Heavy Metal

High density and atomic weight

Once upon a time a friend and I went to buy some wood for our guitar projects, and I bought myself a block of maple. It was wide enough for a 1-piece body, not very pretty grains and fairly light-weight. I cut it into shape back in the time when I was building "Black Pearl" and "Willow", and the body blank had been stored inside for proper drying for years. So when it finally was high time to start a new build I decided to make 2 builds at the same time, just as I did with "Black Pearl" and "Willow". One with this maple body ("Heavy Metal") and the other with a pine body (the "Silver Surfer").



Time to lay down some specs;

Construction: Bolt-on
Scale Length: 810mm (32")
Strings: Dunlop NPS 45-105
# of strings: 4
Tuners: Gotoh GB720W
Bridge: Gotoh 201B-4
Frets: 24 Medium Jumbo SS

 Neck wood: 3-piece birch
Body wood: Maple (1-piece!)
Fretboard wood: Wenge
Neck pickup: Seymour-Duncan SMB-4A
Bridge pickup: Seymour-Duncan SMB-4D
Preamp: Seymour-Duncan STC-3A
I once saw a video on YouTube where a famous DIY person wrinkled up some aluminum foil, glued it onto a small wooden jewelry box and painted it black and then wiping the excess paint of. It's a fairly simple trick to make something look like the object was made out of forged metal. So I thought to myself; "How cool wouldn't that be to make a complete bass body like that"? Thought turn into process, and once the body was ready for painting, I bought some aluminum foil some the grocery store (the more sturdy stuff), wrinkled it up and glued it onto the body with some contact glue.



To get some fairly authentic look on the foil I blended some drops of black paint pigment into some Danish oil, applied it with a piece of cloth on the wrinkled foil and wiped off the excess. After it dried 5 coats of matte rattle can spray lacquer was sprayed on and once that was dry a few coats of furniture wax.



So how does it sound? Below some MP3 sound clips I recorded by plugging the bass straight into my PreSonus Audiobox 44VSL soundcard.

Both Pickups:


Neck pickup:


Bridge pickup:


However, about 3 years after all this, I decided to do a makeover on this bass.
Read all about it here; Heavy Metal -The Make Over