journal

In search of bass....

I play guitars that are hand made by a Canadian Luthier named Neil Bryan. He is a super nice guy, a great craftsman, and his prices are very reasonable. Back in the Spring of 04 he asked me to help him beef up his web presence to try to bring in more business. The tough economy in the US, the bad exchange rate, increases in material costs, and the competitive nature of his business were taking a financial toll despite the fine work he does.

Since cash was tight for him we agreed that a trade was in order. A new site in exchange for a basic bass. Just a plain alder body with a simple finish and pau ferro neck. He sent me a picture of his template for a sort of modern version of a "Jazz" bass. Looked cool to me so I went to work on the site.

The site ended up exploding into a wonderful resource for anyone who might want to know more about how an instrument is built, what designs have what pros and cons and why these things are the way they are. It was a lot of work on my end but it was a fun site to build (despite my stupid habit of handcoding websites using only notepad). I basically gave him a "whenever you get to it" time frame on completing the bass. Materials are costly so I was willing to wait till he got some new customers. And this new website was really going to bring them in... Not!

Unfortunately new business didn't flood in and 5 or 6 months later he decided to close up shop and move to Western Canada to work, literally, in a gold mine. This was bad in 2 ways. First, my guitar guy wasn't making guitars anymore. And second I didn't have a bass yet. He sent me what he had which was a rough cut body, a truss rod, and some raw wood for the neck. The only bright side is that he was planning to surprise me with a few upgrades to the bass than we had agreed upon, so the body came with a swanky curly maple top.

Now I had to find someone to build this thing. I met with one local luthier who seemed interested but wasn't sure he had time for the job, then never called back. I contacted a couple more guys on the net who were within driving distance, but they were a bit too costly for me. Come March I'd been doing endless google searches for 3 months and no takers.

Then one day I lucked out reading an article by an acoustic guitar luthier who said he had mentored under someone named Chris Stambaugh who had a shop in my area. I plunked his name into google and bingo! He is like a 5 minute drive from my work, has a similar build style to Neil and is willing to do the job with a price tag I can live with. There were some hold ups with hardware vendors and having the thing shipped out for the nitro finish (the stuff is very toxic so many luthiers outsource this now, others use polyurethane). While I didn't have him do any inlays on this instrument some of the guitars he was building at his shop has some very impressive inlay work. There were a couple of double necks too.... hmmmmmm... double neck... ahhhhhhh...

Er, oh yeah. I went with a emerald green finish with gold hardware. Its got Bartolini jazz replacement single coil pickups that are hum canceling (critical when you play near a computer monitor all the time). Chris builds fantastic necks. I have little hands so this was a big deal for me. Put an old Fender in my hands and I'd have more luck hitting a baseball with it than playing a scale. I just can't get my hand around those things. This thing has a really slender neck but it still has a great tone. Don't know exactly how he does that. Anyway I've tracked a couple of songs with it now and the results aren't bad for a guy who has been playing bass for just a month or so. For sure it must be the instrument.

I'll post a picture of the completed bass another time (when I get around to taking one). But do go check out www.stambaughdesigns.com and have a look at his work.