CelloBari

$3,900.00

Tags: Bluetooth Amp, Boneyard, Cantilevered, Copy Available, Garage, Integrated Speaker, Original Not For Sale, Reclaimed Instrument

Categories: 30" scale, Baritone Guitar, Hollow-Body, Pro, Six-String Bass, Specialty

A 30-inch-scale hollow-body built from a 1/4-size cello and a nine-ply Alembic neck begun in 1998, with a Ry Cooder pickup and onboard NUX Mighty 8-BT amp.

CelloBari is a 30-inch-scale baritone built around two components that spent years waiting for the right project: an unfinished nine-ply Alembic neck purchased in 1998 and a worn ¼-size cello found while picking in northern Illinois.

The Alembic neck was originally large enough for a 34-inch-scale seven-string bass. It was extensively reworked—shortened, narrowed and reshaped, with a compound-radius fingerboard and hand-installed frets—to become the neck used here.

A vintage Japanese Teisco/Guyatone pickup provides the current voice, paired with a NUX Mighty 8-BT onboard amplifier powered by a rechargeable 12-volt battery. The cello body provides the enclosure and gives the instrument its unmistakable proportions and character.

CelloBari is currently in the Garage because it remains a mock-up, although it is already one of the most satisfying Rubÿtones I've built at this stage of development. The next version will likely be thinner and may explore additional pickups, but those changes will only happen if they preserve what already works.

If CelloBari is the project you want to take out of the Garage, let me know. Its next stage can be developed around the way you want to use it.

Additional information

Instrument Type	Baritone Guitar
Approach	Boneyard Build, Experimental Build, Front Integrated-Amp Build, Reclaimed-Instrument Build
Construction	Cantilevered, Hollow-Body
Body	1/4 size Cello
Beam
Neck	34" scale to 30" scale (Conversion), 9-ply Custom Alembic (Twin Truss-Rod), Neck-Through Body/Beam
Fingerboard	Macassar Ebony
Headstock	Modified Headstock
Scale Length	30"
Number of Frets	24
Bridge	Individual Saddles
Tailpiece
Neck Pickup
Middle Pickup	Tiesco
Bridge Pickup
Pickup Switch
Controls
Knobs
Amplifier	NUX Mighty 8-BT
Power Supply	12V Security-Camera Backup Battery

CelloBari

Rubÿtone Guitar Scorecard

8.44 / 10

304 / 360 points

playing

Fun to Play

The first test is whether the guitar makes you want to keep playing it. A high score means the instrument feels inviting, responsive, and rewarding rather than merely interesting to look at. The best examples have enough soul that you forget you are evaluating them and simply keep going.

Playability

Measures how naturally the instrument responds to ordinary playing technique across the neck. Action, fretwork, neck feel, access, and setup should work together without asking the player to compensate for the design. A strong score means the unusual construction never becomes an excuse for compromised playing.

Ergonomics

Considers how comfortably the instrument sits against the body, hangs from a strap, and positions the hands. Weight distribution matters as much as total weight, especially when found objects or onboard amplification shift the center of gravity. The most artful solutions make an unconventional shape feel surprisingly natural.

Tone Quality

Judges the character, clarity, richness, and usefulness of the instrument’s core sound. The goal is not one supposedly perfect tone, but a voice with musical identity and enough detail to reward attentive playing. The highest scores go to guitars whose sound has real soul rather than merely acceptable frequency response.

Tonal Versatility

Measures how many genuinely useful sounds the instrument can produce rather than simply counting switches and settings. Different pickup combinations and controls should create musically distinct choices that a player would actually use. A clever circuit scores higher when its versatility feels purposeful instead of complicated for its own sake.

Amplification

Evaluates how convincingly the guitar performs through its intended amplification system, whether external or built in. Output, clarity, noise, feedback behavior, and usable volume all matter. For self-amplified Rubÿtones, a high score means the amplifier feels integrated into the instrument rather than attached as an afterthought.

build

Fit & Finish

Evaluates the precision and care visible in joints, edges, fretwork, hardware installation, surfaces, wiring, and final setup. Handmade character is welcome; carelessness is not the same thing as character. A strong score shows experienced workmanship while allowing the object to retain the marks and soul of its previous life.

Portability

Measures whether the instrument’s mass and dimensions make sense for the way it is meant to be used. A guitar with an onboard amp may reasonably weigh more, but every added ounce should earn its place. High scores reward designs that are easy to carry, hold, busk with, or live with without sacrificing the idea.

Reliability

Rates the likelihood that the guitar will keep working properly through normal playing, transport, and repeated use. Structural joints, wiring, controls, hardware, and power systems should feel dependable rather than experimental in the risky sense. A high score means the wit of the design is backed by experienced engineering.

Repairability

Considers how sensibly the instrument can be serviced when something eventually wears out or fails. Standard parts, accessible wiring, replaceable components, and understandable construction all help. The strongest designs are inventive without turning a future repair into an archaeological excavation.

