Bass of the Week: Manton Customs Titan 6-String Bass

Daniel Brunn shared his new six-string Titan bass built by Robin Manton of Manton Customs and we were instantly intrigued. As modern as it looks, the instrument is inspired in part by instruments from the 17th century.

“This Titan is very much influenced by baroque instruments such as the Viola da Gamba,” Manton explains. “The wings and tone block are Flamed English Maple (Acer Pseudoplatanus), with some very strong fiddleback figure, this is the wood used on the majority of all the best classical and baroque instruments. For the top, the obvious choice was Spruce, but we didn’t want the plain figure that Spruce often has, so we chose Bear Claw Spruce with some wonderful figure, not dissimilar to Quilted Maple. We substituted the traditional choice of Ebony for the fingerboard with Bog Oak, this was chosen as it was important to us to have a more eco-friendly option to Ebony for this bass.”

The Titan has a large chamber in the body and also has a C-hole found on the Viola da Gamba rather than the traditional F-hole shape. The 36-inch scale bass is fitted with all German hardware and electronics, including a pair of Delano SBC pickups, a Delano Sonar X Pure circuit.

“In the neck position there is the SBC quad coil pickup, with a switch to cycle between Series, cross coil Precision, and reverse cross coil Precision,” the builder writes. “Which means this bass can nail the classic P bass tone even though it’s a wildly different instrument! In the bridge is an SBC dual coil with a switch for Series/Parallel/Single Coil and this is placed at the MM sweet spot to get that raspy sound!”

You can hear Brunn play his bass in this clip of Dark Standards performing a version of John Coltrane’s “Equinox”:

In addition to collaborating on the bass, Brunn and Manton wrote an eBook together called Boom! And Then There Was Bass and It Was Good and Everything Was Better. “During the process of putting [the bass] all together Robin and I became friends and we also put a free booklet about the bass guitar together,” Brunn tells us. “One chapter also talks about how we approached the instrument from both perspectives (player and builder) and how important that relationship is. We completed the book this year also as there was so much time to be creative.” The book is available now as a free download from Manton’s website.

Manton Customs Titan 6-String Bass Specs: