Weeks turn into months and months turn into years. I’ve managed to break my record for blog inactivity as I pass the 2 year mark by a day. It’s been so long, that I’ve lost my train of thought on this whole AGB Manifesto kick.
So I started digging through photos and writing, trying to make sense of my timelines. Which led me to build out this official bass timeline. This is all the basses that I’ve owned, modified, built, or attempted to build since I started playing back in 1999.
Drawing and building things has always been what I do. It’s some mix of meditation, reaction, necessity, and when I’m done I can say “oh, that’s what I was thinking.” Approaching building (or specifically bass guitar building for me) like drawing has proven itself to be somewhat problematic at times. In that, having more of a feeling than a solid plan can result in errors you can’t come back from. I keep getting better at finding this balance, but you can see more basses didn’t survive than did.
1999–2009: simpler times when I had four instruments, three that I bought and one that was given to me.
2009–2019: the decade of many failed builds and tinkering the crap out of instruments.
2019–present: a decade of many builds and purchases.
Post-pandemic: building from kits or modding a purchased instrument.
What’s interesting for me is the pandemic as a turning point. Any bass I owned or tried to build before then no longer exists (with the exceptions of the Kraken Attack bass that I built for a friend and the Eastwood and ESP I sold). Every bass I bought, built and/or modified since then is still here.
I left off talking about The Husky White Duke. This was my first attempt at building a bass for The Dynamo Theorem — my college band that started up again after a 20-year pause (years turn into decades). That build, along with digging back into my indie rock playing got me thinking about different kinds of basses.
I have spent most of my time trying to build an acoustic bass guitar that sounds upright-adjacent while not having feedback issues in loud bands. So for me these “different kinds of basses” had frets and solid bodies. The history of the Fender Precision Bass captured my mind with its sweet charms.
In the next chapter we’ll take a look P-Bass compatible builds and mods…
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