{"id":7961,"date":"2015-10-28T11:27:07","date_gmt":"2015-10-28T16:27:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/?p=7961"},"modified":"2017-04-28T16:20:01","modified_gmt":"2017-04-28T21:20:01","slug":"bass-of-the-week-maurice-paul-wombat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/bass-of-the-week\/bass-of-the-week-maurice-paul-wombat.html","title":{"rendered":"[Bass of the Week] Maurice Paul Wombat"},"content":{"rendered":"

See the business listing for this bass builder here<\/a><\/p>\n

This week’s feature bass is a successful attempt at building a bass uke.<\/p>\n

Builder Maurice Coutanceau from Maurice Paul Guitars<\/a> writes:<\/p>\n

\n

My sister plays bass in a uke band and has done so for some time now using one of my acoustic basses with silicone strings, but she approached me to make an electric bass uke. I spent some time Googling this instrument but found that no one out there was into them apart from a guy called Max in America. After a few conversations with him I decided to give it a go and design my own bass uke, and this is the result. My main aims were that the bass should use magnetic pickups which required standard steel strings. The problems I faced were: 1 Making the body shape balanced when standing with a shoulder strap. I have kept to the formula of an upper horn placed around the 12th fret, and this seemed to work even for such a small instrument. Shaping the neck so that the strings would intersect the magnets on a standard P bass pickup Finding a bridge with string spacing that would allow #2 Finding strings that would have high enough tension so that the action would be low enough to play, but not so low that there would be fret buzz. After talking to Max, I decided to use strings made for a 5 string bass using the low B for the E, the E for the A, the A for the D and the D for the G. Initially I fretted the neck, but even with the higher tension of the thicker strings, there was a lot of fret buzz unless I raised the action so high that the bass was unplayable and the intonation was impossible to correct. So I chose to make it fretless. . Once I took out the frets and replaced the slots with a veneer, I was able to lower the action which also helped to correct the intonation problem to a point. Initially I had separate bass elements for the bridge as I was worried that the string spacing at the saddle would not be anywhere near standard 4 string. I was surprised to find that the spacing was almost the same as my full sized bass, so I elected to use a Schaller four string bridge which looked better I think. Since there are no steel strings made for the uke bass with a 21\u201d scale length, I needed to cut the strings short and file the ends in order for them to fit into the machine heads. This was especially needed for the B string as there was no way it was going to fit into the Gotoh machine head slot. The Pickup I chose for this is an active EMG P bass pickup<\/a> which I routinely use and really like on my full sized basses not knowing if it would work on such a small instrument. I was really surprised by the way it sounds. I think the B string (instead of the E) really works well and sounds amazing. The upper strings have a clarity that I don\u2019t have on my other basses and so if I didn\u2019t have such thick fingers I think this would be the bass of my choice to play in the band. This project has been a lot of fun and I will continue to make uke basses and experiment with the combination of woods, pickups and strings. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"04548_08_Original<\/p>\n

\"04548_09_Original<\/p>\n

\"04548_01_Bass<\/p>\n

\"04548_04_Betty<\/p>\n

\"04548_05_closeup<\/p>\n

\"04548_06_Detail<\/p>\n

\"04548_02_Bass<\/p>\n

\"04548_07_Front<\/p>\n

Well done!<\/p>\n

Want YOUR<\/i> bass to be featured for Bass of the Week?
Submit yours now using our easy web form<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

See the business listing for this bass builder here This week’s feature bass is a successful attempt at building a bass uke. Builder Maurice Coutanceau from Maurice Paul Guitars writes: My sister plays bass in a uke band and has done so for some time now using one of my acoustic basses with silicone strings, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":7952,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[19],"tags":[40],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7961"}],"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=7961"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7961\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}