Standin’Up

$3,695.00

Tags: Boneyard, Copy Available, Found Object, Garage, Integrated Speaker, Original Available, Reclaimed Instrument, Self-Standing, Spirit Level

Categories: 34" scale, Four-String Bass, Hollow-Body, Pro, Specialty

A full 34-inch-scale stand-up bass squeezed into a compact Matsumoku hollow body, with a carpenter-level beam, twin Jazzmaster pickups and a built-in Pignose Hog-30 powerful enough to take it to the street.

Standin’Up is a 34-inch-scale bass combining sections of a Matsumoku hollow-body electric guitar with a cherry carpenter’s level as its central structural beam.

The maple neck has a rosewood fingerboard and 20 frets. An ebony archtop bridge works with a cello tailpiece, while spruce stair-tread material, violin components and boat hardware are incorporated into the body structure and trim.

Two Jazzmaster pickups are controlled by a three-way toggle. Vintage chicken-head, Harmony PowerPal and Pignose-style knobs contribute to the mix of repurposed components.

A Pignose Hog-30 provides the amplification, powered by a rechargeable 12-volt battery. The current configuration uses the Hog-30 speaker as a single speaker unit.

The combination of the long 34-inch bass neck, narrow central beam and separated hollow-body sections gives Standin’Up the proportions and visual character of a compact electric upright while retaining conventional fretted-bass playability.

Additional information

Instrument Type	4-String Bass
Approach	Boneyard Build, Experimental Build, Found-Object Build, Front Integrated-Amp Build, Reclaimed-Instrument Build, RestoMod, Structural Reinterpretation
Construction	Cantilevered, Hollow-Body
Body	Matsomuko Hollow-Body Electric Guitar
Beam	Cherry Carpenter Level
Neck	Maple
Fingerboard	Rosewood
Headstock	Bass Headstock
Scale Length	34"
Number of Frets	22
Bridge	Ebony Archtop Bridge
Tailpiece	Cello Tailpiece
Neck Pickup	Fender Jazz Bass
Middle Pickup
Bridge Pickup	Fender Jazz Bass
Pickup Switch	3-Way Toggle
Controls	1 Volume / 1 Tone
Knobs	Harmony PowerPal Amp, PigNose, Vintage Chicken Head Knobs
Amplifier	PigNose Hog-30
Power Supply	12V Security-Camera Backup Battery

Standin'Up

Rubÿtone Guitar Scorecard

9.86 / 10

355 / 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

A Compact Stand-Up Bass That Needed to Get Louder

The original idea behind Standin’Up was portability.

I wanted a bass that could be compact enough to take into the city without carrying a separate amplifier.

The first version combined pieces of a Matsumoku hollow-body electric with a 34" bass neck, a cherry carpenter's level for the beam, violin parts, boat hardware and a cello tailpiece.

It worked.

But it wasn't loud enough.

When I tried to use it around brass players and all the other noise that comes with playing outside in New York, the little amplifier couldn't keep up.

So Standin’Up went back to the bench.

More Power

The next version got a Pignose Hog-30.

That certainly solved the volume problem.

Two Jazzmaster pickups feed the amp, and a rechargeable 12-volt security-camera backup battery provides the power.

Standin’Up can make some noise now.

But that's the thing about solving one problem.

Sometimes you discover the next one.

The Reason This Rubÿtone Is in the Garage

The speaker is in the wrong place.

The Hog-30 gave me the power I wanted, but its speaker is heavy.

Putting all of that weight in one place affects the balance of the entire instrument and makes Standin’Up heavier than I want it to be.

The amplifier isn't really the problem.

The way I packaged it is.

Standin’Up has already been through more than one renovation, and this is another example of why I don't consider a finished Rubÿtone untouchable.

If I learn a better way to solve the problem, I can go back and solve it again.

When I Have More Time…

I want to get rid of the single speaker and replace it with two speakers mounted into the backs of the hollow-body sections.

That would distribute the weight instead of concentrating it in one place and make the hollow-body construction do more of the work.

I also want a switch that gives me three choices:

Speaker one.

Speaker two.

Both.

That interests me for more than just balance.

The two sides of the instrument don't necessarily have to behave the same way. Being able to listen to either speaker independently—or put them together—gives me another thing to experiment with.

The 34" scale stays.

The cherry carpenter's level stays.

The Jazzmaster pickups stay.

And I already know the Pignose can make it loud enough.

I don't need another amplifier experiment.

I need a better way to distribute what I already have.

Now I want to make Standin’Up stand up better.