Jul 10
3
Custom Bass Guitars
There are many aspects of building next custom bass guitar. First of all instrument itself. Just variety of them is the huge subject. Considering such things as number of strings, frets or no frets, headstock or headless, length of scale, tone preferences depending on wood combinations or maybe type of fiber and resin or composites used to build it , electronics, hardware, finish etc……
Rybski never considered his work as repetitive way of creating a product, on the contrary the custom bass guitar
is exact description of his work! Variety and challenge of it is what makes him exited and drives him to reach new dimensions and levels of custom work. For instance the headless bass, as most of us know made huge show and kept very popular sometime in 80′s and suddenly almost vanished. Is that fluke, or something odd happened?
Rybski thinks that nothing happened and that is the reason, why headless bass lost it’s popularity. First it was a great gimmick, lot of players used it for size, others for hip looks, some for less weight, but Rybski found many manual and tonal attributes and continued searching for maximizing those advantages! For instance he has personally couple of them in his arsenal that he uses in his band projects. His double neck- 5 string fretted and 5 string fretless not only sounds great, but also fits in regular lead guitar case thanks to very tricky and innovative neck alignment or rather misalignment.
Rybski also developed incredible easy and foolproof string holding hardware for use with regular strings and without any wrenches or moving parts. I think that many bass players have been discouraged to play headless bass because poor access to double ball strings! His other very custom bass guitar is his 6 string headless fretless bass. Very compact and very well balanced instrument is designed for maximum sustain and super comfort. Because of small size he generated incredible tight core giving fantastic range of playable solo notes up to 32nd fret position and punchy, growly bass and all that with weight similar to a standard bass guitar! He also designed tuning hardware in the bridge that proudly says “CUSTOM”
Custom bass guitar always was and still is to Rybski all about the player and playing. Following many bass players ideas took Rybski Further than most builders. Many times in his career Rybski had a chance to custom fit bass to players physiognomy. Most of the time we imagine bass player as a big guy, but truth is that lots of very talented bass players are as average or smaller than we think. Rybski has few solutions such as smaller or thinner necks or short scale bass. Short scale bass guitar never made to the main stream custom bass guitar building. The popular notion is that short scale bass is a lesser bass or sounds not big enough. Rybski disproved that many times developing ways of bringing real big bass sound to a smaller instruments. With his development of new wood configurations, new electronics and most important experience, he changed old formulas and myths putting together sweet short scale bass adding more range to custom bass guitar subject. For those, who say that standard scale bass sound better- probably when you compare two together, but Rybskis short scale bass guitar still will hold it’s place in pro’s arsenal!
I mentioned the double neck bass guitar and that is something that Rybski worked on all the time and he has tremendous experience in designing and building. That is his favorite custom bass guitar configuration because he plays several different stiles and for instance he can play slap and fretless solo in the same tune or groove on fretless and use some cords etc….. What I want to say really custom bass guitar shouldn’t be limited, word “CUSTOM” means a lot to Rybski and he will do anything to be proud of it!
