Custom Series

Choose from conventional tuning, headless or hybrid headless layouts.

Available as a standard bass with 4- to 6-strings, extended range bass with 7+ strings or choose an octave string layout with 8- to 18-strings.

A wide range of scale length and string spacing is available standard. Added cost options expand this to include any scale length, including multiscale, string spacing and nut width you need.

Any combination of woods suitable for a bass may be selected for your instrument, though we are happy to make recommendations on recipes that work well together or that can help you meet the goals you have for your instrument.

Figured, exotic and domestic hardwoods of many varieties are used. We also use hybrid material such as dyed and resin-stabilized burls and Thermalwood® Obsidian Ebony, which tailor some of these woods to work better in our instruments.

We specialize in sourcing hard-to-find woods to meet the most demanding requests to build truly unique instruments.

We use conventional and headless bridges from Hipshot Products®, ETS® and Riviera®. Tuning machines are sourced from Graph Tech® and Hipshot Products®, while headpieces for headless instruments come from Hipshot Products® or Riviera®.

Jescar Music® stainless steel fretwork is standard, in one of three sizes. If you prefer nickel-silver or another material, we can source that as well.

Our preferred strap buttons are the Dunlop® Dual-design Strap Lok buttons, though we can also install Schaller® or other locking systems, including Dunlop® flush mount.

Our preferred nut material is brass and we commonly sculpt scalloped nuts for out instruments. We also use Graph Tech® Tusq® or bone at the clients preference.

Our carbon fibre neck reinforcement is sourced by a supplier of carbon fibre components to NASA. We also use dual-action stainless steel Flexstrong® truss rods from Mike Gutsch, either in single or dual configurations depending on string count, neck width and scale length.

We are particularly proud of the dual-coil pickups developed for us by our Canadian partner MJS Custom Pickups®. These offer a very balanced a detailed tone and are optimized to work with series/parallel switching to give fatter, mid-focused series tones or flatter, hi-fi parallel tones.

We also offer a low-impedance version of our dual-coil pickups, optimized to work with filter-style preamplifiers.

Our preferred preamplifiers are sourced from Bartolini®, Trickfish®, and JTex Electronics®. These offer flexible 3- and 4-band preamplifiers, as well as an active low-pass filter preamplifier.

The custom series can also be ordered with a variety of other pickups and preamplifiers and we have worked with Delano®, Kent Armstrong®, EMG®, Bartolini®, Seymour Duncan®, Glockenklang®, Richter® and John East®. If you have specific pickups and preamplifiers that suit your taste, we can integrate them into a Custom Series bass.

We can integrate piezo bridge saddles, soundboard transducers (for hollowbody instruments), MIDI systems, headphone amplifiers and other custom electronics requests.

We offer oil and wax finishes as standard. These finishes reveal the beauty of the woods selected for your bass while also providing a finish that can be very easily touched up in the future.

For clients wanting additional protection, we offer a satin oil varnish finish, which further protects the woods from water and other liquids.

For clients seeking high gloss or coloured finishes, we outsource UV-cured polyurethane finishes to Vancouver Guitar Finishing. These are the ultimate in ultra-thin lacquer type finishes and are available in almost any colour, from natural, to transparent and burst colours, to solid colours, metallics and colour-shift paints.

We offer only satin epoxy finishes on our Maple fretboards. This finish is very durable and maintains a very natural appearance of the wood.