Photographs courtesy of Reiji Maruyama
David Segal from New York Bass Works sat down with our tech Max to talk about how a cracked neck lead to his unique head stock, why he prefers bolt-on necks, and where he tries to draw the line when obsessing over the details.
What inspired you to get involved building basses in the first place?
I bought my first bass, a brand new Fender Precision, way back in 1973. Shortly afterwards I found that the flat-wound strings were buzzing. I didn’t know anything about strings then, so I went to a music store and they said, “Use these Rotosound round-wounds.” So I took them and put them on the bass, but it was still buzzing.
So I took it to a store and the guy said, “Oh this no problem. You just need a level, crown, and polish. It’ll be two weeks and $25.” So I drop the bass off, and then 2 weeks later there is still nothing done. 3 weeks. A month. Two months. Nothing done.
Finally I get the bass back, and I’m so anxious to get it because I’ve lost a lot of time. I haven’t been getting to play. And most of the finish on the maple finger board had been sanded off of my brand new bass. I was very upset, so I brought it back to them and the guy says, “Players really like that feel.” And being an amateur, I just accepted it.
Then things started turning gray. So I took it to another guy, and he says, “No problem. We’ll refinish it and everything else for a hundred bucks.” And another two months go by and I get it back and the guy had done a horrible job of finishing it. So at this point for the first four months my bass wasn’t even in my hands. I just accepted it because I just wanted my bass back and I wanted to play.
But the one thing I didn’t accept was that I worked very hard to save up for this bass and I paid somebody to screw it up for me. So I just said, “I can do this myself. I’ve got wood-working skills. I’ve taken shop classes.”
I was very good with working with wood, even though I didn’t have eyes on building. I just thought I’d work on it myself. So I bought a book and I read it a little bit. I picked up some basic tools and did my own work, and I said “That’s it. I’m not going to let anybody touch my instruments again.”
And how were those early builds?
It started by just doing the mods and repairs myself. Then by 1977 I started building my own basses. I was building from scratch, building the necks, routing for truss rods, doing everything that had to be done from scratch.
I had done a few of them and I did a pretty good job, but I practically gave those instruments away. There was nothing on the headstock then. They just looked like Fender Jazz basses. I actually still have one that I built in the late 70s. It’s a fretless with walnut body that kind of looks like a cross between an Alembic and a Fender. It has a good sound, but it looks a little funny.
Where did it go from where?
Well in the early 80s I was playing a lot of synth bass at gigs. There was really no substitute for the keyboard for those sounds for top 40 dance funk bands. I realized maybe I wanted a bass with a low B string, which I really liked anyway just for the tone of it.
This was about 1984, and there were some guys building a low B bass. Some boutique builders were doing a good job of it, but it wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted my old jazz bass with a B string on it. I just wanted more range to be able to get those low notes. So I had a jazz bass body and I designed a 5-string, 24 fret around it by redesigning the body and cutting into it a little more, leaving the pickup spacing the same, and extending the scale somewhat.
I took that design with a luthier in Florida where I lived then, who will remain unnamed, and he built the instrument for me as well 4 or 5 others for other people. Unfortunately the one he built for me was a complete failure in every way. The truss rod didn’t work. The neck didn’t adjust. He used ebony for the fingerboard, which was not what I wanted. I had wanted rosewood.
I tried everything to fix it myself, but I ended up literally throwing the instrument in the garbage. There was no recourse, there was no refund. I just lost out on the whole deal. And once again, I was disappointed in the service I got from others.He had used pickups – I think some EMGs if I remember correctly – and they were made for a 4-string, so the middle were the split was this dead spot. He said, “Well, you know, the A string might be a little low. You might have to deal with that.” But the A string didn’t work at all, there was no sound.
I checked around with other builders in the New York area and I played some really great basses from them, but I still didn’t find what I wanted. It was nothing against the work they were doing, but it wasn’t what I was envisioning. That’s when I just decided to go back to building it myself.
