Antonio and Leonidas: Naming (part two)

Building the P-Bass-Man PART TWO

(part one here)

At the beginning of this year (2013) I had (lying about) a gutted P-Bass, a surprisingly poor sounding  Split Pea Pup and J-Bass pup, along with a new Mighty Mite replacement pickup for a MusicMan bass. The wheels started turning and I began to think about Leo Fender and violin makers. Not that the two are exceptionally connected, it's just what I was reading up on…

Clarence Leonidas "Leo" Fender released the electric bass guitar in 1951 through the Fender Musical Instruments Corporation. It was the first of it's kind! The first stringed bass instrument with frets, which allowed it's player to play more precisely, hence the name: Precision Bass.

Without Leo Fender's invention of the P-Bass (along with the Jazz Bass and the Stratocaster and Telecaster guitars) rock 'n' roll would be a different animal. That alone is impressive, but Fender went on to MusicMan and developed the Sting Ray bass—a new sounding bass for a new musical era. For my purposes, I had bits of a Sting Ray and pieces of a P-Bass… wheels turning, ideas happening.

In 1965 Leo Fender sold The Fender Musical Instrument Corporation to CBS. He was told that he hadn't long to live. After selling the company he sought a second opinion (concerning his health) and was treated and recovered from his illness. I expect he was kicking himself at this point.

In the early 1970s the Tri-Sonix Company was developing which would later become MusicMan. By 1975 Fender was the company's president and in 1976 the Sting Ray bass was born. The Sting Ray bass looked very similar to the P-Bass with the exception of a different headstock and pickguard. However, the defining characteristic of the Sting Ray was it's high-output bridge humbucker pickup fed into active electronics. Active electronics being another first. Here was Leo Fender again at another major milestone in bass history.

Fender himself was not a bass (or guitar) player and in fact had hearing damage, making high frequencies difficult for him to hear. Sterling Ball (of Ernie Ball which now owns MusicMan) has a fun anecdote about Leo Fender: Fender in his shop holding a screw driver to his ear so he could feel the string vibrate—full story here. "Popular music was shaped because Leo Fender couldn't hear the high end," says Sterling Ball and now millions of rock fans can enjoy the same hearing loss! ha!

Like I said, I was reading about violin making and makers. This very quickly takes you to Antonio Stradivari, who went by Antonius Stradivarius since it was fashionable to Latin-ize your name at that time. I have a Stradivarius, however it's of the Selmer variety. I can't help but draw some comparisons between these two instrument makers, although Leo Fender probably has more in common with Henry Ford than Stradivari.

I picture Antoni Stradivari as William Shakespeare—suppose that's odd since Shakespeare was an Englishman (not Italian). However, I more or less picture Shakespeare like Roberto Benigni with a moustache. After reading this bit about all the cool kids Latinizing their names, then reading that "Leo" was short for Leonidas and not Leonard, I had arrived at a name for this bass, which up until this point I've called "Jim's Bass."

Violins receive names from exceptional players that have owned them or similar circumstances. It's interesting to me how old violins are, that they keep being passed down through generations of players—centuries of musicians playing the same instrument! By comparison, electric bass guitars are in their infancy and I wonder how long they will last…

I think instruments made with care and consideration carry something unknown with them. As a player you either connect with that or not. I was never able to name my trumpet and I think that was because I never felt a strong connection with it. With bass guitars, I like that you can take them apart, mess with their guts, make them your own. I don't know if I have the right bass yet—the one that thumps and howls just the way I would like it to, but I'll keep trying and Leonidas is a step in that direction.

More on the build to follow…

Kitchen Sink Poster

A noir set in modern times, Kitchen Sink opens May 17th! More info here.

Antonius and Leonidas: Ricardo (part one)

Building the P-Bass-Man PART ONE

Building the P-Bass-Man takes me back to when I first started playing music outside of the school band program. Maybe it's because of the history of the Fender Precision Bass—the first of it's kind and still the industry standard… but, more likely it how this particular P-Bass came my way.

