Bass Builder Guide by Kit Oliynyk

Your Style, Your Bass Fodera Cover Story

Getting Out of the Way

Collector's Corner Anthony Wellington, Teacher, Player, Collector

A Brief History of

Boutique Bass Guitars

$9.99 US

Contents A Brief History of Boutique Bass Guitars ............................... 8 Fodera Cover Story: Getting Out of the Way ........................ 18 The Business of Bass Building ...................................................... 26 Collector's Corner: Anthony Wellington.................................... 32

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BASS BUILDER #1 > CONTENTS

STAFF Pubisher and Editor in Chief Maria Santory Writers and Contributors Elton Bradman Ray Santory Rick Turner Mike Viseglia Publisher's Assistant Jennifer A. Wickes Cover Story Photography by Roberto Falck Art Director Kit Oliynyk Interns Tre Jackson Bethany Vaughan

Drake Custom Bass www.drakecustombass.com

Drake Custom is a small custom shop founded by Andrew Drake who has been building basses professionally since 2005. Andrew specializes in easy playing 32 and 33 inch medium scale 4, 5, and 6 string basses as well as long scale basses and 8 string tappers. Andrew crafts his own necks and bodies by hand with pride in his design and workmanship. Special attention is focused on the playability, sound, and longevity of each of his instruments.

DC MODEL 7

BASS BUILDER #1 > DRAKE CUSTOM BASS

DC MODEL 6

641.891.6404 drakecustom@live.com

THE BETTY

Garz Guitars & Basses www.garzguitars.com

743-770 Pickens Rd P.O. Box 687 Doyle,Ca 96109 530.827.2369 garzguitars@psln.com

MAG 6 LW

COBRA 6 STRING

I have been building instruments since 1986. All basses are handcrafted by me, one at a time. I use the highest quality woods, electronics and hardware available. You can choose one of my current models, or I can design one for you. I have many custom options available. Contact me for your dream Bass.

COBRA 5 STRING

KUNGHA 6 STRING BASS BUILDER #1 > GARZ GUITAR & BASSES

A Hundred Little Decisions: Getting Out of the Way

Fodera’s approach to crafting modern bass tone is all about getting out of the way and letting each player shine through. E.E. Bradman talks to Fodera’s Jason DeSalvo for insights into the company’s ever-evolving ideas of tone

ruth be told, it’s all about tone. Tone sets us apart or marks us as a member of a group; it gives instruments their identities, announces our intentions, and helps define our chosen genres. Just as our tone of voice is as important as what we say, our bass tone, our musical voice, sets the stage for everything else we play: It’s tough to appreciate good phrasing, well-developed technique, and other desirable qualities if we can’t get past a player’s tone. Many of us will spend a lifetime and a big chunk of our bank account looking for instruments that can help us manifest the tones we hear in our heads.

market, owning a Fodera is a sign of having “arrived.” But what exactly is “Fodera tone?”

For many players, that search leads to Fodera, the New York City company that builds instruments designed and crafted by bassist Joey Lauricella and luthier Vinny Fodera. Fodera is renowned the world over for its blend of old-world craftsmanship and attention to detail, as well as a thoroughly modern aesthetic that would be impossible without 21st-century advances in preamp, pickup, amplifier, and manufacturing technology. Like Rolexes and Rolls Royces, these instruments long ago transcended their humble, practical beginnings to become status symbols; even in today’s crowded boutique bass

Are all your basses custom basses? We now have two product lines. Our Standard line—which includes a Matt Garrison, a YingYang, and an Emperor—cater toward a very common set of specifications that are regularly asked for. To get one of those, you don’t have to wait as long, and we make them in batches of 60 or 30 pieces. When you buy one, you are buying that instrument the way it sounds, for the tone it has. For everything else, there’s our custom line. Roughly 50 percent of our production is Standards, and 50 percent are custom instruments.

Few would know the answer to that question as well as Jason DeSalvo, the business consultant who has been the third member of Fodera’s leadership team since 2009. As a bass player whose first interaction was buying a Fodera back in 2006and whose journey through bass tone has inspired him to assemble a stable of 12 Foderas since then DeSalvo has plenty to say about what gives a bass its tone, Fodera’s earliest tone templates, the definition and evolution of the Fodera sound, and the company’s intensive approach to helping customers find their own voices.

