Posted on February 20, 2026February 20, 2026 by Dale Phillips Meet the Maker: David King Meet the Maker: David King by Jonathon Peterson Originally published in American Lutherie #85, 2006 David King and I have been rubbing shoulders at instrument shows for years, and I have always been a big fan of his work, but the bass he had at the last Portland Handmade Musical Instrument Exhibit was stunning. Elegant and balanced, with a flawless finish, custom hardware, active EMG pickups, an onboard tuner, and every ounce accounted for — I just had to talk with him about his lutherie life and how he made these beauties. Was it instruments first, or was it music? It was music first. There were four kids and two adults in my family, and everyone played an instrument. My dad was a political science professor at U. Mass. in Amherst; he played the piano. My eldest sister played clarinet and my next sister played viola and sang. My brother was a cellist. Eventually my dad picked up the viola, too. I started violin at age seven and carried it on until I hit college, at around twenty. Then I realized that the sound of that thing right under your ear — I think little kids can take that noise better than adults can, but I was never going to be a great violinist. (laughs) You have to draw the line. I’d always listened to classical music, and it never occurred to me that there was pop music out there, or anything else that could be taken seriously. Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of the Articles Online featured on our website for Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. For details, visit the membership page. MEMBERS: login for access or contact us to setup your account.
Posted on February 19, 2026February 19, 2026 by Dale Phillips Three Flattop Acoustic Basses 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. Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of the Articles Online featured on our website for Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. For details, visit the membership page. MEMBERS: login for access or contact us to setup your account.
Posted on January 15, 2026January 15, 2026 by Dale Phillips Electric Bass Design Consideration Electric Bass Design Consideration by Veronica Merryfield, David Minnieweather, and moderator/organizer Harry Fleishman from their 2008 GAL Convention panel discussion Originally published in American Lutherie #99, 2009 Harry Fleishman: We’re going to talk basses. Veronica Merryfield is here to talk about the transition from acoustic to electric upright. David Minnieweather is going to talk about bass design from a player’s standpoint, and I’m going talk about thinking in terms of design and making materials choices. So without further ado — do you want further ado? — here is Veronica. Veronica Merryfield: This is my twenty-fifth year of making instruments. I was doing analog synths in my early teens and I needed a bass for the sound I was after. I bought a cheap bass and it was rubbish. Right then, Ned Steinberger brought out this beautifully designed bass but I just couldn’t afford one, so I started building. I made a bass and played it for fifteen years, despite all its problems. Now I use it to show students that their stuff’s really not all that bad. Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of the Articles Online featured on our website for Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. For details, visit the membership page. MEMBERS: login for access or contact us to setup your account.
Posted on October 10, 2025October 10, 2025 by Dale Phillips A Savart-Style Upright Bass A Savart-Style Upright Bass Constructing a Simple 34" Scale Upright Bass Suitable for Bass Guitarists by R.M. Mottola Originally published in American Lutherie #80, 2004 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume Seven, 2015 Regular experimentation on my part is directed toward the goal of producing the sound of the double bass from instruments that can be readily played by the bass guitarist. Many approaches are possible and the instrument described here is the result of one of these. The design process began with functional requirements for the bass. This list was pretty basic. The target group of musicians was bass guitarists, and this constrained the scale length and a number of the critical dimensions of the neck and fingerboard to be similar to those of bass guitars. The instrument had to be musically viable in all styles in which the double bass is played pizzicato. It had to be transportable too, an easy design goal given the standard for portability set by the unwieldy double bass. To that list I added one more requirement — that the prototype be relatively simple and cheap to build. The bass is just like any other instrument, only more so. Material cost is higher because there is more material. Construction time is greater because there is simply more to construct. The upshot is that a bass design experiment can consume a lot of time, effort, and money before the success or failure of the experiment is known. I wanted to keep both cost and effort down for the prototype. Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of the Articles Online featured on our website for Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. For details, visit the membership page. MEMBERS: login for access or contact us to setup your account.
Posted on October 9, 2025October 9, 2025 by Dale Phillips The Bassola 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. Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of the Articles Online featured on our website for Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. For details, visit the membership page. MEMBERS: login for access or contact us to setup your account.
