The Frankenbass is a desperate hybridization of two basses I had, which possessed certain desirable properties but were, in and of themselves, not good basses. The body of the Frankenbass is a J. Reynolds Chinese-made copy of a Fender P-bass. I liked it because the body was extremely light and comfortable, and the electronics are superb. The Reynolds pickup is super-hot and the tone knob does something useful (which is almost never the case with electric guitars & basses.) However, the Reynolds neck was too long, too wide, too flat, and generally too uncomfortable to play. The Frankenbass's neck came from an Epiphone EB-0 which was built like a tank but was a thoroughly horrible bass in every way. It was heavy, badly balanced, and ugly. The pickup sounded like mush and the tone pot was either defective or mis-wired. The bridge was a nightmare; I could set neither the intonation nor the action to my liking. The only good thing about the EB-0 was the short-scale neck, which felt reasonably good in my hand. I observed that the neck bolts on both basses were spaced exactly the same, and I had the idea of combining the two. Amazingly it worked, and the Frankenbass (though not perfect) is an improvement upon both of them, greater indeed than the sum of its parts. It sounds great but there's still something lacking in the physical feel of the instrument. Oh well, I'm still keeping it because it looks cool and sounds pretty sweet.
Contents copyright 1994-2009 by JW Kennedy.