Carl Thompson is a pioneer of bass building. He built the first six-string contrabass guitar for Anthony Jackson and the first piccolo bass for Stanley Clarke, but he doesn’t rest on his laurels. The luthier is still pushing the limits and building world-class instruments in his New York City shop.
This week we’re checking out his latest build, which was made for the lucky customer Brian Kelly, who got a Full-Frills model with an enormous 38-inch scale. Even with the extra length, the bass is quite manageable.
“The bass weighs an astonishing 7.6 lbs and has a perfect balance point,” Kelly writes.
Thompson crafted the museum-quality piece with Macassar ebony, west African mahogany, pau ferro neck binding, olive wood, a bocote and walnut core, and red heart. The pickups are a pair of Kent Armstrong soap bars that feed into Thompson’s own passive circuit. Its volume and tone knobs are accompanied by two 3-way switches: one as a pickup selector (neck/neck+bridge/bridge) and one functions as a killswitch, full-range, and high-cut capacitor.
