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Just HOW Crafty ARE these WARMOTH guys, ANYWAY?!?!?

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stubhead

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I mean:
http://www.warmoth.com/Showcase/ShowcaseNeck.aspx?i=BN4991&Body=1&Path=Neck

Purpleheart & Ebony? FRETLESS?!?

$175!!!

Bang! Before ya know it, you're building a Bass6, a Fender design which has proven to be so popular over, ummm, 6.5 decades, that the list of songs featuring one is, uuuuuuh. umm. Countless!  :icon_biggrin:

But it's PURRPLEHEART! EBONY! $175... close shave, that one. I think it's called "value=added" or something, where you insert a near-irresistible combination of a few things into an ordinarily eminently-resistible thing, like a poodle that does taxes & tub grout or something. I'll bet their agents have like a required-reading list, Machiavelli's "The Prince" and Hilter's "Mein Kampf" among them. Pavlov; Ziggy Freud woulda had a lot of fun with a Stratocaster shape, huh? Pink guitars, guitars with teeth, it's no wonder they're running things and. I. just. Purchase....

OBEY​
 
That's roughly half price. I'll bet it was a cancellation/return/mistake.
 
It wouldn't be at all hard to put a real bridge in there and fill up the hole with epoxy or a wood block ----

http://www.warmoth.com/Showcase/ShowcaseItem.aspx?i=B2557&Body=2&Bass=1&Path=Body

hmmmmmm.... what kind of tuners and strings they take?  :laughing3: :help:
 
StübHead said:
Bang! Before ya know it, you're building a Bass6, a Fender design which has proven to be so popular over, ummm, 6.5 decades, that the list of songs featuring one is, uuuuuuh. umm. Countless!  :icon_biggrin:
Click to expand...

1. The Warmoth design is nothing like the Fender one. At all.

2. Carol Kaye? Come now... One of the best session musicians of all time. Used Dano and Fender Bass VI's along with a P bass... On tons of recordings throughout the 60's and 70's.

Also, Glen Campbell is often said to have used one, but in truth it was also Carol on his recordings.

StübHead said:
hmmmmmm.... what kind of tuners and strings they take?  :laughing3: :help:
Click to expand...

Any. Klusons work fine, but you may need to widen the holes for use of modern tuners. Also, LaBella makes a set of strings for Bass VI, I believe the proper gauge is about 0.100 to 0.25 or so.
 
ಠ_ಠ said:
StübHead said:
Bang! Before ya know it, you're building a Bass6, a Fender design which has proven to be so popular over, ummm, 6.5 decades, that the list of songs featuring one is, uuuuuuh. umm. Countless!  :icon_biggrin:
Click to expand...

1. The Warmoth design is nothing like the Fender one. At all.

2. Carol Kaye? Come now... One of the best session musicians of all time. Used Dano and Fender Bass VI's along with a P bass... On tons of recordings throughout the 60's and 70's.

Also, Glen Campbell is often said to have used one, but in truth it was also Carol on his recordings.

StübHead said:
hmmmmmm.... what kind of tuners and strings they take?  :laughing3: :help:
Click to expand...

Any. Klusons work fine, but you may need to widen the holes for use of modern tuners. Also, LaBella makes a set of strings for Bass VI, I believe the proper gauge is about 0.100 to 0.25 or so.
Click to expand...

labella?? i thought that was a local thing. the factory is in newburgh... the strings are nice. no gimmicks.
 
Screw it, if this is still kicking around when I get paid next week I'll probably pull the trigger.
 
Please do - soon! :laughing3: The intriguing thing, for me -  I believe these things are the mutant offspring of Jazzmaster guitars. And if so, the necks, and neck pocket is guitar-sized! Meaning, you could slap that bad boy onto any old guitar body you please, as long as you know how to measure well enough to mount a bridge. And the 30" scale length isn't locked in stone - they say black side dots, but If you really, really  wanted something in the baritoney, 27" - 28.5" scale length - you can yank their dots, and fill it somehow, then measure for your own scale length. It might just be easiest to route a bitty channel and run a strip of binding right over the whole thing.

