fbpx

[Bass of the Week] Doner Designs JazzMan

For a hobbyist builder, Steve does some darned fine work.

Steve from Doner Designs writes:

Doner Designs is a fancy name for my son and I who build as a hobby and also donate some of our works to charity. We don’t do any build-for-sale work but do flip our personal gear sometimes to make room for the next project.

Since we build for fun, we like to try new and unusual things, never repeating ourselves. Most of our basses have had three pickups, elaborate electronics and sometimes exotic woods. In the spirit of trying new things, we wanted to do a single pickup bass this time with a 24 fret neck and also wanted the pickup to be something really special, potentially worthy of calling our signature pickup. Even though the highest frets are hard to reach on this body, we think the fingerboard extension completes the look since there is only one pickup. The pickup is located in the “Warmoth sweet spot” which approximates MM pickup positioning.

We call this bass and its pickup the “JazzMan”. The inspiration for the pickup name and design is Nordstrand’s BigMan pickup which stuffs two Big Singles into a MusicMan cover. The JazzMan pickup has two Nordstrand split coil J pickups under a MM cover. We also thought about calling it the BigBoy or the LittleMan, but liked the JazzMan name best.

We worked directly with Nordstrand on the custom pickup. To help keep the price reasonable, we used two standard split J pickups but the key to the sound is that we used two different J pickups and they are pushed to the outer edges of the shell. The one toward the neck is an NJ4se whereas the the bridge side is an NJ4sv. The differing winds have the effect of making the two sides sound as if they are further apart – the neck side has more low end and the bridge side has more high end even though the separation between the two coils is not that significant.

The body is chambered swamp ash with a unique quilt maple top. Finish is dark tung oil and paste wax. Neck is unfinished roasted maple with an ebony fingerboard. We went with an ebony fretboard so that the extension would be very sturdy. Stacked knobs are for a four band Audere preamp. Balance control pans between the two halves of the pickup. The strings are ultra responsive LaBella Supersteps. Weight is 9 lb 14 oz.

We think the bass sounds great, but have not had a chance to do any recordings yet. As one might think, it sounds a little bit like a J bass and a little bit like a MM bass. The ability to blend between the two sides of the pickup along with the four band equalizer make the bass extremely versatile.

Now that this one is off the bench we are looking forward to giving this one a long-term test drive and diving into our next charity project which is a time machine theme bass.

img_1252

img_1373

img_1375

img_1377

img_1378

img_1380

img_1388

Sound Clip

Well done!

Want YOUR bass to be featured for Bass of the Week?
Submit yours now using our easy web form

11 thoughts on “[Bass of the Week] Doner Designs JazzMan”

  1. Really beautiful bass. Did you carve the body first then laminate the maple? Did you stain the maple to look like the top is carved? Whatever, I really like it. For me it’s the little things that make an instrument stand out in the crowd and I like your name plate on the headstock and the metal plate on the back of the neck even though it is a neck through bass. For me the smoothe lines really gel with the overall design. Love it! I’m interested in your finish. I am making basses here in Nepal with four Tibetan boys but we have had real problems with our finish. We can’t bring danish oil from overseas as it is flammable, so we have been using Tung oil or french polish. We also make acoustic and classical guitars but for them we use shellac. You said you finished with tung oil and paste wax, is there a technique for that? We are just sanding in the tung oil but it takes an age to dry. The finish on your bass looks like the finish we would like on our basses… Thanks for sharing this beautiful instrument. Maurice.

    Reply
  2. think these guys are using Warmoth bodies and necks – which is fine – they didn’t really feature that in the article. Just goes to show how much you can do without wood shedding. They do have some interesting electronics going on in their basses for sure.

    Reply
  3. Maurice – thanks for your kind remarks! Andrew is correct about us using Warmoth bodies and necks. The finish is pure tung oil (dark) from the Real Milk Paint Company. We also finish it off with Minwax dark paste wax applied with 0000 steel wool. Long process. The oil application, waxing and buffing takes 2-3 months because the oil takes a long time to cure.

    Reply
  4. Andrew – correct. We have a router and do some light woodworking, especially on our charity theme projects, but we focus more on the design, finish, assembly and setup. One of these days we will cut our own body. I don’t guess we will ever have the skills needed to make a neck. My son and I are both electronic geeks and he is in engineering school, so that aspect is somewhat more interesting to us than the wood carving side.

    Reply
  5. Sorry about the quick and dirty sound sample. Going from memory, the segments are: neck coil, both coils, bridge coil and a single note panning through the tone controls.

    Reply
  6. How about putting a “stick on” type transducer (I’m thinking the type made for acoustic guitars as an under the bridge as opposed to under saddle type but the company name evades me right now) under the fretboard extension. Not sure of the tonal or sound quality but it would almost be worth it for the experiment. Beautiful bass and kudos for the pickup experiment. Glad it worked out

    Reply
    • Thanks! The origin of using a bolt on headstock logo is that a couple of early builds used dark exotic hardwoods, so a decal would not have worked very well. Besides the dark color, one was wenge which has a very coarse grain. Axetreme Creations makes the headstock name plates for us. The ovals and the neckplates are from another laser engraving shop called LazrArt. When they first came out with the ovals it seemed like a great way for us to put something on the back.

      Reply
  7. Great looking work. The only thing I would have done would be to move the control knobs out of the way. My play hand would certainly beat the one below the pickup to death. The name plate add a lot of class.

    Reply

Leave a Comment

Want a New Set of Pickups?
Enter for a chance to win: