Custom Bass Guitar

I finally got some pictures of the custom bass I made for myself. The body is locally harvested (Michigan) White Ash. The neck is Mahogany with a tiny bit of Cherry in the headstock, and the fingerboard is Striped Ebony. The rear coverplate is quartersawn Cherry. It is quite heavy because of the ash, but sounds GREAT! It sounds very much like a double (upright) bass. I love the strings—they are called “tape-wound”strings, and won’t corrode—I use GHS brand strings exclusively because they are excellent quality and are made in Battle Creek, MI—that’s pretty close to home. The pickups are dual-coil humbucker Jazz Bass pickups. I have a volume control for each pickup, and one tone control shared between both.

HEAR A SAMPLE OF IT HERE.

The headstock was possibly the hardest part of the instrument as far as design goes. I wanted it to be as small as possible, look good, and still fit my tuners and the cover plate for the truss rod. I carved the neck with wood rasps and spokeshaves. The neck was finished with pre-cat lacquer and the fingerboard was finished with—you won’t believe it…......OLIVE OIL rubbed in by hand. The body of the bass has four coats of 100% tung oil (imagine how long that took to dry!!) and four coats of clear gloss Polyurethane.

I am a true believer in showing the natural beauty of the wood that God gave us to enjoy. I rarely stain wood. Here are some Pictures of this gorgeous instrument…the Ash is really nicely figured.











Notice that the guitar body is made from ONE board of Ash. I planed and sanded the boards to thickness, cut the pieces to length, and glued two pairs of boards face-to-face to get the thickness, and then I edge glued each ‘half’ to get the width I needed (I made sure on the front of the bass, that the sapwood came together on the centerline of the guitar to give a nice blend from one side to the other, with no visible glue line). The end grain on the bottom of the bass has a cool Herringbone pattern from the rift-sawed part of the boards.

I will post a clip of one of my studio recordings with this bass later. The recording was made with standard stainless round-wound strings, but they were cutting into the Ebony fingerboard, so I changed them to tape-wounds.

Keep an eye out for my instruments to appear on Ebay. I’d like to try to get a market for these fine instruments going online. I’ll keep ya posted. Thanks for looking!!

-- Lane Custom Guitars and Basses