There was a neat little write-up on doing your own electric guitar or bass pickups here and they asked for mirrors of a sound file of these pickups on a bass, so I thought I'd give them one.

Here is the sound file mp3 link.

I chopped the most relevant section out and pumped the gain for easier listening. I had to turn my speakers up too loud to hear it.

The tone isn't bad, but I was hoping for something ballsier. I'll have to read up a lot more on pickups if I decide to do another home-made bass guitar. The comment storm on that site is definitely worth checking out as well, I haven't had enough time to read through it though!

So after I put up my initial story about my homemade bass guitar, I thought about maybe making another one on spec. I decided to ask the bass forum at Harmony-Central what they thought about this. Here's my initial post:

a while back (4-5 years ago) I built my own DIY electric bass with around $700 in materials/tools outlay

you can see pictures and a bit of a story about my instrument at http://www.maxopedia.org/?q=DIY_bass

I have a couple questions for you guys.

1. If this bass were made to a very high level of fit 'n' finish with even higher quality materials, would you consider purchasing it for yourself or someone you know?
2. What do you see as the fair value of this instrument?

I am thinking about building another custom instrument based on this design. This would be a speculative build with the intent to sell, and the vast majority of my efforts would go into perfecting the design, sourcing high quality woods/components, and producing an instrument with an extremely high level of polish.

just wondering what people think - would it be worth it to build a spec instrument?

People's responses varied. For some reason the people over at the Harmony-Central bass forums believe that CUSTOM_BASS = MULTI_PIECE_NECK. I have no idea why they think this, and perhaps a different forum would yield a different response. Here are some of the better tidbits with my responses.

is that a single slab neck? I'd be concerned about it's stability.
-catphish

Is this really a concern? Is it a must that high-end custom instruments have laminate necks? My understanding is that this issue is very contentious from a practicality standpoint. Some builders swear by one-piece necks, others don't. Personally I somewhat prefer the single-slab in terms of aesthetics. Sandwich basses are not my thing. As an aside though, the exact neck in this instrument carbon fiber reinforced. I am not sure if this is a good thing or bad thing. Perhaps if I went with an all-wood neck I would want to go laminate.

like some of the ideas, but in my honest opinion the complete finished item looks like a collection of styles that you'd expect to find on three different guitars. The elabourate scrollwork on the horn looks out of character with the generic shape of some aspects of the rest of the guitar. You should've done more to make the head stand out as much as the body does.
The electronics cavity cover could do with a re-think, It looks rushed and out of character. If I had your woodworking skills I'd make a more rounded shape out of the cavity cover and sink an acetate cover in flush with the back of the body, using CSK screws. This would look a lot more professional, and because its not aluminium, it'd be easier to shield the electrical connections to prevent shorting.
On the bright side, I'm a fan of original/quirky guitars and if I saw this one hanging up in the shop, I'd deffinately be tempted to pick it up and play. The finish looks good and I'm sure you could find a more mature or denser mahogany to recover some of the tone.
as for price, you have to bear in mind that mass made guitars are made in vast numbers, and as a result the manufacturer gets materials and components in bulk VERY cheaply. I heard that manufacturers and distributors can easily make a 400% mark up on final sale price, meaning a squire stratocaster would probably cost less than £25 to manufacture. They make so many that this profit margin is enough for the factory to cover overheads and labour. On this basis, a $700 guitar with the features on yours would not make a good value sale, especially considering that you probably spent hundreds of work hours building it and this would equate to $1200 in labour (100 hours, semi-skilled labour). The finished guitar, all things considered, probably cost you closer to $2000. However, I'm sure that if (in the unlikely instance) you actually made this guitar as a prototype for a mass market guitar, through outsourcing, mass buying and careful consideration to the number of components and manufacturing processes, you could manufacture that guitar for less than 5% of what you spent.
But at the end of the day, I'm taking this all to seriously and if practical creativity and design innovation makes you happy, then this project was a 100% success. I wish I could work wood as well as you, I've only learnt how to work metal!
- James_Russell

For some reason I just really wanted to do a scroll. I can understand where you're coming from in regards to the pastiche of styles that were the genesis for this bass. Personally, I love the design. I am a much more an artist than I am a woodworker. I've had many people flip out over the curves and proportions of the bass; I feel comfortable I've made the right decision in regards to overall silhouette. I was looking for something that marries the modern instrument to the classical one while not forgetting the stylistic conventions that make the electric guitar so playable and comfortable.

