Four-string Musicmannish thing

[Mediocre Polymath]

Hello folks, Paul the Plug suggested that people might be interested to see the two basses I've built over the last few years. I'll start with my four-string fretted bass, as that is the one I documented in more detail. I wasn't a member here back when I made it, but I figure I could post this in installments, like a conventional build diary. Partly to keep things in style and also so I don't have to write a shitload of stuff at once.

 

So, where to begin? I think this all starts with my very first bass, which was a 2002 OLP MM-2. For those who don't remember, these were decent-enough licensed Musicman copies (Sterling back when the "Sterling" was a specific model not a brand) with passive electrics, basswood bodies and maple necks. This picture isn't mine, but it looked exactly like this.

At some point around 2004 me and my brother drilled out the body and stuck a Kent Armstrong jazz pickup in at the neck. Later we (well, mostly him if I'm honest) replaced the stock pickup with a Bartolini MMC and crammed a NTBT preamp in there. The picture below shows my brother's sophisticated workshop set up (note the bracelets, because it was 2004 and we were cool). You would be amazed how clean a rout he was able to make freehand with a black and decker + blunt chisel combo.

 

 

It sounded awesome but it never played particularly well, and that only got worse as I made various ham-fisted attempts at fixing it (attempts that saw most of the frets get filed away). In 2007, I bought a Yamaha BB604 and sent my OLP off on a years-long odyssey that saw it get passed around my social circle. (it only got more stupid stickers over time)

 

Fast forward to 2017, when, after having made two electric mandolins and a guitar, I started giving some thought to making myself a bass. I remembered that my old OLP had a good 300 quids' worth of high quality electrics in it, so I retrieved it from the friend of a friend who had it gathering dust in their attic, poor thing.

 

On getting it back, however, I was surprised to find that it sounded even better than I remembered it sounding. And while I procrastinated on the design of my new bass, I decided to refret it with some stainless wire that I'd bought by mistake for another project and not used. I remembered this as just a stop-gap thing, but looking back through my photos I realize that this frankenstiened, almost 20-year-old OLP – with its blank headstock, tinfoil shielding and its finish marred by the residue of removed stickers – was actually my main bass for like three years. I played quite a few gigs with this thing.

 

 

Eventually though, I settled on this design, and started buying the wood I needed. Tune in next time for the actual build process (I'd intended to at least start that here, but I got carried away). 

 

[Richard R]

Following. 

[Mediocre Polymath]

Some people seem to be interested, so I'll continue. Though before I do, I think it would make more sense for me to quickly explain my general set-up.

 

My guitars are mostly made at home, at a workbench in my garden (which periodically requires me to duck out of the rain holding an armful of tools). I have the option, however, of periodically taking stuff up to my wife's work so we can do things that require big, expensive tools like table saws, CNCs or routers. My wife is a scenic carpenter who runs a professional set-building shop with just about every tool you could possibly want. She's also a much better woodworker than me, it's handy.

 

Anyway, back to the build. When I first started making guitars I bought a big ol' slab of ash, something like 2.4 m (8 ft) of the stuff, to make bodies with. I liked the way it looked, but it was very, very heavy and, by the time I came to start work on this bass, I'd already used most of it. I decided to use the remaining length of wood, cut into thin strips, to make a multi-piece body from contrasting woods (the other wood being sapele).

 

I was inspired to do this by a picture of a bass made by a now-mostly-forgotten British luthier called Peter Cook, which I came across in Melvyn Hiscock's Make Your Own Electric Guitar years ago. Weirdly, when looking though my old reference images I realized that a bunch of them came from this very forum. So, er, thanks @FlatEric for providing those. If you read this, I thought you might be interested to see my Peter-Cook-Axis-inspired electric mandolin, which I made around the same time.

 

 

The last section of ash board was cut down on the table saw in my wife's workshop, then I set to squaring it all up and levelling the sides with my trusty flea-market Record No. 7.

 

 

This is the bass body with all its pieces squared up. It's not been glued in this picture, but I had already drilled the holes laterally through the centreblock for alignment dowels.

 

I cut out the side pieces with a borrowed jigsaw, and did the remaining bits of the centreblock shaping by hand. I drilled those pilot holes for routing before I glued the body up, because my drill stand wouldn't reach when it was all joined together.