Before Warmoth started the short-scale basses, I built a 30.5" scale fretless out of the regular G5 neck & body - they just moved the pickup up 1.5" for me, and left the side dots off.  There's a casting epoxy clay called Milliput that makes dots ridiculously easy - after you've downloaded all five of the free scale-length dot placement programs and compared them (to make sure no one's out to screw you), measured for 'em a billion times (knowing full well there's no way you're going to get closer than 1/64" anyway with your somewhat Neanderthalian "work shop" setup {throw the cats off the bed so you can work on your gits}) then agonized over them long enough to get the holes drilled, the Milliput part takes like 5 minutes. Mix - cram -dry - sand. Pffffft.


NO LINES NO DOTS NO MARKERS! THASS THE REAL COMMANDO WAY - Semper Pee or semper tea, or semper fee or something - them Boy Scouts.



LOOK MA -DOTS!

I'm kind of lucky, I just dropped serious coinage on a - fretless, bloodwood/ebony guitar neck! Lucky, in that that one wouldn't have done me right - heck, I'd be happy to find a 22"-scale fretless, David "Fuze" Fiuczynski even gets 'em made to 19" scale. But it's be cool to put that thing on a body with just enough room for one pickup, and about 38 frets-worth of real estate. Peanut Buddha above there has 28 "frets" - High C tuning - EADGC - the top note is an E four octaves above the lowest. But still, go BUY BUY BUY the damn neck you guys - afore I get paid. Do I really need car insurance, I don't hit anything.... :help:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lXySBmieiw

(A course, the other consideration is, really short lengths of bass strings sound pretty awful. Even the usual burping and farting analogies don't cover it - maybe, sounds more like a leaky moist one, IYKWIM. There was a brief, unfortunate moment in Music History where, simply, no one had the gumption to tell burpy/fart Bass Superstar Stanley Clarke that his $4,000 Alembic "piccolo bass" was just a crappy-sounding guitar missing some strings.)

But lucky Mr. Clarke totally redeemed himself by arranging certain gobs of molecules in one tiny corner of the universe - that thereby permitted this guitar solo to exist:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUW5pS6JLvo

 
StübHead said:
The intriguing thing, for me -  I believe these things are the mutant offspring of Jazzmaster guitars. And if so, the necks, and neck pocket is guitar-sized! Meaning, you could slap that bad boy onto any old guitar body you please, as long as you know how to measure well enough to mount a bridge.
Click to expand...

Nope. Not the same pocket. Definitely wider.
 
Somebody was probably high when they ordered it, Warmoth made it, and they wouldn't pay for it when they sobered up.

That said.........................

NO..it won't fit your guitar.  Completely different neck pocket. 
However, if you make your body...say...out of purpleheart (which I have access to a nice stash..) and make the body to fit the neck, you're going to have yourself one of the coolest Bass VI's in existence.
Yeah, you'll need to learn to play it without frets, or simply fret it yourself.  But it would be worth it.  Write yer own damn music for/with it.
 
First: DAY-UM, that's pretty!  I'm a sucker for purpleheart, though.

Second: long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I bought a Warmoth freless baritone neck and stuck it on an LP copy body, with a badass style wrap bridge on the stoptail studs, making the scale about 31".  GREAT sounds, but actually quite hard to play.  The small neck profile combined with the long scale & tight string spacing (with larger than average strings and my larger than average fingers) made it really hard to play. 

As much as I might drool over this thing, I'd advise anyone to think twice about it if you haven't played one before.  The bass VI is a unique instrument, not a guitar or a bass.  I'd put it this way: as different as playing techniques are similar but distinctly different between guitar vs bass guitar, the bass VI is something else entirely.  Similar, and some techniques do overlap, but it's a 3rd column.  YMMV, and lots of folks have done cool guitar & bass stuff with it, but be prepared to practice a lot.
 
Fretless strings, close together, don't let you put two fingertips next to each other, which is a really common technique on fretless bass (and why they're so wide, sometimes). But, they don't do it on upright basses... there is always a tradeoff, somewhere or another. The fretless VI probably wouldn't allow barres of two adjacent strings either, but that actually varies a lot depending on individual hands - how bony, soft or hard your hands are, where the bones and squish-pads are, etc. To "play like Jaco" you almost certainly would need hands like that, and have gone through roughly the same stages of musical development  as he did. I don't get it, but there are some serious Jacoheads out there. Unemployed, mostly... :evil4:
 
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