Bass Gear - Page 229

After featuring a beautiful 1969 Fender Precision Bass in our Old School series, Tim Wolfe, Jr. sent us a note about his 1962 Precision. Not only is this one great looking bass, the story is equally terrific. Tim’s grandfather gave him the bass after playing it for years. Here’s the story… How long have you owned it? Around a decade...

Three years after selling Lakland Basses to a private investment group, Dan Lakin is getting back into the bass building business. His new company, D. Lakin Basses, is launching two new models that with his signature artists Joe Osborn and Bob Glaub. The Joe Osborn 4 is defined by a pair of single coil D. Lakin pickups with a 1.5″...

Dutch luthier Rikkers Custom Basses turns thirty this year, and to celebrate the company has introduced two new bass models: the Acoustiline and the Acidline. As with the rest of their instruments, the basses are hand made in the North of Holland. The Rikkers Acoustiline is a unique hollow body acoustic bass defined by its bass-reflex ports in the upper...

Shredneck, a company that specializes in practice and travel instruments, has introduced the Z-Series of travel basses. At a total body length of 36.25″, the Z-Series bass is approximately 5/8ths the size of a standard bass guitar. The instrument’s 2-piece nato body is loaded with a PJ pickup configuration with volume and tone controls. The maple neck is topped with...

Murray Kuun is a South African luthier who admits he came to the profession relatively late in life, but his passion is in creating fresh designs. “I am not keen on making copies of instruments that have been copied ad nauseam,” he shared. “All my instruments are original designs.” His first bass model is the Elemental, a neck-thru bass with...

Up for a review is the Ibanez SRF700 Portamento, a 4-string fretless from the company’s new Bass Workshop series. The bass is fitted with some nice features for a bass under a thousand bucks, namely piezo pickups imbedded in the bridge and integrated with Bartolini active pickups. The bonus here is that the piezos actually sound great and not harsh....

Italian string manufacture D’Orazio has announced a new set of strings for upright bass called the Spyrachrome. Designed for psychobilly slap style players, the new strings are described as soft to the touch with high magnetic response for improved use with pickups. The Spyrachrome is made with a flat wire steel/chrome winding over a steel rope core created by D’Orazio....

Gallien-Krueger has announced the company’s new CX Series of bass enclosures. Designed to compliment their MB Series of heads, the cabinets are loaded with proprietary ceramic drivers designed and built in the United States. Each of the units also has a horn with a defeat switch and both Speakon and quarter-inch inputs. The lineup starts with the CX115, a 300-watt...

Scottish luthier Alan Cringean of AC Guitars has introduced a singlecut version of his Krell bass, which was unveiled last year. The new model features all of the body contours of its predecessor but replaces the upper horn with a continuous slab to connect more of the neck to the body. The new design features a flat fingerboard with a...

Spector introduced their Helium Series of NS and Forte basses at Winter NAMM this year. The series uses a unique combination of reclaimed woods to create basses that weigh in at seven pounds and twelve ounces. “The top of this neck thru body instruments wings are carved from quarter sawn sycamore obtained from salvaged logs of trees which have blown...

Wounded Paw Effects has released the Black Sheep Bass Preamp, a rackmountable pre designed for tonal flexibility. Its sound is based around six parallel overdrives focusing on six different frequency bands, giving you control to drive different frequencies of your signal in varying amounts. The Black Sheep also has a fully buffered effects loop that can be run in parallel...

This week we check out a cool collaboration between Bee Basses luthier Fred Bolton and Dan Lenard of the boutique bass website Luthiers Access Group. While many Bee Basses instruments are ordered as extended range instruments, Bolton and Lenard decided to create a “normal” bass in the form of a 5-string. The resulting Worker Bee 5 is still beyond normal....