Three Flattop Acoustic Basses

by Graham McDonald

Originally published in American Lutherie #113, 2013



Gerard Gilet, Jim Williams, and myself were each building guitars in Sydney, Australia back in 1988. As it happened, we all received orders for acoustic bass guitars around the same time. None of us had ever built one previously. Remember, this was twenty-five years ago. There was not much information available — none of this modern interweb stuff — so there was a bit of discussion back and forth about the best approach to take. American Lutherie editor Tim Olsen had written an article in AL#9 (GAL Plan #13) on acoustic bass guitars and this had been followed by several more articles in AL#12 including one from Harry Fleishman. All of these articles can also be found in The Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume One. Harry’s article included a photo and diagram of a delightfully asymmetrical body design which I promptly appropriated. (I did retrospectively seek permission when I met Harry at a GAL Convention some years later.) These articles provided at least a starting point for our instruments.

All three basses were finished about the same time, so we thought it might be useful to do some comparisons. I came across these few pages of handwritten notes recently and thought our observations might be useful to others who might be working on similar projects. All were about the same size (i.e., as big as possible) and made of similar materials — Sitka spruce soundboard and Tasmanian blackwood (acacia melanoxylon) body. The main difference between the instruments was the method of soundboard bracing.