MiniHuh?
A radically shortened electric mini built from a rescued neck and the cutaway horn of my old ’90s five-string bass, with violin and viola strings, piezo pickup and onboard NUX Mighty Lite amp.
A radically shortened electric mini built from a rescued neck and the cutaway horn of my old ’90s five-string bass, with violin and viola strings, piezo pickup and onboard NUX Mighty Lite amp.
Telephone game
I was having a long-distance conversation with my friend about how to achieve a shorter scale length for an instrument. The goal is to reduce the overall size, making it easier to transport. We want to be able to bring it with us every time.
There are many ways to create a mini. Here's one of them.
For this project, I selected a neck where the fingerboard had delaminated nearly one-third of the way. I was able to easily peel it off the rest of the way using a putty knife.
The idea is to use the smaller part of the scale. I played a trick here by adding the big frets back at the top, but I needed to cover up the truss rod with something.
It's a Strat style whammy tailpiece locked down in such a way as to direct the break angle pressure through a piezo transducer embedded under the bridge.
The body is from an old heavy metal 5-string bass that I used to play in bands back in the 90's. It's a part of the lower cutaway horn.
Inside the amp case is an end pin style piezo preamp that disconnects with the same switch that shuts the power amp down.
As one might imagine, this configuration created a seriously bright tone, so I addressed this issue on two fronts. First, I changed out the strings with some very fine viola and violin strings. Not only are these strings gentle on the fingers, they are warmer sounding and have depth in their character. The other way we handled the brittle nature of the tone derived from piezos in the first version was to add an extra tone knob with doubled up caps welded to it so you can roll it way back if you like. It still wasent doing it for me with the Fender® MD-20 so I changed that out to the NU>X Mighty Lite which opens up a whole lot of tone control in the presets so now we dont have any unmusical feedback and the tone is sweet and pure.
Additional information
| Instrument Type | |
|---|---|
| Approach | |
| Construction | |
| Body | |
| Beam | |
| Neck | |
| Fingerboard | |
| Headstock | |
| Scale Length | |
| Number of Frets | |
| Bridge | |
| Tailpiece | |
| Neck Pickup | |
| Middle Pickup | |
| Bridge Pickup | |
| Pickup Switch | |
| Controls | |
| Knobs | |
| Amplifier | NUX Mighty Lite |
| Power Supply |