The P-Bass was a gift from Jim on my 22nd birthday. I answered my basement apartment door and he was standing there with a red bass guitar. He handed it to me saying that he was inspired by Wolfman to learn bass, but hadn't yet and didn't expect he would.

Jim and I were horn players—him tenor and me, trumpet. In addition to the high school band program, we played in a ska band together, Captain Chewie and the Space Skadets.  Jim started getting things organized in 1996 and on New Year's Day 1997 we had our first practice.

Captain Chewie and the Space Skadets, 1997.

For the length of the band we seemed to have a new bass player every few months. Ric was the third bass-man to play with us and he was mind blowing. A big guy in his mid-twenties, he was something of a beast when he played—massive hands slapping and plucking at the strings—steam rising off his bald head—we called him Wolfman. We were all 16-18 years old except Wolfman and then eventually we just couldn't get a hold of him—I imagine he got sick of hanging out with kids. And, we were on to our fourth and final bass player.

Too young to play bars in Beloit, WI—except for Ric—who doesn't
look too happy about driving to Wisconsin for a picture.

Some of Ric's exceptional bass playing in Captain Chewie's The Card from 1999:


So why was a tenor player giving a trumpet player a bass? Well, I've left out some details (and several banalities). Around 2000 Captain Chewie split up as we all started moving away to college and other endeavors, so I took up bass. I was teaching myself through the tried and true method of hunting and pecking—essentially playing horn lines on bass. First, in a quintet called Echolalia, which split into a trio called The Dynamo Theorem. Eventually the trio became a quartet with Jim on tenor, changing our name to Ladyradio.

Hunting and pecking in Echolalia, 2001.
Courtyard Cafe, Champaign, IL.

Up to this point I was playing a Squier P-bass. Originally a pretty cream color which I chipped off, leaving just the bare wood (I mention this as a bit of foreshadowing—despite being part of the same company, a Squier paint job is nothing compared to a Fender paint job). I'd taken to writing things on it—real gems like "Rebellion is Cliché."

Singin', horn playin', and bass strummin', in The Dynamo Theorem.
Mike and Molly's, Champaign, IL, 2002

Here is Ladyradio's This Will Be Our Homecoming from 2003

That's how this P-Bass came my way, but what about the P-Bass in general—a fretted, electric, bass guitar… part two will be along shortly.

Kitchen Sink

Working on a new poster for The Theatre School at DePaul. Here is the first painting, which didn't make the cut.

Hedges…

Illustration for Men's Book Chicago—an article discussing hedge funds.

Antonius and Leonidas: Introduction

Antonius and Leonidas: Building the P-Bass-Man

Most of my time is spent sitting with a computer or a piece of paper in front of me. Certainly I love drawing and designing, but as they say—you can have too much of a good thing. Music is just as important to me as art, I'm just not as good at it. However recently I've found a way to blend the two by building instruments (or customizing existing instruments). I've begun chipping away at my fear of electronics and really enjoy working on projects that either work or don't—definitively …none of this, well I prefer green stuff.

Antonius and Leonidas will be a bit of an on-going series here talking about this P-Bass build I'm working on and tying that in with some music history and some hopefully interesting personal anecdotes—oh and entertaining pictures of me in high school. 

Invest in art

Illustration for the April issue of DC Magazine. An article about investing in art.

My latest poster for DePaul

Drawing Phil Lynott's hair is a lot of fun. Definitely a fun poster I got to create for DePaul this time around. Thick Leonard is a fictitious Thin Lizzy tribute band in this play…

Hey there Phil,

Talking heads and monsters

There are a lot of great creatures and imagery in Evangeline Walton's Prince of Annwn. I'm also learning some Welsh…

Piccolo Sound Samples

My intonation will get better, bear with me. But, I wanted to post some samples of the piccolo with the new strings.