 

 

And here's my hi-tech set up for carving out control cavities. Note the 1980s Bosch drill stand that my wife found at the back of the cupboard at work.

 

I didn't take any pictures of the routing process, but here's the router template for the pickup routs and neck pocket. My wife was able to import my technical drawings to her workshop CNC, and I then brought the body up to the workshop to use the routers there. I should mention at this point that I really, really hate using routers. They scare the shit out of me.

 

 

And here's the finished product. Pickups and neck pocket routed, as well as a recess for the control cavity cover on the back. The string-through holes and the neck mounting holes were done with the workshop pillar drill. All the shaping and rounding had been done at home with rasps and spokeshaves.
 

Edited September 27 by Mediocre Polymath

[Mediocre Polymath]

Right, part three. Making the neck.

 

So the first step in this part of the process was that the maple neck blank went up to my wife's workshop so she could bandsaw it out. Unfortunately, on that particular day one of my wife's students had messed up the set-up of the bandsaw in a novel and exciting way (undergraduates man, they have talents). This caused the blade to drift off track and irrepairably damage the wood around where the headstock would be.

 

There is perhaps a parallel universe where this didn't happen, where the last piece left over from the maple board I bought back in 2016 was actually used to make my bass along with the last of the body wood. In that world I might have finished my bass, said "well that's that" and walked away from luthierie forever.
 
In this timeline though, I had to buy another 2.4 metres of maple board, setting up the body-wood/neck-wood nacho cycle that will likely keep me making instruments for the forseeable future. (It's also not the last you'll hear of that ill-fated neck blank – there's a reason why my fretless bass is headless).  

 

 

Anyway, back to the actual process. After the correctly bandsawed neck came back from the shop, I set to work. First thing was to drill out the holes for the tuner pegs (using the janky-ass drill press from last time), followed by the truss rod channel. Because of my aforementioned beef with routers, I do my truss rod routs using an old-fashioned Stanley router plane. This really doesn't take very long (probably quicker than doing it with a router when you factor in making the jig, setting it up, sweeping up all the dust, etc.) and is good exercise. I wholeheartedly recommend router planes. They're great.

 

 

After that I glued on the fingerboard using some little alignment pins though holes around a few fret slots and – as is tradition – every clamp in my postcode. The fingerboard on this bass is a pre-slotted one that I'd bought from StewMac a few years earlier. I generally cut fret slots myself, because it gives me more options when it comes to scale length and wood choice, but I was happy for the opportunity to skip that stage here. I then planed/rasped away the excess. You'll note that I've still not carved the neck; this is because I find all the other steps in the process easier to do with a flat-bottomed slab.

 

 

With the fingerboard attached, I got out my slightly smaller plane again to properly level the glued fingerboard. It was pretty flat to begin with, but I didn't want any bumps to get introduced by the glueing and clamping. This also revealed the lovely colour of the wood.

 

 

Here's the board after I'd added the dot-markers and sanded it with radius blocks. I'd originally intended for this bass to have blocks and binding, but I decided that this didn't really fit with the aesthetic. I also didn't feel like dealing with the hassle of cutting the recesses and the channel for the binding.

 

 

Here's the neck after the fret installation (done with a big hammer and earplugs). I go through and shape the fret ends after I'ver finished carving the neck.

 

 

With all that sorted, I got to shaping the slab neck using rasps and a spokeshave. You can see the neck from the OLP in the background here because I was measuring and comparing to get the dimensions and shape more or less the same. I don't have any gauges or guides for this part of the process; aside from the occasional check of the overall thickness I primarly work on feel. You know how I mentioned the router plane is good exercise? Well, it's nothing compared to this stage. I'm still not entirely sure whether Rock Maple is a wood-like rock or a rock-like wood.

 

 

I don't know if you can really see the shape of the neck heel in this picture, but that's something I'm particularly proud of. I carve them to exactly follow the curve of join with the body, so they go straight to playable thickness with no Fender-style chunky section in front of the joint.

 

 

Here's the finished neck, next to the old OLP neck it replaced. I was going to try and wrap up this trilogy here, but I once again find myself talking too much. It will have to be a Douglas-Adams-style trilogy in four parts.

[Mediocre Polymath]

Apologies. Work got a little manic, but I'm back for part four of three – finishing with the finishing.

 

I've tried a bunch of different techniques for applying finishes over the years, with varying degrees of success. My home workshop is just my garden – and it's not a very big garden at that – which makes using spray finishes unpleasant. In order to make a spray booth you have to tie a bunch of old sheets to trees, washing lines etc., and hope that the fumes don't get ignited by one of your neighbour's spliffs. (Here's a guitar being painted in what passes for my spray booth).

 

This is no fun, and it also makes you reliant on getting perfect weather (low humidity, hot but not too hot, no wind to blow the sheets everywhere, no family gatherings on the other side of the hedge). Perfect weather isn't easy to come by in the UK, so I try to avoid spraying as much as I can. What I've settled on is a brush on gloss polyurethane lacquer called Mann's Extra Tough, which is designed for worktops and the like. My technique involves doing many, many coats of laquer and then sanding/buffing to a mirror finish. It's labour intensive, but the lack of fumes and overspray means it's easy to contain and you can do it inside.

 

This was the view from where I sat, working from home during the first few weeks of lockdown. Every now and then, between nervously checking the news and working, I'd get up and apply a quick coat of lacquer.

 

Here's the body and neck (finished with the same stuff and same technique, just with more masking tape), curing in my climate controlled hot-room.

 

This is what it looks like once all the sanding and buffing has been done. Pretty good for brush-on laquer in an attic, I think. I'd added the copper shielding foil by that stage, which is a straighforward process of cutting & sticking and giving yourself hundreds of little cuts on your hands (like paper-cuts, except from something even sharper!).

 

Here's the wiring harness from the old bass, twisted into a bizarre and stiff shape by 15 years crammed into a too-small space. I replaced some of these components – moving the active/passive switch from a push-pull on the volume knob to a separate DPDT switch.

 

Here's a close of up its guts, mid-way through the wiring process. I'm not very tidy when it comes to electrics, as you can see. You can't really see it under the nest of preamp cabling, but there's another DPDT switch under there that switches the humbucker between series, parallel and singlecoil (in reverse polarity to the jazz at the neck).

 

 

My original intention was for there to be four knobs (rather than the original's 2 plus 1 stacked). It would have had separate bass and treble knobs, with the active/passive switch also flipping the treble knob to work as a passive tone. That was why I moved the switch off the volume pot. However, I discovered mid-way through the build process that centre-detended 50k linear pots are surprisingly expensive, and decided not to bother. The fourth knob, therefore, is a passive tone that's only active whewn the preamp is switched off. I've used it perhaps three times, but it's nice to have.

 

Here's the finished bass next to the carcass of the old one, so you can see the relative size and shape. The bridge is a Schaller, I think, with through body stringing and the tuners are the originals from the OLP.

 

 

And here's a picture taken outside, so my crap camera could give you a better idea of the colour.

 

 

And the back, showing the rather nice neck transition.

 

[Richard R]

I really enjoyed reading that - and what an excellent finished bass. 

[Mediocre Polymath]

I suppose I should probably say something about what it's like to play after all that.

 

I have it set up exactly as I like, with extremely low action and standard-gauge 45-105 strings. It has pretty big and tall frets and a 9.5 inch radius on the board, so it's comfortable on the hands. (I don't really have any strong opinions about radiuses on bass fingerboards, but I generally go for 9.5 inch as it's what I like for guitars.)

 

The range of sounds you can get out of this is wide, but perhaps not what you'd expect. The Bartolini pickup is in the correct MM position (just a smidge bridgewards from where a P-bass pickup sits), which means that with the pickup in parallel you get the traditional Musicman sound. However, if you switch it to series (which I prefer) you get something more akin to a high output, aggressive sounding Precision.

 

The weird stuff comes with the single-coil sounds. With the MM pickup split you get the north (neckwards) coil, which is about halfway between where the two pickups on a jazz sit. That coil soloed is more Rickenbacker-like than anything Fender-y. Similarly the angled jazz pickup is a good 4-5 cm closer to the neck than a jazz or precision pickup, so it has a sound all of its own. Combining the two single coils gives a very bassy tone that's got an even more pronounced version of the Jazz Bass mid-scoop. It tends to get lost in a band situation, but sounds nice.

[mrbacco]

On 12/02/2024 at 00:02, Mediocre Polymath said:

Some people seem to be interested, so I'll continue. Though before I do, I think it would make more sense for me to quickly explain my general set-up.

 

My guitars are mostly made at home, at a workbench in my garden (which periodically requires me to duck out of the rain holding an armful of tools). I have the option, however, of periodically taking stuff up to my wife's work so we can do things that require big, expensive tools like table saws, CNCs or routers. My wife is a scenic carpenter who runs a professional set-building shop with just about every tool you could possibly want. She's also a much better woodworker than me, it's handy.

 

Anyway, back to the build. When I first started making guitars I bought a big ol' slab of ash, something like 2.4 m (8 ft) of the stuff, to make bodies with. I liked the way it looked, but it was very, very heavy and, by the time I came to start work on this bass, I'd already used most of it. I decided to use the remaining length of wood, cut into thin strips, to make a multi-piece body from contrasting woods (the other wood being sapele).

 

I was inspired to do this by a picture of a bass made by a now-mostly-forgotten British luthier called Peter Cook, which I came across in Melvyn Hiscock's Make Your Own Electric Guitar years ago. Weirdly, when looking though my old reference images I realized that a bunch of them came from this very forum. So, er, thanks @FlatEric [I don't know how to do the tagging thing] for providing those. If you read this, I thought you might be interested to see my Peter-Cook-Axis-inspired electric mandolin, which I made around the same time.

 

 

The last section of ash board was cut down on the table saw in my wife's workshop, then I set to squaring it all up and levelling the sides with my trusty flea-market Record No. 7.

 

 

This is the bass body with all its pieces squared up. It's not been glued in this picture, but I had already drilled the holes laterally through the centreblock for alignment dowels.

 

I cut out the side pieces with a borrowed jigsaw, and did the remaining bits of the centreblock shaping by hand. I drilled those pilot holes for routing before I glued the body up, because my drill stand wouldn't reach when it was all joined together.

 

 

And here's my hi-tech set up for carving out control cavities. Note the 1980s Bosch drill stand that my wife found at the back of the cupboard at work.

 

I didn't take any pictures of the routing process, but here's the router template for the pickup routs and neck pocket. My wife was able to import my technical drawings to her workshop CNC, and I then brought the body up to the workshop to use the routers there. I should mention at this point that I really, really hate using routers. They scare the shit out of me.

 

 

And here's the finished product. Pickups and neck pocket routed, as well as a recess for the control cavity cover on the back. The string-through holes and the neck mounting holes were done with the workshop pillar drill. All the shaping and rounding had been done at home with rasps and spokeshaves.
 

 

 

very nice thanks for sharing ... also the bag in the last photo is amazing too! 🙂 

[moley6knipe]

Late to the party but yes, this is excellent. A really strong original design. I like!

[BassTool]

Yup, me too!

 

Great work 👍🏼

[Andyjr1515]

Me too.  I love the laminated body bass.  Nice work and great result!

[Mediocre Polymath]

Quick postscript to this build. I just replaced the Kent Armstrong jazz pickup with a Bartolini 9J-S1 that I bought from @loudspeaker. I did this for purely aesthetic reasons (I wanted the pickups to match) and I'm dead chuffed with how well the level of wear on the new Bart matches the one that's already there.

 

 

I'd wondered if perhaps the new pickup would bring about some dramatic improvement or change in the sound, but honestly it's almost exactly the same. I recorded the bass before and after, and even with big monitoring headphones on, it's near impossible to tell the new and the old pickups apart. Something worth considering when you're next planning an electronics upgrade.

[moley6knipe]

There IS something satisfying about how a Bart pup ages, isn’t there? Which is weirdly niche! My 18 yo BTB with USA Barts has all sorts of finger wear, and a satisfying groove from where I anchor my thumb!

[Geek99]

On 12/02/2024 at 00:02, Mediocre Polymath said:

. My wife is a scenic carpenter who runs a professional set-building shop with just about every tool you could possibly want. She's also a much better woodworker than me, it's handy.

 

…for the pickup routs and neck pocket. My wife was able to import my technical drawings to her workshop CNC,

You do realise, I hope, that you have the blueprint for “perfect basschat wife” right there ? the most used phrase around these parts is “if I can sneak another one past..” followed by “well she does have a lot of shoes/handbags/kittens” 

you can quote me 

Now 3D print her 

Edited April 16 by Geek99