How did it become a business?
I had access to a couple friends’ shops where I could sneak in and spend a little time. We’d do a little bit of this and that, just for a couple hours a day. So building took me a long time. And my first venture into building a five, somehow I ended up going in the wrong direction; I ended up building a neck-through and disappointed myself. I built a really excellent neck-through bass, which was fine for anybody who likes that kind of bass, but for me it was the wrong instrument.
Then I experimented with a bolt-on and that was very, very successful. The bass was really good, so I said, “Well this is good. Now I know I can build an excellent instrument for myself. Great. I have my bass. I can get back to my gig schedule and pursue other things musically without thinking about building anymore.”
Then people started talking about it. “Hey, I know this guy, he builds his own basses. You should check him out”. And people would ask if I could build them something, but I’d have to say no. I didn’t have my own shop, and it would take too long.
But then eventually I said, “Why not have my own little shop in my house so I can build anytime I want?” And that was the originally idea. I could build and repair and do whatever I needed to do for me. Next thing I know I’ve got a customer, and then another. But even then I figured that was it. I would have a few guys in the area that would enjoy an instrument from me, and that’s it. But eventually it became a business.
How’d you come up with the name “New York Bass Works”?
By 1997 I still didn’t even have a real name for the business. I had called It New York Bass Works because I just needed a name. I’d call up compani
es and vendors and they’d ask me “what’s your name?” and I actually came up with that name as sort of a working title. Then when I tried to come up with something else, I just couldn’t think of anything else that sounded right. So I said, “Oh, I’ll just stick with New York Bass Works. What the heck, right?”
But I still had to come up with a logo. And I still didn’t have a defined headstock yet either, so I had to come up with a logo. I didn’t know what to do, s
o I went to commercial artists and people I knew who were good with art and asked them to come up with something for the letters NYBW. But nothing seemed to work. It had to be something that would look good in pearl, but also as a decal. And it had to stand out and have some kind of character to it so you’d remember it.
And then one day I was just sketching around and I came out with a rough idea. It came out with a NY graffiti art look, like something you’d see spray painted on the wall of a building. And it worked. It was whimsical and weird, and I went with it I didn’t have anything else.
Where did your unique head stock design come from?
The head stock design was very boring a first. It didn’t look like much. Then one day I made a critical error on the router table when I was routing a neck. I was coming around the router table and I came back into the bit and it nearly knocked the neck out of my hand. It shot it back and put a crack I the top of the headstock. And I thought, “Oh boy, what am I going to do now?”
So I took the template off, put my thumb over the crack to where I thought it ended, drew a pencil mark, and just kept cutting in and cutting in until the crack was gone. And it didn’t look half-bad. It actually looks kind of good. It was unique and it was different.
So I sent an image to a friend of mine, and he said it looks very good, but it looks a lot like MTDs design. And I didn’t want to take someone else’s work, so I put my thumb on it again and made another cut, and low and behold that’s how the headstock evolved. I didn’t think anyone was going to like it, but it turns out that most people really like it so I kept it in all my basses. Every bass in every series has that look, which was an accident from the beginning.
I’d like to talk about some of the details of your basses. One of the things that really stands out in your designs is the string hole out of the nut isn’t just straight, it actually adheres to the natural tapper of the strings on the body.
Wow, you are one of the few that have noticed that. I like to go as straight with the string pull as possible. I think it makes the most sense. I always felt that if the string is bound to one side in the nut it was not equal, and it would get tension in a place that is unnecessary and wrong. The string should lay straight over the nut, and as straight as humanly possible to the actual peg.
So when laying out he design for the headstock I go over the nut in the line of the string line, completely across over the edge of the headstock design. Then I place from there the tuner location. Sometimes there is a slight compromise in the straightness of the string pull, but most of the time I’m getting it pretty darn straight.
You like to pay attention to the details.
