Fretless Bass Makeover
To celebrate my 50th birthday I embarked on this project to turn a neck-through-body into a fretless bass. I had been keeping my eye on a neck-through bass body on Guitarfetish' factory buyout section that seemed a much better offering than the others. It was tidier than most of the others and didn’t look like it had been hauled from the carcass of the Titanic. It already had some styling elements that either had to be accommodated or removed - in this case the 12th fret corona eclipse and the unnecessary point on the headstock.
I had Binford Luthiery remove the frets and fill the fret slots. Because the 12th fret already had the inlay I opted to integrate it and use its rotational symmetry to extend out the fret markers using that same distribution. As there were 9 dot locations it broadly infers the sun and the solar system and I would have liked to maybe turn one dot into a ringed Saturn motif but finally decided against it to avoid being overly literal.
Good design is just as much about knowing when to stop and not add further detail. The pointed end of the headstock was a detail that I personally felt was one too many. The styling doesn't occur anywhere else on the instrument so I had the headstock reshaped to terminate with a flowing curve which is sympathetic to the curves of the body. To break up the expanse of the body and to give it a feature element, the faux pickguard was integrated with similar sympathetic flowing curves. This was made from dyed bubinga (rosewood is in short supply here in New Zealand) to match as closely as possible to the rosewood fretboard. The bass uses Aguilar pickups and the OP3 pre-amp and I use my proprietary 18v battery - a CAD modelled and 3D printed battery holder that houses 6 x 3v high performance button batteries.