Bass of the Week: Cetonia Music Tools Horizontal Sawn Bass

Many basses are created to showcase the beautiful figuring of exotic woods. A young luthier from Italy has taken that idea in a different direction. Clod of Cetonia Musical Instruments shared his latest bass with us called the Cetonia Horizontal Sawn Bass. As the name suggests, the wood used for its body was cut horizontally to showcase the rings of the tree.

Clod says the feature has always been scrapped, misread, and therefore never realized. He points out the cut is usually relegated to decorative trivets, but it can be used for more than that.

“[I found] a treatment to stabilize this [type of cut] and make it suitable even for musical instruments, so the bass features this beautiful body made from an old Tuscan pine log, reclaimed like all the woods I use for my instruments,” he tells us. “The shape, the colors and the distressed and relic treatment made it look like a really old item of dark and fairy-tale appearance. Such a look is inspired by the horror cinema of directors like Tim Burton and Mario Bava. The idea behind the realization of the bass was to channel the oneiric sceneries of these movies into a real tangible instrument that in turn can create sounding art. I put the years of experience of my work and my faith in this idea to make this actualization happen, and I think this is what makes this bass so special.”

The bass is completed with a bolt-on maple neck with a rosewood fingerboard that features large arbutus inlays. Its body meets the neck at the 16th fret, and the luthier explains that they are only accessed by right hand tapping. He also pared down the electronics, opting for a single DiMarzio P pickup wired to the output with just an on/off switch that’s hidden on the side of the bass. Completing the horror theme is a custom iron bat string retainer and copper bridge cover.

Clod shared a short bass demo, but he also told us about the bass’s tonal profile. “The position of the wood grain in this sawn doesn’t let the vibrations of the strings flow freely through the wood structure of the bass, rather it creates a solid mass that supports them lying underneath,” he says. “Instead of smoothing the vibration of the metal of the strings it
enhances it, this along with the minimal electronic circuit results in a raw tone, sometimes harsh, just as I intended it to be.”

You can find Cetonia Music Tools on their Instagram page.

Cetonia Music Tools Horizontal Sawn Bass Specs: