The Bassola

Approximating the Sound of the Upright Bass

by R.M. Mottola

Originally published in American Lutherie #64, 2000 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume Six, 2013



Clearly the best way to get the sound of an upright bass played pizzicato is with an upright bass. But that instrument poses a number of problems to bass guitarists and even to upright players — the former can’t play the instrument, and the latter often simply hate having to carry the thing around. Experiments toward approximating the sound of the upright in an instrument playable by bass guitarists constitute something of an ongoing project for me. This article describes one such effort, a large (for a guitar) acoustic instrument I call a Bassola, for no other reason than that it rhymes nicely with my last name.

The project began with listing the functional specifications for the instrument. When engineering a new instrument (or anything that represents more than a trivial departure from some existing and well-specified entity, for that matter) I find it very useful to have a target to shoot at. This makes it easier to plan and deal with the design tradeoffs that inevitably occur, plus it provides some criteria against which to judge the finished product.