It’s always refreshing to see bass builders thinking outside the box. This week we’ve got a great example of that with the Not Pear by Wes Urbaniak. The thin-bodied acoustic bass takes on a violin-esque shape, but every single Not Pear is different from the next.
“They are all a little bit different on the outside because of the approach taken in the harvesting of wood,” Urbaniak tells us. “Nearly all the wood has been salvaged from 100+ year old pianos, raw logs rotting upon the hills, dumpster finds, house demolitions, other instrument builds, etcetera.”
This example of the Not Pear is a fretless that features a body with ash back and sides that were saved from the sideboards of a 1922 piano. Its top is Scotch Pine, while the figured maple neck is topped with a wild looking fingerboard constructed from pau ferro, zebrawood, and figured maple. The Zebrawood, which Urbaniak kept from previous instrument builds, is also used for grafting and the bridge. Finally, the saddle and nut are constructed from ebony and padouk.
The Not Pear is only made in limited quantities due to Urbaniak’s schedule and the resources available. “Being a touring musician, only small handfuls of custom orders have been accepted while at home,” he says. “As I have aged and my experimental experience with instruments has grown, it was decided to move into a small scale production model of 50 instruments a year with 3 builders on board; 25 or less being the Not Pear bass.”
Hear what Not Pear 003 sounds like in this clip: