Doing Things Wrong

Audiovox Electric Upright Bass (1/9)

This is the biggest of the Audiovoxes, weighing in at a full 12 pounds, with a 36" scale. The neck is a Brazilian Cherry (Jatoba) floorboard over maple, with a straight cutout headstock. There are over 100 marker dots. The body is veneered masonite over solid plywood, with Danelectro-style Tolex binding. There are also strap buttons, this instrument can be played vertically or horizontally.

This bass has a 5-string magnetic pickup and dual bridge-mounted guitar piezos with a powered impedance buffer. The floating bridge is fully adjustable by 1/4-20 knurled wheels. The strings are Rotosound TruBass RS88, which give a good imitation of an acoustic bass.

The saddle and string nut are clear acrylic, the string anchor is a drawer pull, and the rest of the parts are from scrap, matching the neck. The veneer is bees-wing eucalyptus, stained dark and finished in UV-cure polyurethane. The long cello-style endpin retracts all the way into the neck pocket. It stands 5'7" fully extended.

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This body was purchased on eBay from a parted-out guitar. Might have been a Squier, I don't remember. It was in pretty good shape, and I gave it a good polishing. The neck is hand-made, one of my first. The back is hand-picked Home Depot maple, the fretboard is pre-slotted rosewood from StewMac, I hadn't yet worked out how to make my own. If you cut the first two frets off a 34" fretboard, you end up with a 30" scale. That's about the limit with a pre-slotted fretboard though, as you start to run out of frets at the other end. The dots are 1/4" pearl from StewMac, expensive. The frets are probably pre-cut Fender.

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