BASS BUILDER #1 > A HUNDRED LITTLE DECISIONS: GETTING OUT OF THE WAY

How does a new customer’s Fodera tone journey begin? Once a customer emails or calls to say they want to build a bass, the first part of the process is asking the right questions: What are you playing now? What tone do you like? What tone don’t you like? The most important thing in getting the right tone for a customer is understanding their concept of good tone. I ask them, if you could have a bass that sounded perfect, what would it sound like? We start by having them send me some sound samples, or by them saying something like, “Man, I love the sound of my ’64 Jazz Bass.” We know by definition that a Jazz Bass has an alder body, Brazilian rosewood fingerboard, maple neck, and it’s a bolt-on. So they’ve just given us some clues to level the field and let us start thinking about tone. How much do the woods determine the tone of a bass? We are definitely, devoutly, 100 percent, positively in the camp that wood matters. We believe we are building acoustic instruments that happen to be electrified, and that every single thing we do related to the choice of woods plays a role in the final tone of that instrument. We don’t believe, as some builders do, that it’s all about the electronics, and that you won’t hear the difference in the wood.

I think we have one of the most versatile preamps out there, but our preamp is meant to be as transparent as possible. It will let you alter the innate tone of an instrument, but it’s not going to let you change the tone of the instrument. If I build you a bass out bright woods, it doesn’t matter how much I boost the bass on that preamp, it’s never gonna give you that kick-in-the-pass big bottom that you’d get if you had an alder bass body. It’s just a different thing.

The last wood we decide on is the top wood. A lot of our basses are known for their gorgeous exotic top woods, but those top woods are much more of a spice than a main ingredient, because they’re thin and because they’re not really significant in terms of the quantity of the mass they add to the instrument. There are some very dense top woods that we use, and in those cases, we have to take into account the sound that they make. But most of the time, choosing the top wood is the last thing we so.

Take us through the process of choosing body, neck, and fingerboard woods. Generally, we build 95 percent of our instruments with walnut, alder, ash, or mahogany. The body wood is the largest piece of mass on the instrument, so it is going to have the largest impact on tone. The neck wood also has a high proportion of the instrument’s overall mass, and it has a significant impact on tone. We build predominately with two different neck woods: Ash, which has a slightly warmer, more percussive sound, and maple, which has a brighter, more ringing tone. About 85 percent of our necks are maple. Then we get to fingerboard wood, which has a fairly profound effect on tone. Even though there’s not a lot of mass there, the string is being fretted (or on a fretless, is being vibrated directly) against that fingerboard, and the way in which that wood excites and resonates is very different depending on the woods we use. For fingerboards, we choose between bird’s eye maple, pau ferro, ebony, Macassar ebony, Brazilian rosewood, Indian rosewood, and Madagascar kingwood. We have a number of fingerboard materials, all of which have different densities and tonal properties.

What happens when there are conflicts between how a customer wants a bass to look and how they want it to sound? It happens all the time. After we’ve made recommendations for woods based on the sound clips they’ve sent us, some customers will come back to us and say they love that sound but they don’t like the way the wood looks. And then we have to tell them that although they had their heart set on an ash body, for example, because they like that nice grain, they want a warm tone, and ash is not warm. We’ll tell them, It’s your bass, we’ll build it either way, but if we build it with ash, you’re going to love the way it looks but you’re probably not going to play it very much because it’s going to have the sound that’s in your head. What kind of electronics options do you offer? We use a preamp co-designed by Joey and Michael Pope of Michael Pope Designs, and that goes into every bass unless a customer wants a bass that’s completely passive, like Anthony Jackson, who runs his jack straight to the pickup. When we talk about electronics, we’re really dealing with pickups. We used to have a lot of choices, but over the years, we’ve found that

EMG’s or Seymour Duncans—either dual- or single-coils—seemed to consistently give almost every customer the sound they were looking for. Depending on what tone the customer wants, we’ll choose the right pickup for them, and then we’ll talk about spacing—we can space pickups in ’60s position, ’70s position, or any realm within that; we also offer other combinations, like Tom Kennedy spacing, for example, or Richard Bona spacing. Over the years we’ve developed a menu in our heads about how pickup spacing affects tone. How much time do you spend with customers discussing the options? We do have customers who’ve worked with us before and know exactly what they want, but for every one like that, there are many who need help narrowing down the millions of options. Usually, on a custom build, there’s anywhere between five to 30 interactions before a final spec is set; a lot of times, that involves the customer making a trip to the shop. I’ve had customers that I’ve spent 40 hours of my life with before they have a final spec. If somebody needs that time, it’s there; we’re never going to say, “We’ve talked to you enough now. Make your decision or go somewhere else.” That’s just not who we are. How do you know you’ve succeeded? If we’ve done our homework right, when customers get their basses, they’ll have that big Fodera grin, which is like, “Yes!” At this price point, we can’t afford to put a bass in someone’s hands and not have them have that grin. The stakes are too high. When you’ve saved for a couple years for your dream bass and you finally get it, it better sound and play like you dreamt it was going to. We take that really seriously.

BASS BUILDER #1 > A HUNDRED LITTLE DECISIONS: GETTING OUT OF THE WAY

How would you describe Fodera tone? I think the Fodera tone is an absence of tone, if you would. We like to think of our job as bringing out a musician’s voice, not imposing our concept of tone on them. We make basses that are articulate, nuanced, rich, deep, and extremely versatile, but the actual instrument should sound like a neutral filter. It should be a canvas for you to write what tone you want. Do you want to go with old-school tone you associate with a 1960s Jazz Bass or even a ’50s P-Bass, or do you want that Victor Wooten sound—that ultra-modern, extremely precise, almost high-end audio quality to it? Those two tones are about as far apart as you can be, and yet we make basses with both of them every day. The Fodera tone is more about understanding what the customer wants to get out of it, and pulling the right ingredients together to make sure that we deliver that. There is no one thing that goes into making a great Fodera—it is the end result of a series of a hundred little decisions made throughout the process of working with the customer to design each bass.

tone (although Tony actually uses a maple neck, so his basses tend to be a bit brighter). We have a lot of really spectacular artists we’ve been fortunate enough to work with, and part of their journey with us has been working with us to develop their signature sound. Then we replicate that tone for customers who like that person’s sound. After such an intense process of choosing and building a bass, what happens when a player tires of their Fodera’s tone? We do have people who change their tastes over time. There are a

As transparent as the preamp may be, some of Fodera’s most prominent players share a certain approach to tone, which seems to influence what customers ask for. Yeah. Let’s say someone just went out and heard Janek Gwizdala play, and then they’ll come to us and say, I want my bass to sound exactly like that. Well, that means they want a walnut body, an ebony fingerboard, an ash neck, Seymour Duncan single-coil pickups, and they want a certain spacing—that’s that instrument’s tonal signature, which is very easy to replicate, because we know what it is. So we do a lot of basses with walnut bodies, ebony fingerboards, and ash necks; that’s that Janek GwizdalaMatt Garrison-Tony Grey kind of

BASS BUILDER #1 > RICK A HUNDRED TURNER:LITTLE THE BUSINESS DECISIONS: OFGETTING BASS BUILDING… OUT OF THE WAY

number of people who will trade in their Fodera and work with us on a new build; that happens at least a couple times a month. And then we go out and find a happy camper for the other one. If your tastes have changed, there’s going to be some other cat out there who’s gonna love what you had, and we’ll find a home for that. And there are a number of players out there with several Foderas; some cats keep their basses as a historical record of where they come from so they can go back and revisit it by playing the older basses.

Fodera Guitars www.fodera.com

68 34th St. 3rd Floor Brooklyn, NY 11232 718.832.3455 sales@fodera.com

EMPEROR 5 ST

YYS

Founded in 1983 by Vinny Fodera and Joey Lauricella, Fodera remains a small, family owned company crafting less than 300 instruments per year all right in Brooklyn, NY. Our job here at Fodera is to listen to the needs of our players and build instruments that get out of the way and let them shine through. We pride ourselves on not having a typical “Fodera Sound.” All of our instruments are crafted from the very finest tone woods personally selected by some of the most experienced hands and ears in the business.

BUCKEYE BURL IMPERIAL II

OLIVEMONARCH DELUXE BASS BUILDER #1 > FODERA GUITARS

Andrew Drake of Drake Custom

Beau Leopard of BL Design

Cleve Johnson of LedBelli

Devon Smullen and Family

George of F Bass

Jacques with Darryl Jones

Jason Desalvo of Fodera

Jimmy and Caeser Coppolo

Jody of Ansir with Mina Burnside

BASS BUILDER #1 >

Joey Lauricella of Fodera

Jon Maghini M Basses

Manuel Delgado

Mark Garza of Garz Guitars and Basses

Mike Kinal's Guitar Class

Pete Skjold in shop

Kenneth Lawrence

Three Generations of Delgado

Gerald of Marleaux Bass Guitars BASS BUILDER #1 >