Not sure if anyone has noticed this just yet: First Electric Bass Guitar in the World -Paul Tutmarc Audiovox 736 Electric Bass | eBay
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Tutmarc audiovox model 736: where are they?
- Thread starter beebassdude
- Start date
It’s been put up for sale by Greg Tutmarc, who is Paul Tutmarc’s grandson I think. He say’s it is one of 3 known to exist, but I think it is the 4th one to be found.
Design,
I was told a few years ago by a guy that he found one in NY in a barn but it was totally rotten and he threw it away....don't know if I believe him,it was bud that said he got an order for 100 of his 1948 Serenader bass. I don't know if he ever made them though. I only know of one.
I was told a few years ago by a guy that he found one in NY in a barn but it was totally rotten and he threw it away....don't know if I believe him,it was bud that said he got an order for 100 of his 1948 Serenader bass. I don't know if he ever made them though. I only know of one.
I finally finished this, on the right, next to the Uke bass. I don't even know what to call it. The starting point for the design is: capo a guitar at the seventh fret, and discard the highest and lowest strings. That leaves EADG like a bass, but up an octave from a standard guitar, with a 17 inch scale like a big ukulele. Then double all the strings like a mandolin, and what the heck, give it 24 frets. If anyone can come up with a workable portmanteau of guitar, bass, ukulele, and mandolin, I'd like to hear it. I know: guikulelin !!!
Here it is during its lengthy setup process. On its first assembly, I would rate it awful, but I made a list of all the adjustments and corrections, and tore it down and fixed it. I had to rework the nut and raise the bridge up with a shim, as well as do a very fine fret leveling. I also fixed a brainfart in the electronics ( simple volume/tone, with a series/parallel switch on the tone. ) These Chinese tuners are the worst I've ever seen, but I tore them apart, lubed everything, and found the right place to smack them with a hammer, and now they are acceptable.
The build is very similar to the uke bass: 1" white pine core capped with maple plywood, maple neck with red oak fretboard. This body is extremely light, probably too light to even carry a full-scale guitar neck, so this was a good way to salvage it. There are a lot of ugly modifications under the expansive pickguard, including a new bridge block where there was originally a pickup rout. The sound hole doesn't do much, but it adds a visual feature to what would otherwise be an awful lot of white pickguard.
The bridge is a modified Bronco bass part. These are readily available and inexpensive, and have the advantage of being narrow gauge - the same string spread as a guitar. I made new saddles from 3/8" brass rod and spare parts. You could also use a 3/8" brass bolt from a marine supplies store, but I didn't think of that.
You can see the string spacing works out very nicely. I ended up shimming the bridge up with a piece of pickguard material, so I could have saved myself a lot of bother and just screwed the bridge down onto the pickguard without making a cutout, and then a shim to fill in the cutout.
The inter-string spacing is as a bass, and the neck is standard guitar width at the heel. A standard mandolin bridge is hooked for loop-end mandolin strings. I wanted to use regular guitar strings. I also didn't want a super-skinny mandolin neck.
The pickup is a cheap Chinese humbucker. I like these, they sound good for both guitar and bass, and there are 4 wires so you can separate the coils and do fun things. I like the soundhole mounting, and it is easier than making a tight pickup route.
Here is a detail of the other end. The nut is bone, jazz-bass-width, and went through a good deal of production before I was happy with it. The truss rod cover is fake, there is no truss rod adjustment, just a steel bar. Another way to fill in otherwise empty space. The strings are all tuned in unison. I used 30-22-14-11, all from the big box of misfit strings. This is basically the middle four strings from a light guitar set, times two.
It sounds very dinky unplugged, but it sings when you plug it in. I'm kind of lost on a 17" scale, my fingers feel huge. ( A real mandolin has a 13" scale, I'd probably crush it. ) The frets above 20 are not very playable - just look at the spacing. You'd have to have some really hard callouses to make clear notes up there. But they look cool, and improve access to the frets that are playable, and lengthen a neck that would otherwise be even shorter. You can make power chords on the lower frets. An alternative would be to string it up DGBE, like the upper four strings of a guitar. Then you would have all of those chords instead. ( One of my goals was to build an instrument that didn't require a lot of transposing. I don't know a whole lot of guitar chords, and I'm damn well not giving up any. )
I had toyed with the idea of adding a piezo pickup, but this design is not well suited to experimenting. You have to unstring it to get the pickguard off and access the electronics. So I will keep it simple and reliable under there. I have a thread on building here:
You Can Build It
Oh jeez, I almost forgot my other inspiration:
Video also features the incomparable Derek Smalls on bass.
... and where are they now, the little people of Stonehenge?
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Can you spot the new one? Fretless. The rack was recently built just for the Audiovoxen, with special dimensions to fit the smaller bodies.
Never mind the back burner, luthiery hasn't even been on the stove for a few months. This is the new body for my first Audiovox. It is a five dollar piece of poplar from the lumberyard, stained to resemble walnut. It actually looks better than walnut. All the woodwork is done, it is down to finishing now. The soft poplar will need a good coat of protective polyurethane
The pickguard is a piece of 1/8" window plastic from Home Depot, with several coats of brass spray paint on the back. I experimented with sanding the plastic to get a brushed look, but eventually went with smooth. The paint is the right color but not really a metal texture, but it has the advantage of never tarnishing.
Also, I don't know what a piece of brass that size would cost, but I'm guessing at least fifty bucks. All together, you're looking at under $20, including the paint. This body will get the walnut neck and all the hardware from the original.
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Who doesn't recognize this rout? And the back ...
And my trusty DeWalt 611. These routes were all done freehand, after removing what I could on the drill press. This little router is all you need to build a guitar. It is so much easier to control than a full-sized router, and has plenty of power. This pine is actually stronger and harder than alder, and the router went right through it at half speed, with no burning. A while back a woodworking noob asked router advice on TB, and got sold a big expensive Porter Cable contraption. I'll bet he's sorry now.
The tremolo cavity was drilled through on the drill press. That's how you get the location on the back. Then I connected the holes with the scroll saw, and routed it out to the final dimensions. The spring cavity keys off the tremolo cavity. I did that entirely with the router - what a mess, but the drill press wouldn't reach to the center of the body. Well, that's what vacuum cleaners are for. I also used earmuffs, safety glasses, and a breather mask, otherwise I would be choking on sawdust right now.
I used an old 1/2"d x 1" long router bit, probably the oldest one I own, but recently re-sharpened on a diamond hone. I took all the cavity dimensions off my Japanese Strat. Since everything is covered up, none of it needs to be perfect, that's the genius of Fender. I calculate there is 5/16" of wood between the spring cavity and the pickup cavity.
I made templates for both the front and back from Masonite. They are tracing templates, not thick or sturdy enough to use as router guides, but otherwise quite accurate, and covered with notes, like radii, depths, alignments, etc. I tried to head off every mistake I might make. So far, so good.
I've never done one of these tremoloes before, I don't know where you need to be exact and where you can be sloppy, so the whole thing is as precise as I can make it. But the Strat pickguard, stretching from the neck to the bridge, covers up pretty much everything.
Now I need to figure out the control layout, which means starting on the pickguard, at least in cardboard. This body is smaller than a Strat, so everything is tighter, but I will fit in a Strat output tub somehow. Maybe something like this:
I tried a "pecan" stain on a piece of scrap, and I like it, so I will probably stain this body a little darker, then Tung Oil. The pine has a look somewhere between ash and alder, nice and stripy. The glue joints are only apparent on the edges. A sunburst would cover that.
Not going to do any Strat-style contouring, this body is so small it doesn't need it, and you really don't want to lighten it any. Not sure what sort of pickguard I want, probably just white. I had to hunt around on eBay to find a 5-way switch that will fit in a 1-1/2" thick body.
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And then this. The only woodwork left is to drill for the neck mounting holes and bushings. It will have basic volume/tone with a five-way switch and a push/pull on the tone knob for the forbidden 1-3 and 1-2-3 combinations. Otherwise I think I'll keep this simple and passive.
The control and output cavities were hogged-out with a forstner bit on the drill press, and then finished freehand with the router. The little router has much less torque reaction than a big one, which makes freehanding much easier, even with just one hand. Following a pencil line is as easily as drawing it. A foot-long 1/4" drill bit made the hidden cross-connects, you'll need one of those.
The pine routs nicely with a straight bit, but the 1/2" roundover left some rough spots where the bit met the grain the wrong way, even with the speed backed off. Can't do much about that except sand it out, and it came out fine. Almost no burning. This hard pine is a little more difficult to work than soft alder or poplar, which would be expected.
