{"id":12153,"date":"2018-03-26T08:48:53","date_gmt":"2018-03-26T13:48:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/?p=12153"},"modified":"2018-03-26T08:57:53","modified_gmt":"2018-03-26T13:57:53","slug":"what-was-that-weird-bass-john-entwistle-played","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/article\/what-was-that-weird-bass-john-entwistle-played.html","title":{"rendered":"What was that weird bass John Entwistle played?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you want to talk about custom basses, the one that John Entwistle played in his later career (as in from 1985 until his passing) is pretty much as custom as it gets. <\/p>\n<p>For simplicity&#8217;s sake, the bass John played as shown above is a Buzzard bass. That&#8217;s not a company but rather a model name. Almost any tech spec sheet on this bass will describe things on this instrument as &#8220;irregular.&#8221; As in irregular body shape, irregular headstock shape, and so on.<\/p>\n<p>Early versions of the Buzzard were designed by John himself and Warwick and were made from only wood. Later versions had graphite necks made by Modulus that attached to Warwick bodies. Modulus is reported to have made a total of 6 graphite necks for John&#8217;s personal Buzzard basses. Even later versions of the Buzzard were made by Status, a UK-based builder specializing in graphite composite instruments (and is still in business!)<\/p>\n<p>John could, obviously, wrangle an unbelievably awesome live tone out of a Buzzard:<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><iframe src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/GQk0av8L0oY?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>While John was known to use several different basses over the years (including Alembic,) the Buzzard was the bass he was most seen with live from 1985 on.<\/p>\n<p>Where the Status Graphite version of the Buzzard is concerned, the body had a &#8220;basket weave&#8221; design for its overall body appearance (it was not just a straight gloss black,) neck with Roman numeral inlays, &#8220;hyperactive&#8221; pickups, 1\/4&#8243; stereo output, LED on\/off switch, bass cut\/boost knob, pickup blend knob, midrange on\/off toggle, midrange frequency knob, and master volume knob.<\/p>\n<p>Great bass? Well, the best way to answer that is that it was a great bass <em>for John<\/em>. John specifically designed the Buzzard to be as good as it could be for live performances, hence the heavy use of graphite (which does not shift anywhere near as much as regular wood does.) <\/p>\n<p>For you &#8220;modern Entwistle&#8221; tone chasers out there, the Buzzard used soapbar size pickups. We carry <a href=\"https:\/\/bit.ly\/soapbar-pickups\">many of those<\/a> by several different brands. The kinds best suited for a modern Entwistle style tone are ones that provide tons of range, have tremendous output, promote superior even string balance <em>and<\/em> have superior shielding for the best possible live sound. An example of that would be the <a href=\"https:\/\/bit.ly\/bart-singularity\">Bartolini Singularity<\/a>, but bear in mind that is one example because again, we carry many soapbar sized pickups, so choose carefully.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you want to talk about custom basses, the one that John Entwistle played in his later career (as in from 1985 until his passing) is pretty much as custom as it gets. For simplicity&#8217;s sake, the bass John played as shown above is a Buzzard bass. That&#8217;s not a company but rather a model &#8230; <a title=\"What was that weird bass John Entwistle played?\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/article\/what-was-that-weird-bass-john-entwistle-played.html\" aria-label=\"More on What was that weird bass John Entwistle played?\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":12154,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12153"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12153"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12153\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12156,"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12153\/revisions\/12156"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}