{"id":8424,"date":"2016-02-17T11:22:48","date_gmt":"2016-02-17T16:22:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/?p=8424"},"modified":"2017-04-28T16:26:18","modified_gmt":"2017-04-28T21:26:18","slug":"bass-of-the-week-david-emm-stingray-ss-1601","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/bass-of-the-week\/bass-of-the-week-david-emm-stingray-ss-1601.html","title":{"rendered":"[Bass of the Week] David Emm Stingray SS 1601"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

The feature bass for this week comes from Switzerland!<\/p>\n

Builder David Emm writes:<\/p>\n

\n

As a drummer\/guitarist I have always wanted to play the bass as well but up until now, I\u2019ve never had one. I\u2019ve played on many friends basses but without owning one. It’s hard to actually learn how to play properly. <\/p>\n

Midway through 2015 I decided this had to change. After looking around trying to find the right bass and not finding \u201cthe one,\u201d I came to the conclusion that maybe I should create the bass I wanted myself. <\/p>\n

A friend had a Music Man Stingray and that was my favourite bass I had played, so I decided this should be the guitar I base my creation off of. <\/p>\n

The main differences between the Music Man and my guitar would be that I would be building a neck through, and mine would be \u201cshort scale\u201d. After attempting to play a few short scale basses in music stores, I concluded I was on the right track. <\/p>\n

With there being a much lower supply of spare parts and hardware here in Switzerland, I sourced most of my parts from the USA and the UK, including from Best Bass Gear. My wood was sourced from Exotic Hardwoods LTD UK. After watching several months worth of YouTube videos, I finally started the build over the Christmas holiday period and the bass was finally completed at the end of January 2016. <\/p>\n

Despite being my first build from scratch (I had assembled a Stratocaster from parts) I was confident the months of building it in my head whilst watching YouTube would pay off, and it did. Knowing what I needed to do and in pretty much the right order made the project run quickly and I\u2019m very happy with the end result. The only problem I have now (and I hereby warn other self-builders about this) is that I now have the building bug and have the idea for numerous further projects of bass guitars, electric guitars, and even an electric violin in my head, I just have to work out how find the time and means to get the ideas out of my head and into existence in the real world. I would like to offer some advice to anyone else thinking of building their own instrument in the future and I have 4 main points and they are mostly about tools. <\/p>\n

1 Building a guitar is mostly about tools and how you use them, make sure you know how each tool works and test EVERY tool you use on spare wood before you use it, I learned this the hard way when my borrowed Router (which it tuned out was full of rust in the motor and collet) spat the bit out and put a massive hole in my neck wood right at the start of my project. Needless to say, that Router wasn\u2019t used again and I ended up buying a new one. I hadn\u2019t yet 100% learnt my lesson when I started using chisels and planes that didn\u2019t cut properly, after that mistake, it sunk in. <\/p>\n

2 Buy, Borrow, Beg, acquire-in-some-way GOOD quality tools. Normal DIY handymans tools will probably do the job, but only just. Good quality tools, make things easier, they do their job properly allowing you to concentrate on what you are doing and this reduces time, stress, mistakes and problems. Be prepared you may have to budget buying tools for your build, good tools will allow you to do many many projects, cheap tools and low quality tools may not even finish the first one! <\/p>\n

3 if you plan to use hardwood, FIND A BANDSAW, you don\u2019t need to buy one, just find one you can use for your main cuts, the neck profile and body outline. Bandsaws are 10000% better then Jigsaws to cut hardwood, the cut is cleaner, it cuts easier, you have much less vibration through your hands. My attempts to cut my neck out with a Jigsaw nearly ruined my whole project, luckily I found a friend of a friend who had a bandsaw and I used that to clean up my shapes and outlines giving me a much more accurate and cleaner finish. I hate to think what I would have ended up with if I only had my jigsaw to cut the outlines. <\/p>\n

4 Using hand tools is a much practiced skill. This is a skill I was out of practice with and using imperfect planes and chisels (even after sharpening) were making a mess of my wood. Power tools saved the day. I used an angle grinder with a Saburrtooth carving disk to carve the belly cut, the neck\/body join, the arm bevel and the back of the guitar. I hadn\u2019t done this before either, but a quick test proved that I was more comfortable with this method. <\/p>\n

My bass specifications <\/strong><\/p>\n

Strings – 4
Scale Length – 768mm (30.25\u201d)
Body wood – Sapele body wings, Zebrawood top
Finish – Hand oiled
Neck wood – Maple with thin hand oiled finish
Nut width – 42mm (1.65\u201d)
Headstock shape – Music Man style 3+1
Neck profile – chunky C at headstock end transitioning to flatter (but not thinner) C\/D at neck\/body join
Fingerboard – Mexican Rosewood Bocote
Bridge – Hipshot A style
String Spacing – 16.5mmm (0.656\u201d)
Strings – Rotosound Trubass 88 black nylon tapewound
Tuners – Wilkinson
Pickup – Active EMG MMTW<\/a> splittable pickup
Preamp\/EG – Active EMG BTS Control 2 band EQ<\/a>
Power – 18V
Weight – 5.0kg (11 lbs) <\/p>\n

I hope to find a way to record the sounds of this bass and put it on the YouTube, to me it sounds great! However this will first require me to learn how to play it to the point I don’t offend the entire bass community with my terrible skills and secondly I may have to acquire an audio interface <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"02836_03__DSC8701<\/p>\n

\"02836_04__DSC8706<\/p>\n

\"02836_05__DSC8709<\/p>\n

\"02836_06__DSC8717<\/p>\n

\"02836_02__DSC8693<\/p>\n

\"02836_01__DSC8684<\/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 The feature bass for this week comes from Switzerland! Builder David Emm writes: As a drummer\/guitarist I have always wanted to play the bass as well but up until now, I\u2019ve never had one. I\u2019ve played on many friends basses but without owning one. It’s hard … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":8417,"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\/8424"}],"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=8424"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8424\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}