CelloBassE

$2,695.00

Tags: Copy Available, Integrated Speaker, Original Available, Reclaimed Instrument

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

A cello-bodied six-string bass inspired by the Fender Bass VI, built for readily available heavy-gauge string sets, a dark low-register voice and a busking-friendly footprint barely larger than an acoustic guitar.

CelloBassE is a six-string, extended-range Rubÿtone built around a cello body and modeled around the practical dimensions and string requirements of the Fender Bass VI.

Its proportions provide the lower range and heavier strings of a Bass VI-style instrument while keeping the overall footprint relatively close to that of a conventional guitar. The cello body provides the hollow enclosure and gives the instrument its distinctive narrow-waisted profile.

CelloBassE is designed around commercially available Bass VI string sets rather than individually assembled custom gauges. This makes its extended-range setup repeatable and allows replacement strings to be purchased as a complete matched set.

Additional information

Instrument Type	Baritone Guitar, 6-String Bass
Approach	Boneyard Build, Front Integrated-Amp Build, Reclaimed-Instrument Build, RestoMod, Structural Reinterpretation
Construction	Simple, Hollow-Body
Body	1/4 size Cello
Beam
Neck	34" scale to 30" scale (Conversion), Maple
Fingerboard	Rosewood
Headstock	Modified Headstock
Scale Length	30"
Number of Frets	18
Bridge	Rosewood Archtop Guitar
Tailpiece	Trapeze Tailpiece
Neck Pickup	Humbucker
Middle Pickup
Bridge Pickup	Humbucker
Pickup Switch	3-Way Toggle
Controls	1 Volume / 1 Tone
Knobs	Vintage Guitar Amp Knobs
Amplifier	Vox DA-5
Power Supply	9V Rechargeable Battery

CelloBassE

Rubÿtone Guitar Scorecard

9.22 / 10

332 / 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

I Got Tired of Buying Individual Strings

I've always wanted a Fender Bass VI for busking. I like heavy strings, and I especially like the dark, rich sound they produce when they're tuned below standard guitar pitch.

For a long time I experimented with what I called my “Fatt String Guitars.” Before I thinned the herd, probably a third of my experiments were headed in that direction.

I was constantly buying individual strings, changing gauges and putting together my own sets until I found a combination that gave me the tension and balance I wanted.

It worked.

It was also a pain.

The Fender Had Already Solved Part of the Problem

Eventually I realized that there was no reason for me to keep inventing a new string set every time.

The Fender Bass VI already had an established format, and manufacturers already made complete string sets for it. If I designed my guitar around that standard, I could still build the instrument my way without making replacement strings part of the experiment.

That's where CelloBassE came from.

I wasn't trying to make a copy of a Fender Bass VI. I was borrowing one of the most practical things about it: the strings are already available.

That gave me a known starting point for the scale, tuning and string gauges while leaving everything else open to becoming a Rubÿtone.

Why a Cello?

Busking was part of the idea from the beginning.

I wanted the low range and heavy strings, but I didn't want to end up carrying something enormous into the city. The cello body gave me the hollow-body space I wanted while keeping the overall footprint surprisingly close to a standard guitar.

That's part of what makes the combination interesting to me. A cello suggests something much larger. A Bass VI suggests something longer. Somehow, putting the ideas together resulted in an instrument that is still manageable enough to carry around.

And that was the point.

CelloBassE came out of years of experimenting with heavy strings and low tunings, but one of the most useful things I learned was also one of the simplest:

Not every part of an experiment needs to be custom.

Sometimes it's better to build around something you can buy in a package.