LEFT: 5-string bass pickups- the coils have been wound, and the pickups put together with their magnets, just before being placed in fully shielded covers and potted in epoxy. CENTER: Pickup coil being wound. Photo by Janet Perr RIGHT: The interior of an AE5 Swallow bass.
number of different instruments
in my hands. I had this idea
that I was going to have a hol-
low bass, and initially, I thought
I was going to bend the sides
on it and have to make it head-
less so it wouldn’t be neck
heavy. As it turned out, I ended
up deciding to hog out a piece
of mahogany for the bod-
ies instead, but the first three
or four were headless. I then
came up with an intonation-
adjustable wooden bridge using
saddles with brass shims. With
it, you could move the saddles
but it would still actually react
sonically like a wooden bridge
with bone saddle. But this
didn’t allow me to use any tra-
ditional piezo elements, so I was
using an undertop transducer.
It sounded okay, but it fedback
a lot. Additionally, by build-
ing the headless instruments, I
realized I was limited with the
hardware, string spacings, and
nut width. The body was actu-
ally heavy enough that I didn’t
need it to be headless, so I
moved to putting the head back
on the instrument.
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