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Weird & Wonderful Basses


BigRedX
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More basses from France - [url="http://www.kopo.fr/"]Kopo[/url]

The semi-acoustic Glaz and the semi fretless Lina



But for me the star of the site is the Arobasse



3 octave maple neck attached to a carbon fibre or stainless steel 'body'

These also feature the [url="http://www.optomik.fr/"]Optomik[/url] bridge/pickup which seems similar in concept to the Lightwave system but also includes the 13-pin out to drive a MIDI interface. No prices listed on the site...

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More mysterious basses this time from [url="http://www.mubass.co.kr/"]MUBass[/url] in Korea.

Pierrot Lunaire


MU-1 F Custom


Citadel Doubleneck


I don't know much about these as the site is completely in Korean and auto-translation makes even less sense than usual...

However they do seem to be big fans of Q-Tuner pickups and there's some cool design details on all the basses - I particularly like the bridge on the Pierrot Lunaire.

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Those MU basses look quite good fun - and I think there is a Kopo bass on eBay right now?

I would make a post about the new Vigiers but I haven't actually seen one yet so all I know are the specs and so forth which are on the website. I was hoping to get one to review but might have to wait a while...

Cheers
ped

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Look what I found:
[attachment=9049:0006open.jpg]
[url="http://www.musicgadgets.net/2006/12/27/scott-french-travel-guitar/"]http://www.musicgadgets.net/2006/12/27/sco...-travel-guitar/[/url]

Looks a lot like the Status Streamliner.

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I like that a lot!

I just had a good look around on the Scott French site and there's some very cool and different guitars - the basses with the exception of the one you've shown not quite so interesting.

The Status Streamliner is one bass I've still looking forward to trying. I guess that a trip to Status is the only way to do this at the moment?
Also I'm never sure about how well I'll get on with single-cut basses. I love the looks of most of them but my poor "guitarist's" technique menas most are difficult for to play above the 12th fret...

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[quote name='BigRedX' post='206251' date='May 25 2008, 10:57 PM']More mysterious basses this time from [url="http://www.mubass.co.kr/"]MUBass[/url] in Korea.

Pierrot Lunaire
[/quote]

Blimey! That's probably got more glue than wood in it :)

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Time for some more metal madness - this time from [url="http://www.beckguitarworks.com/"]Beck Guitarworks[/url] in the USA

Here the appropriately named Battle Bass



The head and body are mirror-finish stainless steel and the neck carbon-fibre re-enforced maple with a fretless ebony fingerboard.
The Beck instruments are ones that definitely look better in action than just sitting on their stands.
Dwayne Becknell has also been designing slightly more conventional instruments for [url="http://www.bcrich.com/draco.html"]BC Rich[/url].
At the moment, the Battle Bass is a one off and is currently on loan to Victor Wooten.

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No new basses but an update on the Lace Helix.

I managed to get one of the new 5-string fretless models from the US -serial number 2 no less!





And I wrote a review which you can read [url="http://basschat.co.uk/index.php?showtopic=21194"]here[/url].

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[quote name='Hellrazor' post='215048' date='Jun 8 2008, 07:22 PM'][url="http://www.altguitarbass.com/weird/"]http://www.altguitarbass.com/weird/[/url] :) :huh:[/quote]

Thanks for the link Hellrazor, although I think it's been posted in this thread before...

There's some interesting instruments there, some of which I've covered before and some which I hope to cover in future posts. There were also some Wishbasses...

What I don't like about sites like that is that there is no information given other than some rather poor quality pictures, a lot of which appear to have been grabbed from eBay auctions. There's a couple of instruments on there that I'd be interested in finding out more about, but all we have is the pictures. It also does give the impression that they don't take the weird basses particularly seriously when there's some quality instruments mixed in there amongst the home-butchered body shapes, 'custom' paint jobs of questionable taste and the products of Mr Wishnevsky.

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[quote name='Lfalex v1.1' post='215069' date='Jun 8 2008, 07:49 PM']I keep saying that about a perversely coloured BassLab L-bow... One Day![/quote]

You do know that for the cost of shipping a bass to you and back to Basslab again they'll let you try out one of their demo models for a week?

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  • 2 weeks later...

Time for some more basses. Today's are from ESP.

"I know all about ESP" I hear you say, "Souped up versions of traditional designs played by Americans with beards and tattoos, available in any colour so long as it's black". Well if you're looking [url="http://www.espguitars.com/index.html"]here[/url] you'd be mostly right. However all the interesting stuff is on the [url="http://www.espguitars.co.jp/index2.html"]Japanese ESP site[/url].

What is most impressive is that there is a massive range of custom shop designs that are available to anyone with a spare ¥440,000 (around £2000) to spend on a bass. Here are 4 of my favouites:

Metalbird


Acho


RM380DA


Bandit 6


and my favourite of the more conventional designs in a custom finish ESP Forest currently for sale on Ishibashi's U-box


TBH the basses are somewhat overshadowed by the guitar designs. If I was looking for a seriously glam guitar this would be one of my first choice sites.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I've left this much too long and it's more than time for a new bass (or two)

From Italy this is [url="http://www.manne.com/"]Manne[/url]

You've probably already seen the Malt Whisky instruments - 2 guitars and a bass made from Lagavulin oak casks but just in casr you haven't...





Not an entirely original idea but well executed - the bass in particular seems to have been made with some very 'characterful' pieces of wood.

The Manne range comprises two basic shapes - a rather ordinary F-derived design and their original Moab series:

The Trea


The Soulmover


and the Acoustibass


As the Malt Whisky bass shows, Manne aren't adverse to trying something even more different to normal.

Here's a very short scale piccolo bass with a very deep and dark sound for what is essentially a four-string guitar.


This is now part of my bass collection and currently I'm finding it very useful for creating faux 8-string bass parts with a twist where the 'octave' instrument changes to doubling or harmonising with the bass part.

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It's a fun instrument although it definitely helps being a guitar player too, to get your head round how to use it.

It's 26" scale which make sit just a touch longer than a normal guitar and currently strung with some quite heavy strings.
The electronics are quite 'guitar-like' volume, tone with a pull coil tap, pickup selector and fairly hot humbucking pickups, but the tone is very bassy even with the tone on full treble!

Since I bought it, I've been revisiting some of my Peter Hook-style bass lines that I always thought would sound good with an 8-string and reworking them for a mixture of octave and unison. It allows me to play the main bass in a more bassy octave and then add the top end on the piccolo bass. I've been getting some interesting effects by swapping between the two lines being an octave apart and then going to unison and occasionally dropping a 5th between them.

Here's full photo of the Manne piccolo bass (It's called a Mandobass on the site)

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