I agree that the headstock design could possibly use something more, and that the control cavity cover was rushed. I believe on the next version of the design the control cavity cover will simply be part of the bass itself (made from wood). This was what I originally intended in a vague sort of way, but poor planning reared its ugly head. As far as the headstock, I very much prefer the simple design, with the overall shape only elaborated/extended by a small amount in version 2. I would also make sure that I put a 'signature' of some sort on each instrument if I was producing them commercially, most likely on the headstock. Perhaps a striking logo or design on the simple headstock is all that is needed.

I guess I should have said more clearly that I wasn't intending for this to go into 'production' as in mass production. Even if I have a 'production design' I'm working off of, the instrument is going to lovingly hand crafted and carved by myself personally. I'm thinking more along the lines of a design aesthetic and template that I perfect so I can guarantee as much as possible that each instrument that leaves the shop is well-designed from every practical perspective in terms of playability, maintenance, and ease of construction.

As far as making a living doing something like this and getting an economy of scale going - I have no desire! However, I would like to see if I could perhaps make a small profit while doing something I think is cool and learning more about it. If I perfected my existing design and did a spec build, I would have no trouble putting a $1500 - $4000 price tag on it, but I'm curious what others think, and that's why I posted on this forum.

Also, making my first bass was very fun and fulfilling, but making another one for myself wouldn't be nearly as worthwhile. I'd like my creations to get out into the world and have lives of their own.

Nope I wouldn't buy it. I don't mind the shape, although I don't like the lower horn, but I realize what it takes to make a great bass and most luthiers perfect their trade over years and years. Maybe in 20 I will though?
- willsellout

yea! That's exactly what I wanted to hear.

I think your bass looks very nice, but I dont know you and I will not gamble 1500-4000 dollars just to see if the bass sounds good. When you get into that price range, you are competing with vintage basses, Sadowsky, Warwick, Pedulla, all the biggest names. I know I can buy one of those, and 99 times out of 100 it will be unbelievable.
- landbriancoe

If I built a spec bass and it did not match up to one of those very excellent instruments that you mentioned, I would not attempt to price it as such. I was actually sort of thinking of Sadowsky in particular, and how they take a simple design and make it something spectacular in the execution.

As for selling the bass, that is a secondary consideration to crafting the bass I was aiming for when I made this one. However, one option is to place it on consignment in a high-end music store here in the Chicago area where I live. I wouldn't expect any potential buyer to not be able to play the bass before purchasing. That would be ridiculous. I certainly wouldn't buy my bass without playing it and hearing what it sounds like, preferably through a multitude of amps.

I think it takes guts to make something like that and then say "If I built more similar, would people buy them?".
- bassman1956

yea! More people need to get some guts and learn how to believe in themselves.

Just as an aside, I probably would have never conceived of perfecting my design and attempting to sell it except for the numerous people over the years that have played my bass and said they wanted one too.

so in conclusion, if you want to build a bass yourself for fun and profit. . .

Make sure you go with at least a 3-piece neck. Hahaha.

and get your learn on

Building Electric Guitars: How to Make Solid-Body, Hollow-Body and Semi-Acoustic Electric Guitars and Bass Guitars

Make Your Own Electric Guitar & Bass

Plant Basics

I really like having house plants. Sometimes it seems like a chore, but ultimately they bring joy.

I also like to know how things work, so I've tried to learn how plants work. Although I have spent a good part on my life on a farm, my knowledge of plants was relatively minimal when I started having plants in my apartment in college.

There were really just a few fundamental things I had to learn about plants to make sure they would thrive. Here are some blooms from an amaryllis that I originally got from my mom. Unfortunately, because I have not created the right environment for them in the past couple years, they have not bloomed since. That's actually kind of nice, because the blooms are messy. At least they are pretty!

I was able to produce these blooms by relying on a few basic concepts.