You can see the rough outline of the pickguard, Strat-like, but smaller and following the lower contour, without the horn, of course. Now I'm thinking about doing a two-tone burst in polyurethane. Experimenting is the point, and I haven'y poly'd over this pine yet. A burst on a regular Audiovox would be pointless, as the enormous pickguard covers almost everything, but here it would work nicely.
This is starting to look like something. I took some measurements from my real Strat, and realized I needed to take about 3mm off the neck heel. With the overhanging 21st fret, I couldn't use the belt sander, so I sketched the outline and cut it freehand with the router. Once that was fixed, I laid out the holes for the bridge mount and drilled them. To do that, I first punched and drilled the two ends and mounted the bridge. Then I punched through the empty holes in the bridge, removed it, and drilled the remaining four holes. It came out perfect. From the 20th fret to the mounting holes is 7-1/4". I wish I could just get a strat pickguard and cut it down, but the control holes would be in the wrong places.
Some more progress - the pickguard is a cross between the Strat and the Audiovox. I couldn't decide what to do around the neck, there was no good way to reconcile the two styles, so I didn't. Just a straight cut down to the corner. Adds some angularity to the organic rounded shape.
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This is the last of the "main production run" that I started several years ago. This bass was intended to have a twin guitar, but that plan changed and the twin is not going to happen. This is pure Danelectro - pickups, controls, bridge, body. It plays surprisingly nicely, considering I just strung it up for the first time. After a few weeks I will do a proper setup.
I still have two more Audiovox projects, which you can see in the background, then I am done with this design.
The fretboard is Brazilian Cherry, or Jatoba. Now that rosewood is all but illegal, this wood is going to become a major player. I expect very soon all the advertising agencies will seize upon its magical tonal properties, and the internet will become crowded with debates over whether it is lighter or darker. B*llsh*t. This wood is used a great deal as flooring, and is readily available and relatively cheap. The hardness and grain are similar to rosewood, but it is not oily. On this piece I applied two coats of real Tung oil. That darkened it considerably from orange to brown. Tung oil ( or linseed ) is a drying oil that is permanent, unlike stupid "lemon oil", which evaporates away after a few weeks.
The precise cutout under the bridge. This way I can remove the pickguard without having to remove the bridge. The cutout was roughed-in with the scroll saw, then finished with files. The electronics are dead simple so that hopefully I will never need to remove the pickguard. The pickups are wired in series with a single Danelectro stacked control. The bridge ground is a piece of aluminum tape under the pickguard. I didn't bother shielding anything, lipsticks are pretty well shielded all by themselves.
I use a domed finishing washer under the back bridge screw, so I can cinch it down snug to the body. That is something Danelectro missed, it adds virtually nothing to the cost and makes the bridge mounting much better. The rest of the build is similar to my previous ones, 30" scale, double-acting truss rod, polyurethane finish ( pores fully choked! ) Home Depot maple neck, masonite over plywood chambered body. This is one of the first ones where I used wood glue to attach the binding after sanding the body edges down to bare wood. This is the only way that really works, and it is how Danelectro did it back in the sixties.
I love the sound of a Danelectro bass, which I attribute to the low-output lipstick pickups and rosewood bridge. The bridge intonates well enough. Intonation is more marketing hype than anything you can hear, especially under real playing conditions, close is good enough.
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I finally assembled the re-build of S/N 0. This is the improved body style; the original body is behind it on the bench. I transplanted the neck and all the hardware. The new body is stained poplar and polyurethane, the pickguard is clear plastic painted on the back. The old neck is walnut. I started a new nameplate to match the pickguard, but right now I think the old one is fine.
New poly can pick up imprints just like lacquer, so for the next few months this one is going to hang by its tuners. You'll notice the headstock is true to the original, and not very practical.
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Here are all the basses together. Left to right:
- 21" hollowbody, plywood over pine
- 30" hollowbody, masonite over plywood
- 30" fretless hollowbody, masonite over plywood
- 30" solidbody, poplar
- 32" solidbody, poplar
Here's a nice bump for this old thread. I finally got the body polished and finished the neck. To re-cap, the body is Radiata pine and the neck is maple, from Home Depot. The fretboard is Jatoba, or Brazilian Cherry.
You Can Build It
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