Delia, Oh Delia

Here is Delia in her final state:

I'll get a song up once I get a little better at playing her, but Delia sounds great with these heavy gauge flatwound guitar strings. You can get a kind of sitar type sound on the G string while droning the D. Along the fingerboard I scratched in diatonic markers for reference points:

 

Each of my builds seems to end up with a theme album. For the defretting—franken—P-bass build it was Paul Simon's Graceland and for this it was Lou Reed's Berlin, Live at St. Ann's Warehouse. What's interesting to me, with guitar strings (instead of the bass setup) this instrument really fits the tone of that album.

What gave me the extra shove to try this was coming across this video. This guy does this regularly for local schools—so kids with small hands can start learning bass. I think that's really cool. His seems to sound much better than my version. Check him out.

First Act dubbed this the Delia and I'll keep the name because of the man in black:

The Super-Short Bass Experiment

The Beginning
I think it's best to start at the beginning, but we'll have to go back a bit first. The guitar was passed along to me from my friend and bandmate (Torch Singer) Vel, who had already customized it. You can check out some fun customized First Act guitars here. He purchased it as a First Act Delia, which looked like this:

The electronics, I believe are: 3-way pickup switch, 2 volumes, 1 master tone. Vel added two coil tap switches and changed out the pickups.

Being baffled by instruments with more buttons or strings than I have fingers, I removed the top two strings, tuned it to perfect fifths and played it for a bit. It had been sitting for several months when I got the idea to try it as a 2-string slide bass—something I've thought about since I was 13 and first heard Morphine. I went super minimal, installed a P-Bass pickup and a volume knob, which looked like this:

I enjoyed playing it, but it lacked the bigger bass sound I wanted and got pretty dead sounding at about the 7th fret (playing with the slide).

The SS Bass Build
Two years ago I switched from long scale (34") to short scale (30 1/2") bass. I found it much easier to play and preferred the thumpier sound. As you shorten the scale of a bass (or any stringed instrument) while keeping the same tuning, you begin to lose string tension. Which, causes less definition in the sound and therefore a boomier or thumpier sound. With that in mind as well as these new U-Basses, I thought I could make this into a super short scale bass and maybe achieve an almost double bass tone.

At first, I wanted to keep this simple: one pickup, one knob.

 

I ordered this Artec pickup from Hong Kong. Total with shipping: $20. It is built with the extra wires necessary to do coil taps, parallel/series… so I put it up on Facebook, asking what I should do and got a lot of great feedback. Sure I wanted to keep it simple, but the body already had six holes in it for knobs and switches. Everyone unanimously agreed on tone control. After that, there's really an almost endless amount of variations you could go with.

I let that sit and began defretting. 

I had to plug the two middle tuning peg holes and make the others larger to accommodate bass tuners. I set out on a tri-tone stain application: ebony, cherry, and walnut. To account for the wider bass bridge I had to add some wood to the center of the body.

After a week or so I decided there needed to be a bridge pickup as well. The bridge pup ended up being a neck pickup from a Telecaster (something I had laying around). The wiring ended up as: 3-way pickup select switch; Neck Humbucker, parallel/coil tap/series switch, volume, tone; single coil bridge pickup, volume, tone. Which looks like this:

And to my amazement I made a wiring schematic that worked! I strung it up and that's the build.

  

Unfortunately, it doesn't sound so hot and that's kind of a bummer. Here is a sound sample to better explain things.

Basically, there is a lot of weirdness. The bridge I tried was a little too beefy, so the action got pretty high towards the body. The E string refuses to stay in tune and there is so much odd—phaser—strangeness happening it tends to sound out of tune in general. I spent a couple minutes trying to talk myself into that being the sound, but it didn't take. I guess I proved to myself why basses need a certain scale in order to achieve a good bass sound.

In Conclusion
So, I've already switched out the bridge and replaced the strings with heavy gauge flatwound guitar strings. So what is it now? Well, I call it a piccolo bass. It's an absurd term I think, because you basically have the bottom strings of a guitar. However it's not totally without merit, because you are feeding the signal though bass pups to a bass amp. They make 34" piccolo strings… and this guy Jeff Schmidt will blow your mind with some fretless piccolo craziness.

My little trademark—Eric Dolphy under the neck: