Headless Basses
A bass platform for inspired playing.
Vulture began life as a client’s request for a Condor bass with a less offset body and vintage appointments. Following construction and delivery of that bass, the design was further refined into this unique instrument. As the name may suggest, the Vulture offers many of the same design features as the Condor, but in another platform to inspire your creativity, both in instrument appointment and in musical performance. Available in 4, 5 and 6 strings, headed or headless, fretted or fretless, Vulture can adapt to your playing needs.
Headless without limitations.
Many of you will be familiar with people looking for double ball strings and other unique strings to fit their headless basses. With modern headless hardware, this is not a limitation. Headless versions of my basses work with all of the same strings as their cousins with headstocks. String ends are locked down either with a thumb screw or grub screw tightened with a hex key (included with your bass). As long as the string windings cross the nut, the string is compatible with our headless hardware. Lock the string ball into the bridge tuner, pull the string taught through the headpiece, tighten the lock screw, cut, tune and you’re back to playing. I find it simpler and faster than winding a string around a conventional tuner post.
Optimized ergonomics.
We have refined the body shape and neck-body interface of the Shrike to provide the most ergonomic playing experience possible. Our deep cutaway and three-bolt neck joint are conceived to give the player the most comfortable playing experience across all two octaves of the fretboard. Optional neck-through-body construction give a more effortless experience playing in the upper register. Our neck angle and fretboard height are carefully chosen to provide the player with a fast feeling neck that give the player space to pop and slap.
Our bodies have generous arm and tummy bevels with very rounded body edges to ensure that the bass feels comfortable against your body. The body size was carefully refined to produce a lightweight and compact body that retains enough size to feel right and blend into the player.
State-of-the-art hardware.
You can be assured that your Shrike bass is equipped with nothing but the best available hardware. Careful thought is put into the selection of every component that goes on your bass.
The Shrike is available with either a Hipshot® or ETS® single string bridges. In the headless configuration the bridge options include Riviera® and ETS® bridges. We believe these are the best bridges available on the market in terms of sound transmission, adjustability and finish quality. Graph Tech® Ratio® tuners provide undeniable tuning benefits to the E and B strings employing different gear ratios for each string to equalize the tone shift from each turn of the tuner. If you have not used these tuners before, you will be surprised by the improved accuracy of tuning the E and B strings.
For out other components, we exclusively use Jescar Music® fretwork, available in the clients choice of stainless steel, EVO Gold® or nickel-silver. We use Dunlop® Dual-design Strap Lok® strap buttons with custom ground extra long mounting screws. We use either bell brass or Graph Tech® Tusq XL® nut material.
We typically custom make our control knobs to match your bass body, but metal or plastic knobs are available on request.
High-performance electronics.
The most significant impact to the tone of a bass is the pickup system. We use what we believe is the ultimate pickup system for producing an articulate, full range tone that can form the basis of tone shaping for any type of off-board signal processing. We also offer a variety of onboard electronics options to meet your needs for onboard tone-shaping.
Our magnetic pickups are produced my Mike and Melissa at MJS® Custom Handwound Guitar and Bass Pickups in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. These pickups are the results of many discussions and testing to develop a wide-range pickup that could be used with parallel, series, and single-coil operation to offer the player the ultimate bass pickup. Based on the very best Jazz Bass® pickups, these true dual coil pickups use two Alnico V pole pieces per string per coil to give the clearest and most articulate output possible. We believe this is the best bass pickup on the market.
We offer a variety of onboard preamplifier options for those seeking complete onboard tone-shaping. We recommend and offer preamplifiers from Bartolini®, Trickfish®, Richter® and Flexcore®. These can be combined with a variety of additional options including active/passive switching, passive tone control, pickup coil selectors and EQ frequency selector switches. We also offer a hifidelity onboard headphone amplifier.
Piezo pickups offer the very best approximation of an acoustic bass tone from an electric bass. We offer two systems that use saddle transducers and piezo/magnetic mixing circuits to integrate the pickups with the onboard magnetic pickups - the Graph Tech® Ghost® and Acoustiphonic® system for Hipshot bridges and the ETS® / Richter® system for ETS bridges. These are both world class, ultra low noise systems and we believe that the ultimate pickup package includes both our MJS® pickups mated with a piezo system.
Your electronics system cannot perform its best if it suffers from the induction of extraneous noise. We use fully shielded electronics and pickup cavities using a product that we’ve tested and believe offers the very best noise rejection of stray EM signals and interference from noisy nearby electronics.
Unlimited options.
We believe that most people seeking our instruments are seeking something truly unique and personalized. Therefore, we strive to be able to deliver any option you can dream up. While we offer a standardized options lists to let you understand the price of your dream bass, we welcome additional challenges. Our experience with customers ideas outside of our standard offerings has been entirely positive and has resulted in some truly unique and beautiful instruments, inspiring the creativity of our clients.