I’ve actually these days tried to be less obsessive. Not so much in the design, but in the building. I get a little over obsessive in the building phase to where there is a point I guess where you have to say, enough is enough. But I get all hung up on it. Many very successful luthiers have.
One of the things Mike Tobias said to me is “You’ve got to know when enough is enough. When it doesn’t matter anymore, when it’s not going to help the instrument, and it’s not going to be any more pleasing to a customer.” Some of the details if you aren’t looking under a microscope just aren’t that important.
But I still fight with that all the time. Sometimes I don’t know where to stop. Some people think it’s a good trait to have as a builder, but it makes things take longer. It just prolongs the process and maybe in some unnecessary ways. I don’t want to compromise quality, and I don’t think any of the great builders compromise in quality, but I think over time people get to know what makes a difference, and what is just being obsessive. Sometimes it can be too much.
You have the longest truss rod cover I’ve ever seen. I’m assuming it’s because you have a minimized headstock angle and need to provide straight access to the truss rod.
That’s exactly right. Over the years I’ve done different things. I’ve gone with angles as steep as 14 and 12 degrees, and I’ve gone as low as 8 degrees. And there was a point where I said, you know I like an angled headstock, but I don’t like it overly angled. I like it just angled enough to be able to create enough tension over the nut but not so much that you can build a headstock that might be in danger of breaking, or any of that kind of thing if the worst where to pull.
I was still sitting on the fence with the non-angled construction of fenders. And I’ve done band saw cuts, scarf jointing in the head stock, scarf jointing in the neck shaft itself. I have settled at scarf jointing in the headstock, but I still maintain that a low angle is better.
At one point I did think these truss rod covers were getting a bit long. That’s when I started angling out a little further and I ended up again at about 10 or 11 degrees. And that was specifically just for that reason, so I didn’t have to make just a long truss rod cover.
There’s another interesting detail to your bass that you touched on a bit when talking about you earlier designs, and it’s something that I don’t think a casual observer would expect, but all of your basses are bolt-ons. Many first-timers assume a neck-through is always better. It sounds like you started out this way. Why’d you decide to go with bolt-ons?
In all of my experiences with neck-through, I’ve found that when I’m playing aggressively and when I’m digging in and really trying to make use of the full dynamics of the instrument, the neck-through basses quit at a certain point. It’s almost like you’re playing through a compressor. There’s a certain point you reach where you are playing harder, but it’s not giving anything back to you.
What I’ve found is that I’d need to get more peak in the notes, so I ended up turning up my amp. But then the sensitivity on the low end of the dynamic wasn’t there. So you would either need to play around with volume, or use a volume pedal. But there just wasn’t anything natural to me about the dynamic. It was getting too far away from the envelope of an acoustic instrument, which is a very wide and dynamic.
If you play acoustic guitar, or an upright bass, or any instrument that really has acoustic output, the bolt-on instrument is not exactly the range of an acoustic instrument, but it’s closer to it. Where you can play ever so soft and actually play as hard as you want. Dig in as hard as you want. It seems like there is more head room in the acoustic of the instrument. And that translates to the pickup of course.
Electronics for electronics, scale for scale, design for design, the bolt on is always better for me. That doesn’t mean it’s better for everybody else, but it’s better for me. So it’s my belief system going to work.
Now if somebody where to say to me, “I don’t care about the dynamics at all. That’s not what I’m about. I want a neck trough instrument from you.” That wouldn’t be a problem. I would still do it. As a builder I actually enjoy building neck-throughs. They are more fun, more artsy. It’s more satisfying as a builder to build a neck-through. But as a player and on the receiving end of the instrument I’m not so happy with it.
What’s satisfying to our eyes isn’t always satisfying to our ears. Maybe if a natural compression exists with a neck-through bass, then the disadvantage is that you can never turn the compression off. But if you have a bolt on that has higher initially transience and a little punchier of a sound, you can always add a compressor if you want to get a more compressed sound.
Oh, absolutely. I absolutely agree with that. Sometimes I record with an in-line compressor. Not anything extreme. I don’t like to record anything with extreme compression, but I’ll use just enough to keep it out of the red. And then later on depending on the type of music it is, if it’s pop or dance music, maybe even more compression after tracking. But if I can’t make that decision going in it’s kind of difficult.
I’ve noticed that you like to make your nuts out of wooden materials. Some laminated. Is wood a preferable nut material for you?
Only on an instrument where I’m making a substantial nut. Something I’m making about 3/16” to 1/4” thick. Sometimes even greater depending on the instrument. If it gets too small then I feel there is not enough mass in a wooden nut.
The wood is lignum vitae. It’s very hard, very heavy. It won’t float in water. And it’s very naturally oily, and very wear resistant. I discovered lignum vitae on an old machine that I was helping somebody fix. It was an old scroll-saw. And the moving block was made of what I thought was some kind of fiber material.
This guy says it’s a very hard wood, and I’m thinking, “You’ve got to be kidding me. You’re making something that’s moving up and down hundreds of thousands of times within an hour and it’s moving against steel?” So I thought, this really seems like the perfect material for a nut.
After the first time I used it I thought the sound and the feel was natural. So I decided it was what I wanted to use, and I haven’t had any problems. Well, except getting it. Getting suitable lignum vitae is difficult. The first piece I got was from a long plank and he said it had been around in that shop since 1938.
Looking at some of the other details on your work I’ve noticed that you seem to have a different pickup spacing for your fretless than you do you your fretted. Can we talk about your pickup spacing?
My original idea was that on a fretless, as you get closer to the fingerboard the neck pickup imparts kind of a muddy tone. And with the fretless not being as forward of a sound and usually creating more of the fundamental, that a pickup towards the fingerboard wasn’t as necessary.
Yet the bridge pickup needed to be maintained in the 60’s Fender position to get that sound. So by pulling back the pickup we were able to have a secondary pickup or to have a neck pickup that was more functional. It was more like it was in the sweet spot and the bridge pickup was in the bridge position but being very close together it almost looked a little funny.
The secondary reason was that back then I was using single coil pickups. I thought it was a good idea that the two single coils when used together were going to be hum-bucking, and if you are going to have them hum-bucking it might as well be closer together. That way you don’t have as wide of an aperture. In retrospect a dual coil would work. So many of the fretless basses I build now are just single bridge pickup with the narrower or slightly wider aperture in dual coil form.
Do you have any specific advice that you’d offer for young and up and coming luthiers? What sagely pearls of wisdom would you offer for someone just getting their start?
First thing – learn all your basic tool skills. Learn them well and use only classic techniques and safety first. You need your fingers, all of them. Wear eye, ear, and respiratory protection.
If you are not sure of how to use a tool in the way it was designed, stop and get advice and learn. Don’t do anything on a power tool that it wasn’t meant to do. And don’t do anything in a way that you can get hurt.
The second thing – keep your ears open. Listen to the bass, and also listen to the customers. Learn to play at least on a level that you can relate to a customer is telling you.
And one last thing – be as original as possible.
We want to thank David for being gracious with his time and sharing his incredible wealth of knowledge with us. Check out his work at New York Bass Works.
Great Interview! I appreciate David’s candor AND attention to detail! Thanks for sharing this!
great interview, great insight of a boutique builder, his work are not well known as they deserve.
Thank you
great interview, thank you for show the work and insight of a great builder.
All the best
Both are very good, but let’s not forget Fender mareks of the Stratocaster Played by Jimi Hendrix, Eddie Van Halen, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Jeff Beck just a few of the best.References :
Very informative interview. Good questions with well-thought out answers. Makes me want to hear one of his basses in action.
David’s instruments play effortlessly and have tone for days. He’s a class act and monster player to boot.