GBass

$650.00

Tags: Boneyard, Complete Amp Cabinet, Copy Available, Found Object, Garage, Original Available, Spirit Level

Categories: 26.5" scale, Baritone Guitar, Pro, Simple, Solid Body, Specialty

A 27.5-inch-scale six-string busker bass inspired by the Fender Bass VI, built to keep guitar-style chords clear down low, with an aluminum level beam and onboard Blackstar Fly 3.

GBass is a six-string, 27.5-inch-scale instrument built around an aluminum framer’s level used as its central structural beam.

The bridge floats directly on the aluminum level, while the strings pass through and anchor into holes drilled through the end of the beam. This eliminates the need for a separate tailpiece and makes the level part of both the structural and string-mounting system.

The extended 27.5-inch scale places GBass between conventional guitar and longer Bass VI territory, retaining six-string guitar-style playing while extending its range downward.

GBass is currently in the Garage in a functional configuration. Its defining structural elements—the scale length, aluminum beam, floating bridge and direct string anchoring—are intended to remain, while the body construction, pickups, amplification and controls remain open to further development.

Additional information

Instrument Type	Baritone Guitar
Approach	Boneyard Build, Found-Object Build, Structural Reinterpretation, Whole Integrated-Amp Build
Construction	Simple, Solid-Body
Body	Solid Body Guitar
Beam	Aluminum Carpenter Level
Neck	Maple
Fingerboard	Rosewood
Headstock	Modified Headstock
Scale Length	26.5"
Number of Frets	24
Bridge	Rosewood Archtop Guitar
Tailpiece	Aluminum Carpenter Level
Neck Pickup	Jackson 7-String
Middle Pickup
Bridge Pickup
Pickup Switch
Controls
Knobs
Amplifier	Blackstar Fly 3
Power Supply	9V Rechargeable Battery

GBass

Rubÿtone Guitar Scorecard

9.31 / 10

335 / 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 Wanted a Bass VI Without the Mud

I have always liked the idea of the Fender Bass VI, but something about it didn't work for me. When I played guitar-like chord shapes that low on the neck, everything started getting muddy on the low end.

I discovered that putting a capo at the third fret brought the instrument into a range that I liked much better.

But I don't like playing with a capo.

So I decided to build the capo into the idea.

The first version of GBass was a seven-string with a small cello body. I thought the additional low B might be useful, but it wasn't giving me what I wanted, and seven strings made the spacing too tight. I removed a tuner, reworked the nut and experimented with string gauges until I arrived at the six-string version I actually wanted to play.

The result was a 27.5" scale—long enough to give me the extended range I wanted without taking me all the way into the territory that had bothered me about the Bass VI.

The Level Became More Than the Beam

Running through GBass is an aluminum framer's level.

What I particularly like about this one is how many jobs the level ended up doing. It provides the central structure, but the bridge also floats directly on it, and the strings anchor into holes drilled through the end.

No tailpiece is needed. I love that.

That's one of those solutions I don't want to lose. Whatever happens to GBass next, the 27.5" scale, aluminum level, floating bridge and direct string anchoring are the parts that make this guitar GBass.

The Reason This Rubÿtone Is in the Garage

Someone may like GBass exactly as it is. That's not why it's here.

It's here because my ideas about what belongs around that central structure have continued to change.

I've been moving away from using pieces of solid-body guitars simply to fill the spaces that make an instrument comfortable to hold and play. I'm much more interested now in finding ways to accomplish those jobs with hollow-body construction.

My approach to the amplifier has changed too. Rather than putting an intact little amplifier into the guitar, I'm increasingly interested in dismantling it and treating its pieces as individual components. The controls can become part of the front of the instrument instead of remaining attached to an amplifier enclosure that was designed for an entirely different purpose.

If GBass stays in the Garage long enough, that's probably where it's headed.

The Parts I Don't Want to Change

The 27.5" scale stays. The aluminum framer's-level beam stays. The floating bridge stays. The strings remain anchored directly into the level. No tailpiece.

Everything around those ideas is still open for discussion.

That could mean a different amplifier, different pickups and controls, or an entirely different solution for the body sections that currently surround the central structure.

And if somebody wants GBass before I decide what comes next, that's fine too. We can make those decisions together.

A Garage project doesn't always have to wait for me to decide how it gets finished.

Sometimes the next owner gets to be part of the experiment.