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Frankenstein upright electric bass My friend Eric saw a 3/4 size upright bass sitting out on the street to be collected on trash day. He unabashedly nabbed it. Apparently it had been stored in a basement that had flooded, the body all waterlogged and warped. Everything from the shoulders up, however, was fine. Looks to have been a student bass, no telling how old. He offered it to me, thinking i might be able to do something with it, and i accepted. Since the neck / headstock / tuners were intact, i decided to make an electric upright out of it. I took the body apart and hung the old top on my shop wall for a while, until my wife claimed it and turned it into a piece of art (see inset). We recycle. The tuners were a bit rusty, but disassembly and a little sandpaper and steel wool fixed that. The fingerboard was badly warped from the deluge, so it would need to be fixed to the body rather than floating above it, as in its former life. It didn't take much to remove the sides from the shoulders of the neckblock, which i later shaped down so that it flared out slightly from the neck heel to meet the profile of the proposed new solid body. For the body itself, i laminated six pieces of 3/4" walnut to make a stable surface for (a) the remainder of the neckblock and (b) the newly supported fingerboard, as well as (c) a container for the electric business, and the bridge / tailpiece. Once the fingerboard was attached to the body (with a piece of mahogany in between) i planed the warped fb straight, and made a fitting for to mount it on the cymbal stand seen in the photo. It has Seymour Duncan p-bass PUs, a single volume pot, and i cut the bridge from purple heart wood. The body is probably bigger than it needs to be, but it looks pretty nice, considering its greenish skin, the bolts on either side of its neck, stiff gait, and limited vocabulary. The thing sounds and plays pretty well, though Tony says the action is a little low for bowing—not an issue for me. I played it out quite a bit, and used it for some tracking on Janet Pressley's record of hymns, (which at this writing has still not yet been released) on the song "a balm in gilead." It currently needs a bit of bench time, as the bridge has cracked (need to cut a new one with the grain running vertically—oops), and a bit of warp has crept back into the fb, which will need to be re-planed. One of these days. Soon i'll try to dig up and post the first photo of me with this bass; taken on that raised platform above the castle during that violent lightning storm. I was wearing goggles and a lab coat, screaming, "Life! Give my creation LIFE!" |
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