Bass of the Week: StoryWood Music 5-String Deluxe “O” Bass

We’ve featured one bass by Storywood Music before, and luthier Tyler Townsend has just shared their latest bass creation with us. The company, which specializes in utilizing reclaimed materials, salvaged pieces of buildings from three states and another country to create the Deluxe “O” Bass.

Townsend gave us a great rundown of the project, so we’ll let him take it from here:

“The “other” offset bass – This Deluxe “O” Bass was custom built for professional bassist Rene Flores, aka the Groovin’ Cuban, from Orlando, Florida. Rene wanted a unique instrument, both visually and functionally, but one he could make his “daily driver.” We recommended this model as we love the freedom that comes from using this “other” offset bass style. It doesn’t come with the design baggage that other body shapes sometimes do and looks perfectly at home with any pickup configuration and type on the market. Rene was on board.

The body is made entirely from reclaimed and salvaged wood from a variety of sources, as are all StoryWood instruments. In this case, the body is composed of a core made from alternating pieces of reclaimed old-growth mahogany from the Vaughan Furniture Factory in Galax, Virginia and reclaimed maple gymnasium flooring from Creighton University. An interesting note – the mahogany was featured during an episode of Salvage Dawgs on the DIY network as their team salvaged this wood and other parts of the factory itself. The body is capped with fire-salvaged Port Orford Cedar that was harvested from the forest after a devastating 6-month long fire in southwest Oregon. The neck is the same gymnasium maple coupled with a fingerboard made from water-salvaged rock walnut recovered after spending nearly a century under water in a lake in Panama, where valleys were flooded while building the Panama canal.

Rene wanted an instrument he could use on stage and in the studio to cover a wide range of needs. We reached out to Ulyate pickups out of Nashville for this set of his Tic-Tac style Jazz pickups with oblong pole pieces and coupled them with the Aguilar OBP-3 preamp. We jumped on the tic-tac pole piece as a design element and incorporated fingerboard fret inlays in roughly the same shape as a subtle way to tie them together. This bass also has a full Graphtech Ghost piezo system on board with a toggle for jazz pickups alone, piezo alone, or a blend of the two.

The mahogany and rock walnut cutoffs were sent to Clayton Corrello for a custom set of wooden knobs that match the bass perfectly. Final touches include Luminlay side dots that help visibility on dark stages and a matching back cover for the electronics cavity.”

StoryWood Music 5-String Deluxe “O” Bass Specs: