Fifteen years ago my father made a set of patio doors for my garden shed (if I were posh I would call it a garden studio). The leftover Beech has been propping up a corner of my garage ever since, and whilst under orders to clear out the accumulated rubbish, I hatched a plan to make use of it, as a bass neck blank. Of course if you have a neck blank, you just need a body and behold – a(nother) bass.
So, I taped some A3 sheets together and got busy with a pencil. My shopping list:
- Headless
- Fretless
- Multiscale (Ibanez make a 30”- 32” multiscale headless, and they do it for a living)
- Through neck with a full length fretboard, and as a result an under-bridge piezo pickup, and maybe three octaves
- Something like the funky body of the Strandberg Boden
- Hidden control knobs
- Contrasting wood colours
A scrap piece of 6mm plywood for a template. Two scrap pieces of Iroko glued together and routed to make the back of the body.
Quite a lot of glue, many clamps, some light routing and hey presto a neck blank.
A piece of Iroko I cut off a previous build, planed to 6mm thick to make a fretboard.
Nipped round to a friends to borrow some of his clamps, glue the neck and fretboard together.
After routing the fretboard down to the neck, and marking out the frets with a scalpel and a straight edge, I cut the fret slots with a junior hacksaw as I don’t own a proper fret saw. Sand a 12” radius on the fretboard.
The body will have an Iroko back and Beech front, with all the electronics in a cavity routed into the Iroko back. The through neck will be glued into a tapered slot in the body back, so not really a through neck or a set neck, maybe it’s a rebated neck. A recess in the back of the body so the tuners sit flush.
A rough layout of the piezo, preamp, bridge and string anchor.
After a trip to my dad’s garage (a great source of odd lumps of hard wood), I have some more pieces of Beech. After some time with a plane, square and straight edge, I have several strips but none are wide enough for a body. So, back at my clamp friends workshop.
Some planing, routing and sanding, and I have the Beech front to the body, with some rebates routed on the inside.
Frets inlayed with very thin strips of beech offcuts. Plastic side dot markers for all three octaves.
Back of the neck carved.
I really wasn’t sure how to get the strings from the bridge to the tuners, so the partially complete bass stood on the bench for a couple of months… until I was bored enough to think about it. The obvious solution was to rout a slot around the tuners to match the slot on the back, then start filing string slots/grooves. The strings went on and off a dozen times before the slots were about right (I keep a nasty set of strings for the build stage).
Five coats of Danish Oil (£5.99 for 500mL at Srewfix, and its idiot proof) makes the Beech pop, and makes the Beech fret markers contrast the darkened Iroko.
A piece of fretwire for a nut.
The fact that this geometry of bass body stands up unassisted is rather cool.
I am surprised how much I like the aesthetics of such a plain bass, no headstock, a through fretboard and hidden controls. The proof of the pudding, they say, is in the eating. After 30 minutes of playing a multiscale for the first time, I was able to play most tunes without any trouble.
It’s very lightweight; the string tension is much more even than a single-scale bass; the fretting hand falls much more naturally to the shape of the frets (with the exception of frets one and two); and there is a continuous thumb rest (I normally us the top of the fretboard rather than a pickup). I’m wondering why I haven’t made one before.
The fretboard is absolutely straight, infact just a bit too straight. To stop the E string buzzing above the sixth fret I had to put a little relief in, with the truss rod. It could just be the nasty strings though.
I’m enjoying it so much that I might finally make a five string bass but it will need proper headless barrel tuners and some stacked humbuckers. The body will need to be virtually hollow to make it balance. This one hangs on a strap at the same angle it stands up.
Any thoughts ? Would you play a bass without any bells and whistles (or frets) ?
I re-used the screws from the EMGs; the screws that came with the Fluence pickups were the problem
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