• light

• nutrients + pH
• root medium
• temperature

  
  

The particular medium I used that successfully resulted in these huge blooms was a bit of coco coir mixed with perlite. Coco coir is a very interesting medium. I believe it is made from the ground up husks of mature coconuts. It can absorb a great deal of water, but when it reaches capacity extra water will run right through it. As you can see in the photo, it is quite fibrous. Coco coir is awesome, it has great moisture retention capabilities while allowing maximum oxygen to reach the roots. The only downside is that if you are using almost straight coco coir (mixed with a little perlite), you're going to have to use some sort of totally-encompassing nutrient solution as the coco coir offers little sustenance to the plant. I went with a chemical approach.



General hydroponics is probably best known as the workhorse of the indoor marijuana growing community. I don't grow weed, but this nutrient solution is awesome. It is no more expensive than most normal nutrient solutions (i.e. miracle grow), you just have to buy a bit more of it all at once. Shown here are two bottles that you have to mix in order to achieve the correct proportions of nutrients (according to your plant and period in the growing cycle). The 'FloraMicro' solution shown here is nitrogen-heavy (5-0-1 NPK), and the 'FloraBloom' solution is phosphorous and potassium heavy (0-5-4 NPK). Because I live in a very urban area with very basic tap water that comes out at about 8.2 pH, I have a bottle of phosphoric acid in order to drop the pH of the nutrient solution further than simply adding the NPK mix. Being able to precisely control the pH is absolutely required in a hydroponics growing system. If you let the pH get too high or too low, you prevent the plant from optimally absorbing nutrients. The same problem can occur in normal soil, but it usually takes a very long time for problems to surface while some external factor is causing your pH to rise or fall. If you're container gardening with coco coir like I do with my amaryllis, it's quite a bit more responsive than soil, but much more forgiving than in a water culture system. With not much more effort than maintaining a soil plant, a simple hydroponics solution can yield some very impressive houseplants.

Conceivably, an organic hydroponics system might be even easier to maintain, but I think learning how to play god with a plant using chemical nutrients is a useful learning tool. Your control over the plant's well-being is very apparent. When you burn a plant or starve it of nutrients when you're using chemicals, you can only blame yourself. If you use the chemicals right, the plant loves you!

the challenging part for most apartment dwellers

I have never been able to get a decent amount of light to my plants from natural sources. Some apartments have good light-producing windows, but they are few and far between. Also, living in a temperate zone, there is just not enough light to make houseplants bloom year-round. After you solve the limiting factor of nutrient and moisture uptake, the only thing that limits your plants is the amount of light they can effectively use. Some plants can't use as much light as others. The amaryllis does not seem to be particularly sensitive to light levels. I have been able to get them to thrive vegetatively on relatively low light, but exposing it to large amounts of sunlight is required for blooming.

Alternatively, you can provide your own indoor sunlight. The cheapest and most effective way to do this would be to buy four foot fluorescent shoplights from your local hardware store. The issue with these lights is that you want to get them as close to the plants as possible due to the inverse-square law. Essentially, this means that as your plants get farther from the light source, they get exponentially less light per unit of distance.

The important thing to realize about artificial light is that amount of electricity the bulb consumes in watts is not a measure of the light output of the bulb. This is why when you go to buy compact fluorescent lights in a store, you see the 'equivalent watts' of incandescent light that would be required to match the 10 or 20 watt CFL.

GE 26 Watt (100Watt equivalent) Energy Smart Spiral® T3 Light Bulb 3 Count #15517
This is because the most important measure of light for your plants is the number of lumens a bulb produces. Although spectra (color) of the light produced is also a very important concern, the overall production of light is where your focus should lie.

Although CFLs are a decent high-efficiency light solution for growing house plants, the cheapest way to go fluorescent is with the 4 foot tubes. Interestingly, the most common form of 4 foot fluorescent tubes, the 'T-12' size, is not the most efficient in terms of lumens/watts ratio, which is what you want to focus on. The T-10 size of bulbs has a higher lumens/watts ratio.

