alittlebitrobot

gizza listen

Wow, I too am planning a fretless, 5 string, short scale, somewhat headless, strung with tapewounds build. I want to go E-C so I bought a 4 string set of d'addario short scale tapes and then found a site selling individual strings so I was able to buy a high C. The fun of making guitars is that you can make things that you can't find for sale anywhere else, but it does mean that sourcing parts at the beginning can be an absolute nuisance 😁 Good luck with the build! Watching with interest.

wow, congrats! and thanks for making this post. These basses have fascinated me for a long time and, like Ritters, I just find it hard to believe that they really exist.

This is my Ibanez 6 string. The nut is 50mm across and there's so much space between the edge of the C string and the roll-off of the fret. Even if this was a BEADG 5 string, if this C was as thick as the G, there's still plenty of space for the string to flex without choking out on that fret end. Very strange design, if intentional.

cool! Maybe the photo makes it look worse than it really is, but the original position of the string is ridiculously close to the edge of the fretboard! This is interesting for me because my brother is big into 3D printing and when he recently bought a good one, he gave me his old not-so-good-but-still-functional printer. I haven't set it up yet, but I was recently looking up plastic acoustic saddles on eBay for an upcoming build. Why didn't I realise I could just print one with the exact dimensions I want? Thanks!

For people that want to use tree cookies as a table and keep the bark, or have a waney edge board with the bark intact, the tree should ideally be cut in winter when it's dormant and dry. That way the shrinkage during drying is minimised. With this tree being cut now, those sections are going to develop big radial cracks as they contract quickly and dramatically, so it's highly doubtful that they'll remain as one cross section. The cross section of the trunk is the direction in which the wood expands and contracts, so even if you did get a body out of it, I'd worry about the various cavities, the neck pocket, the bridge location all drifting out of alignment and cracking the body along the way. If those logs are yours, you could mill (or have them milled) into planks to make a laminated body. Maybe. EDIT: It is a crying shame, though. My parents had an ash tree in their garden (nowhere near the size of yours) that was due to come down. I asked my dad if I could cut it down so I could get the wood that I wanted from it. A few weeks later, I found out that he'd gone ahead and done it, and then said "the wood was boring. Just pale and all straight-grain. You wouldn't want it." so he gave it all to my auntie for her fire 😩

This is cool! Personally, assuming the p/ups are black, I would go for the black pickguard so there's a clearer visual idea; dark hardware, p'guard, p'ups with a light body. I think the contrast would be stronger. But either way, I think this is fun (and something I've thought about doing in the past so I'm glad I can see how it goes without having to go to the bother of actually trying it myself) so I think you can't really go wrong here.

Love this. I'm looking forward to seeing more 👏

Excellent pic. Looking forward to this one.

Top marks. Nice set of strings at a good price, communication was spot on, and they were posted quickly. Highly recommended 👍

Hectic one, this 😀 Haven't been on BC for a while (3 years according to soundcloud 😮), and just remembered the Composition challenges, only to find it was deadline day. My beloved Ableton8 is no more, so I had to make this with version 9 "Lite" (meaning only 8 tracks, and I LOVE lots and lots and lots of tracks). This is not so much a composition as a bunch of ingredients for what should have been some kind of arrangement. Still, at the eleventh hour, here 'tis. Looking forward to next month already 😁

I played an Aria Feb fretless acoustic in a local music shop and it has me split in half. The GAS-having musician part of me is bursting to own it. But the pragmatic, sensible half is saying "what would I play on this that I can't play on my 34" scale fretless I already own (whose tone I love)?". Also, where would I put it? It's pretty big.. Some day, when I'm having a rough time, I know I'll snap and buy it in a rush of retail therapy. Plus, the shop have made it perfectly clear that if they've sold the one they have in stock, it's no problem- just say the word and they'll order another one for me... NOT HELPING, lads..

Nice. That looks very satisfying to use.

It's interesting, this feels a bit like a missed opportunity to me. With HellZeros LeFay, the RHT allows for a much cleaner headstock, but the Bogart one opted to maintain the look of tuning keys. Obviously they feel that the appeal of RHT is an ergonomic one rather than aesthetic, but still..

wow wow wow, that is stunning @Hellzero Thanks for all this insight, everybody 😄 I just thought I'd show the forum what I got up to last year, and it's turned into a very informative resource for my next build.

Amazing. Thank you! I had a similar idea to avoid complicated routing by just routing a block cavity and inserting the complicated shape separately, but I had it at at the edge of the body because I assumed that there wouldn't realistically be enough space to access the tuners if it was in the middle. I always find when I'm designing anything ergonomic that my intuition for what will work isn't great. There's no substitute for a real world example. This is great, thanks @Kiwi

Oh, that's interesting. My gut feeling is that the weight is so out of whack that I'd need to bolt a substantial chunk of wrought iron on there, but I could be way off. Tomorrow I'm going to sit it on my lap and clamp some stuff to the headstock to find out how much weight I'd need to make playing it a bit less scary. Cheers.

I've been combing through your profile but it's hard to know if I'm seeing the right thing, and a lot of old posts have broken jpegs at this point. If you have any pics, I'd love to see it. I'd like to see what solutions people have come up with for this kind of thing.

Sounds great (to me) with bog standard nameless PJ pickups and alpha mini pots. The fret job I did was just about good enough so there's no buzzing and the intonation is good, but, the big but.. The weight imbalance. The big heavy bridge wants to tip the bass up when it's on my lap. I didn't add strap buttons because I'm just a 'noodling about in Ableton' kind of player, but I might now. I've tried resting it on my left leg like a classical guitarist but I just can't get on with that position. So, yeah, overall I'm very happy with it, maybe thanks to how low my expectations were 😁

Ha, yeah, it's funny when the solution hits you. Even though I've no metal fabrication skills, I just started drawing the ideal bit of hardware for what I needed, and then eventually realised I'd drawn a plug pin 😁

dagnabbit, this is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for! Why couldn't I find this thread before I got to work on mine 😭