This week, I started all over again with the design. Not on full scale, but just sketching body shapes on a small piece of paper. I think I drew like hundreds of ‘m. And when I almost gave up… well after midnight.. there it was! Okay, I must admit I’ve saw all possible basses I could find on the internet for some inspiration, but I drew it myself and I’m very happy with it!

Then I started thinking of the wood. Of course, I read a lot about tonewoods the past few weeks and I made up my mind about the wood I’d like to use. The body will be build from honduras mahogany, a nice reddisch brown wood with a warm tone and nice lows. Perfect for my bass! Then I want a good looking top, maybe something like flamed maple. This is a much brighter sounding wood and could be a good combination with the mahogany body.

Maybe I am going to make the body semi-hollow with a soundhole and a laminated center, built up from different kinds of wood (like ash or maple and wengé), but I am not yet sure about that. For the neck I am thinking about maple with an indian rosewood fretboard.

So, I started designing the guitar, for that is the first step after all. I created a huge piece of paper by taping four A3-sized sheets together and made a full scale drawing of my future bass. I decided it should be a jazz bass with two classical jazz pickups, 4 strings and 24 frets. It took me over 3 days. And that’s when I learned that it’s actually not that easy to design a good looking bass with the right proportions…

This week I read the book ‘Building Electric Guitars’, written by Martin Koch. It was very interesting to read about how guitars are build. First of all, I got a far better understanding of the construction of guitars and secondly, it made me think that I could actually pull this off.

I always dreamt of building my own bass and for some reason, this idea came to me again this week. So I started looking around on the internet for some information. Pretty soon I found a very helpful forum (Luthier’s Corner on TalkBass.com) and some nice books about this topic. The project had started!