than most and was, I believe, chambered. It played and sounded fantastic. I don't mind deeper but unless it sounds better in some way or significantly different than what I'm using now it's pointless. I actually like the couple of Fender basses I that have with thinner than standard depth, like the P Lyte and RW basses. Sorry if this is a derail but I'd like to know if there is any kind of real innovation here. Oddly enough when I read "Stonefield" I was expecting some sort of real stone incorporated into the design. And Woden bridges and knobs on the upper horn are nothing new, Guild has done that for 4 or 5 decades. It matters not to me.
Hi Kirk. Not a derail at all with several good questions here.
Re 'deeper' we have a couple of differences to most:
We use a 2 inch (50mm) thick body. I believe that the thickness in the body brings more tonality to the instrument and point to instruments like the Les Paul guitar and PRS McCarty series as thicker instruments with outstanding tonality. We do some minor chambering on the upper portion of the body and are very careful not to interrupt vibrational pathways. Look at the back of our M Series instruments and you'll note the four round cavity covers rather than one big cut out. This allows the entire wood mass to contribute where a single large cavity pretty much takes the whole lower bout out of the equation.
We also use a 3 degree back angle on the neck similar to archtop guitars, violins, etc. That relieves stress on your fretting hand's wrist but also raises the strings as they pass over the surface of the instrument, so we're deeper in this way too. At the bridge our string height is 1 inch(25mm) above the surface of the instrument. For fingerstyle this leads to a very relaxed hand position, for pick players it opens up different angles of attack (and you are less likely to tear up the face of the instrument) and funk players either like the extra space or, as with the Freekbass Signature Model, we have the Funk Plate to close the gap for those that don't.
And while our necks are not particularly thick, we use quite a generous D profile which again allows a bit more wood mass to be present and contribute to the sound.
So we have a very solid tone inherent in the basses and then our electronics let you do what you want with it. For a variety of reasons I've kept it all passive but we still have high mid and low controls and we're 100% shielded, so very quiet. With the single humbucker always in humbucking mode you can go from the thickest fat dub sound to the thinnest nasal tone and never hear an obtrusive buzz.
Our different variants weigh in between 7.5 pounds and 9.5 pounds, so firmly in the middle of the normal expected weight range. The standard hardware on our basses is anodised aluminum, brass and stainless steel. That goes right down to the smallest screws so you can be certain that nothing on a Stonefield will ever rust. The lightest instrument we offer is our four-stringer with the titanium hardware option, the heaviest is the six-string, also with titanium. The titanium hardware takes off about 40 grams per string but does cost an extra $50 per string over the stainless steel. For weight reasons we only offer the six with titanium.
Finally, re the company name: my surname, Stanley, means Stone Field. It can be seen in many forms: Stanley, Stanleigh, Stanfield Stoneleigh, Stonefield, etc. They all hark back to British history when names were related to where you came from and the lore behind mine goes that the first son of prominent families received the primary wealth and lands while the second son was given the less productive stony fields, hence the surname. Third sons received military commissions and fourth sons went to the monastery. No telling what happened to the rest ;o)
I've not gotten the player comments from Bass Player Live loaded on to our website yet but they'll be up in the next week or two. You can see comments from players in London at this page:
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There's a lot in there about the tone and feel of our basses, including the things people thought we could improve, not just some cleaned up promotional version. Warts 'n all as they say.
Thanks for the questions.
