Long story short, because of work I’m going to be living in a small space with almost no storage for several months pretty soon. I won’t have anywhere to put my any of my basses, but I don’t want to lose the minimal progress I’ve made in learning the instrument.
I have seen the Steinberg Spirit, and it’s too small to fit in the locker space I’ll have. Does anyone know of anything smaller I might be able to take? Is there even any option of continuing practice when I have no space? I’ve seen the acoustic bass you take apart and I doubt even that would fit. What kind of options exist for someone traveling in very confined quarters for continuing to practice?
There’s also stuff like the Fernandes Zo, with a built in amp/speaker.
(“Zo”, like used here and with the cookware brand Zojirushi, means “elephant”. Which makes these like 2x cuter when you know it. It has a little power LED where the eye would be )
Traveler Guitar makes an ultra light bass that’s really small.
My husband owns a Traveler Pro-Series Electric Guitar and it’s very light, easy to transport and sounds great through a headphone amp. The ultralight bass version is short scale and Traveler does not currently offer a pro version, but if storage space is your primary concern it could be a solution.
Just came across this video for the Cali4 mini bass by Mayones. It certainly checks the box for small. It also has a built-in headphone amp which is nice for travel. Seems to be tuned an octave higher than a regular bass, so your open string note is equivalent to a 12th fret note. on a standard bass.
If you want really tiny but still usable, both my kids have one of these and they’re not only super small but actually sound surprisingly good for their price and such. When I bought them it was with the expectation that it would be about the same quality as the toy guitars you get from Walmart but I was actually quite impressed with them. After a bit of set up they’re more than usable. Slight static when adjusting the volume knob on one of them and the tuners aren’t great but that’s the extent of my complaints (aside from the factory strings which, frankly, is my first complaint about every bass I’ve purchased so I can’t fault Glarry for that).
i had one of the old solid body kala’s and was not overjoyed with it. it had the relatively common problem of one of the strings (the G in my case) being subtantially quieter than the rest. this same problem has also happened on other solid U-bass’s with piezos i’ve had. the problem was the kala was roughly a bazillion and a half dollars more than any cheap solid body ubass, and i don’t really see what all those dollars were getting you. cheap electronics, no truss bar, cheap hardware, what exactly are you paying for? these new cheaper kala’s seem to be addressing a lot of these problems so we shall see.
edit: taking a closer look, these are not replacements for the ubass, which is 20" scale. they seem to be targeting the ibanez mikro at 23". on kala’s website there is a teaser for a forthcoming california ubass but no specs are available, could this be an updated 20" solid body?
btw i love this lady’s channel.
bbtw what is with the ginormous ugly pick guard?
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