Marquis6BassJr.

$495.00

Tags: Boneyard, Copy Available, Garage, Integrated Speaker, Original Available, Reclaimed Instrument, Stave

Categories: 30" scale, Hollow-Body, Short Scale, Six-String Bass

A 30-inch-scale six-string bass built from a 13-inch violin, a modified Mustang Bass neck and an oak wine-barrel stave, with a single humbucker and Harmony PowerPal amp.

Marquis6BassJr. is a six-string, 30-inch-scale bass built around a repaired Mustang Bass neck and a heavily worn 13-inch violin body.

The Mustang neck was acquired without a headstock. Its replacement was salvaged from an otherwise unusable Harmony neck and grafted onto the Mustang neck, retaining the original Marquis name across its face.

An oak wine-barrel stave provides the central structure, with the original bunghole deliberately retained. The strings cross a Les Paul Jr.-style wraparound bridge and continue to a trapeze tailpiece.

The small violin body was chosen specifically for its age and wear rather than despite it. Its scratches, discoloration and evidence of its previous life remain visible as part of the instrument.

The original onboard Harmony PowerPal amplifier is no longer functioning, placing Marquis6BassJr. back in the Garage. It could simply receive a new amplifier, but a more substantial possibility is now being considered: retaining the six-string short-scale neck and bridge concept while developing it into the first Tiger Plastic bass.

Additional information

Instrument Type	6-String Bass
Approach	Boneyard Build, Front Integrated-Amp Build, Reclaimed-Instrument Build, RestoMod
Construction	Cantilevered, Hollow-Body
Body	13" Viola
Beam	Oak Wine Barrel Stave WITH Bunghole
Neck	34" scale to 30" scale (Conversion), Mahogany
Fingerboard	Rosewood
Headstock	Modified Headstock
Scale Length	30"
Number of Frets	20
Bridge	Les Paul Jr.
Tailpiece	Eminee Plastic Toy Guitar
Neck Pickup	Humbucker
Middle Pickup
Bridge Pickup
Pickup Switch
Controls	1 Volume / 1 Tone
Knobs	Knurled
Amplifier	Harmony PowerPal
Power Supply	9V Rechargeable Battery

Marquis6BassJr.

Rubÿtone Guitar Scorecard

8.14 / 10

293 / 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

Six Strings From the Remains of Two Necks

The neck started as a Mustang Bass neck that I found on eBay.

Its headstock had been broken off and was completely missing, which made it exactly the sort of thing that interests me.

The replacement came from an old Harmony neck that wasn't worth saving as a neck, but its headstock was.

It already had Marquis written across the front, so when I grafted it onto the Mustang neck, it gave the bass more than a headstock.

It gave it a name.

The “Jr.” comes from the proportions.

This is a six-string bass built around a 30" Mustang Bass scale and a little 13" violin body.

I chose that particular violin because it shows so much age and wear.

I like that.

I don't want an old piece of wood to pretend that it's new. The scratches, discoloration and evidence of its previous life are part of what made me want to use it.

An oak wine-barrel stave runs through the middle—with the bunghole left right where it was—and the strings continue across a Les Paul Jr. wraparound bridge to a trapeze tailpiece.

There are a lot of different histories visible in this one little bass.

I don't see any reason to erase them.

The Reason This Rubÿtone Is in the Garage

The Harmony PowerPal is dead.

The simple solution would be to replace it.

A few years ago, that's probably exactly what I would have done.

But replacing the amplifier isn't the only possibility anymore.

I've built enough other Rubÿtones since Marquis6BassJr. that I'm now looking at the entire instrument differently.

When I Have More Time…

I keep looking at Marquis6BassJr. and imagining something considerably stranger:

What if it became the first Tiger Plastic bass?

I want to try taking this six-string, short-scale bass idea and putting it into one of the vintage plastic Emenee/Maccaferri-style bodies I've been working with.

I would retain the neck—with that salvaged Marquis headstock—and the bridge/tailpiece concept that established this bass's character in the first place.

But I'm not convinced I should do it.

The worn little violin body is one of my favorite things about the current version. Replacing it with plastic isn't obviously an improvement.

It's another experiment.

And that's an important difference.

The amplifier needs to be replaced.

The violin body doesn't.

So before I fix the obvious problem, I want to decide whether I'm repairing Marquis6BassJr. or using what I've learned from it to make something I haven't built before.