One important thing to realize about the 4 foot shop-light types of fixtures is that they require a 'ballast' in order to function properly. Essentially, CFLs are no different from the big tubes we've had around for years and years, but they have been designed so they do not require a ballast to regulate the current they receive from their power source. However, ballasts introduce a power inefficiency, and different ballasts are more or less efficient than others. This inherent inefficiency of the shop-light solution has to be factored into your lumens/watts ratio.

Because they produce little heat, fluorescent lamps have the advantage of being able to be placed very closely to the plants - preferably at a distance of less than 30 cm. Take advantage of this as much as possible. The inverse-square law is not your friend. In order to get maximum efficiency from your lights you have to sometimes go to great lengths.

Although fluorescents offer the best value for the money, and are very energy efficient, the premier solution for growing plants indoors is HID (high intensity discharge) lighting. These lights come in two main flavors that offer slightly different spectras and energy-efficiencies; high-pressure sodium (red spectra, most efficient) and metal-halide (blue spectra, slightly less efficient than HPS).

However, HID lights have several disadvantages.

• their ballasts can be quite loud

• bulbs can be expensive and fragile
• initial cost can be quite high
• they produce a large amount of heat, both from the bulb and from the ballast
• few stores carry them - sometimes you can get smaller wattage ones (50-150 watts) from Home Depot/Lowes that are marketed as 'security lights'

For many of these reasons, HID lighting is only intended for the most serious of indoor growers that demand an experience for their plants as close as possible to actual sunlight. However, one small 70 watt HID lamp can provide a huge amount of light for a vast number of house plants. Furthermore, the massive heat (and light) generated by the HID lamps require that you move the bulbs a good distance from your plants so as to not burn them. This can result in a far easier setup than trying to get your four-foot fluorescent fixtures no more than a foot away from each part of a given plant.

This 250 watt HID light could provide light for an impressive indoor garden, so for some people they are a perfect solution: Econogro Mini 250 Watt HPS Grow Light

However, if you can deal with the space-configuration/inverse-square law fight, go with the four-foot shoplights using T-10 bulbs. If you want cheap and easy space-configuration, go with CFLs. If you don't give a rats ass and just want the most awesome lights possible, get some HID, either metal-halide or high-pressure-sodium. Right now I'm using CFLs for space issues, and I don't want to get an HID lamp because of heat and noise. I only have one 40 watt CFL here, and I hope to add at least 2 more. Two more should be enough light to make my amaryllis to bloom again.

Notice the totally shady aluminum foil reflector. If you go to a bunch of trouble to get some good lights for your plants, you don't want half (or more) of that light just hitting the ceiling. You don't need anything fancy. White posterboard, white-painted walls, and aluminum foil are all very efficient reflectors.

UPDATE 12/19/2007: To see part two of the DIY Bass Guitar saga, please visit http://www.maxopedia.org/DIY_bass_guitar_for_fun_and_profit

So, sometime around the age of sixteen, I started getting into music. The first instrument I learned to play was the electric bass. One thing I quickly learned about musical instruments is that a decent one costs a good amount of money; the sky is the limit for premium and vintage instruments.

So, shortly after I got my first cheap bass, I was scheming to build my own home-made bass guitar. Building an electric bass or guitar is not that difficult in the grand scheme of woodworking, but making an instrument that looks nice and plays even nicer is a fine art even when you're talking about electric instruments.

I cooked up a Carl Thompson-esque design and started sourcing my parts. Even though I was seventeen when I started the project, I had enough money from working a couple shitty jobs to drop $700 on materials and equipment. I already had a good bit of tools before and I had even more after I was done.

The instrument was built as a neck-through. I did not want to buy the tools or spend the time to learn how to do fretwork and shape a neck, so I picked up a Carvin neck with a blank headstock. The tuners, knobs, and output jack are all Carvin-sourced. The pickups are Seymour Duncan, the bridge is a special brass Hipshot - that kind of sucked though because it was back-ordered for several months.