Solutions

Scores the quality of the solutions used when unconventional materials create unconventional problems. Beam placement, neck angle, pickup clearance, feedback, balance, and internal packaging are all opportunities to demonstrate experience. High scores go to solutions that are technically sound and artful enough to look inevitable afterward.

Integration

Measures how successfully all the unrelated parts become one coherent working instrument. Neck, beam, body, hardware, electronics, amplifier, and found objects should cooperate mechanically and visually. The best integrations have a kind of soul: the parts stop looking assembled and start looking as though they found each other.

design

Innovation

Measures whether the guitar introduces a genuinely fresh idea, solution, relationship, or way of thinking about an instrument. Novelty alone is not enough; the innovation should improve the object, deepen the concept, or open a useful new possibility.

Shouldn’t Work

Rewards designs that appear improbable but succeed because the underlying engineering is sound. The wit comes from the gap between what your eyes expect and what your hands and ears discover.

Beauty

Judges visual appeal without assuming that beauty must mean polished, conventional, or expensive. Proportion, material, color, age, texture, and restraint can all create beauty in very different ways.

Sculpture

Considers the guitar as a three-dimensional object even when nobody is playing it. Silhouette, negative space, depth, structure, and the relationship between functional parts should reward viewing from more than one angle.

Coherence

Measures whether the many materials, colors, shapes, and components read as one intentional composition. A Rubÿtone can be busy, strange, or witty without looking accidental.

Relic

Rates the visual and emotional value of genuine age, wear, patina, scars, repairs, and evidence of earlier use. Authentic history carries more weight than artificially manufactured distress.

concept

Stage Presence

Measures how strongly the instrument communicates from across a room or under performance conditions. Silhouette, scale, color, movement, and unusual construction can all contribute before a note is heard.

Stands Alone

Judges whether the instrument feels complete and compelling without requiring a long explanation of why it matters. The story may deepen the experience, but the object should already make a persuasive case visually and musically.

Material Story

Considers how much meaning comes from the history and previous purpose of the materials themselves.

Transformation

Measures how completely the original object has been given a convincing second identity without erasing where it came from.

Boneyard Score

Rates how deeply the instrument embodies the practice of building from saved, secondhand, leftover, or previously overlooked materials.

Necessity

Asks whether each major component has a reason to be there. Extra hardware, controls, decorative pieces, and technology should contribute to function, story, balance, or visual composition.

personality

Story

Measures the strength of the narrative carried by the guitar’s materials, development, accidents, people, places, and decisions.

Surprise

Rates the number and quality of discoveries the instrument offers after the first glance.

Conversation

Measures how naturally the guitar makes people curious enough to ask questions.

Cool Factor

Captures the difficult-to-measure quality that makes an instrument desirable before every reason can be itemized.

Identity

Measures how immediately the guitar feels like itself rather than a variation of something more familiar.

Rubÿtone DNA

Rates how clearly the instrument expresses the recurring ideas behind Rubÿtone: reuse, structural invention, functional sculpture, irreverence, and serious playability.

impact

Humor

Measures whether the guitar contains genuine wit rather than a joke pasted onto an otherwise ordinary object.

Punchline

Judges whether the concept resolves into a satisfying final idea—the moment when the viewer suddenly understands why a particular object, material, or decision is there.

Disdain

Measures the willingness to question inherited rules about what an electric guitar is supposed to look like, contain, or be made from.

Rules

Rates how effectively the instrument departs from established guitar-building conventions while remaining musically and structurally convincing.

Copy Potential

Considers whether the central idea could inspire a new custom build without requiring an exact duplicate of the original.

Evolution

Measures how much useful creative territory remains in the idea after this particular guitar is finished.

THE STORY

This One Took a Long Time to Get Here

The neck for CelloBari goes all the way back to 1998.

I ordered it directly from Alembic as an unfinished nine-ply neck with two truss rods. It was wide enough to become a seven-string bass with a 34" scale, which was what I thought I wanted at the time.

Eventually I figured out that I didn't really like playing a 34" scale.

So I did something fairly drastic to a very nice piece of wood.

I cut the Alembic headstock off.

I shortened the neck to the 30" scale that I prefer, narrowed and shaped it, put a compound radius on the fingerboard and fretted it myself.

What began as an unfinished Alembic neck intended for one instrument eventually became the neck for something completely different.

The body had been waiting for its turn too.

It's a worn ¼-size cello that I found years ago while picking in northern Illinois.

Eventually those two pieces found each other.

The pickup is a vintage Japanese Teisco/Guyatone—the type I associate with Ry Cooder—and the amplifier is a NUX Mighty 8-BT powered by a rechargeable 12-volt battery.

And it sounds amazing.

In fact, I have never been more pleased with any other guitar I have made while it was in this stage.

The Reason This Rubÿtone Is in the Garage

Because this is still a mock-up.

That's a strange thing to say about a guitar that I already like this much, but that's exactly why I don't want to rush the next part.

There are things about CelloBari that I know I want to refine, but I don't want to lose what already happened accidentally—or experimentally—to go right.