The body is made out of mahogany that I got from a local furniture builder that just happened to have some in the thicknesss I was looking for. This was actually unfortunate as the wood was not suitable for building instruments. It was mahogany, but not the appropriate grade. One thing I learned about mahogany is that the dust is essentially poisonous. Part of the reason the damn thing took so long was the sanding process... it would lay me out for the next week with congestion even though I wore a mask. I hand-carved all of the body contours and the scroll work in the horn. It's funny, because in some of the pictures I took, that horn looks a lot like a penis. I didn't realize my bass guitar's upper horn was a paean to masculinity. The finish on the wood is danish oil, and although I know that this is not a protective finish, the wood just becomes more and more beautiful over time. Also, if it ever sustains serious enough damage to necessitate a re-finishing, the process is relatively simple.

Foolishly, I did not make or buy templates for routing the pickup cavities, so they were done freehand with a dremel tool and router attachment. Perhaps this adds character. One particular challenge with the way I designed this bass was routing the wires from the pickups to the control cavity. I did this by (foolishly) buying a long-ass drill bit and just sort of 'guess-drilling' from the control cavity to the approximate location of the pickups. Oh boy howdy, do I have excellent planning. Needless to say, I didn't do it perfectly, and you can see a near-miss in one of the pictures that caused damage to the top of the instrument right around the pickup cavity. The price you pay for success I suppose.

The project took me about 2 years to complete, and technically speaking, the instrument is barely finished. I have left many of the details quite rough as you can see in the photographs. I need to replace the output jack at some point and re-do all the wiring in the control cavity. It is an awful mess and I have spared you those pictures. The control cavity cover with two different screws in it is actually intentional, and I would leave it on the 'finished' instrument. I view it somewhat as my signature although some people have suggested that I should literally sign my bass or in some way put a logo on it. The headstock is a ripe spot for some design, but I kind of like it simple.

Appendix A

I didn't just spring out of the womb with fully formed knowledge of woodworking - I had a lot of help along the way. One great resource was the forum at TalkBass. I put up a thread there about my project, and received some very good responses. Here are some of the more direct questions.

()smoke() - i'm sure the experience you gained is worth a great deal as well--do you plan to build another?

Well, this was something I was thinking about lately. I'm not sure I'd want to build another bass for myself, I'd probably want to sell it. Obviously I'd have to pay a lot more attention to fit'n'finish but it might not be a bad idea. If I made a different design though, I wouldn't want to sell it. It might be advantageous to just keep the design the same, and spend time perfecting it.

Handyman - Looks great! You just need to come up with a spiffy logo for your headstock now.

I think if I was selling someone a bass like this, I'd want some sort of logo on it, if for nothing else than promotional reasons. I don't know what approach I'd want to take with that either. I'm not knowledgeable about inlay techniques, which is what I see when I think of a logo on the headstock of my bass, but perhaps I'd want to take it in a different direction. However, I am somewhat ignorant of my options.

62bass - That's a very nice bass for a first job. I wouldn't worry about "high end" pickups. Those Duncans sound great. How do you like the Carvin neck? I'm very impressed with their quality. Great fret work on mine and didn't need any leveling.

I love the neck, it really makes the bass. I'd probably just go with it again even though I think it's a bit pricey.

To be honest, I'm not a huge fan of the tone of my bass. It's my main instrument and it has a good sound, but it's not what I was looking for when I made it. I'm not sure if this is due to the low-grade mahogany I used, or the pickups. It seems to me that the tone of most electric basses is largely a function of the pickups.

Don't get me wrong though guys, I love my bass. I wouldn't bother taking an insurance policy out on it, because it's priceless.

Appendix B - add mass to bass headstock or bridge for sustain

I saw someone found this page by this search query: "diy add mass to bass headstock".

It's interesting, because this was one of the things I was thinking about when I was working on my bass. I really wanted it to have a lot of sustain, and that's why I special-ordered a heavy brass bridge.

I also thought about this idea of adding mass to a headstock. I decided not to to do it because it would unbalance the instrument and make it unwieldy. It's also doubtful how much sustain it would actually add. Furthermore, it necessitates further design complications and considerations. If anyone has ever done this successfully, let me know!

I would have also put the strings through the body, but I did not want to add this extra time and effort to my design when I was originally building the guitar.

One thing that really worked against me was the relatively low density mahogany I used for the body wings. Don't make the same mistake I did!

Overall, I'd say my bass ended up with average sustain.