Hollowbody Bass Archive » Brandon’s Basses

My New (old) Klira Twen Star 356

Brandon — Fri, 02 May 2008 02:04:07 +0000

Been a while….hope to do some more posts this weekend. But in the mean time…….

Check out my new-to-me mid/late 60′s Klira Twen Star 356:

I bought it with these old tapewound strings on it. Haven’t had a bass with tapewounds in over ten years…..forgot how cool they are. The neck on this bass is awesome, and plays like a dream. Plus the bass has 40 solid years of player wear – naturally ‘reliced’.

This bass sounds great unplugged. The quality of the craftsmanship really comes through in the acoustic sound. This particular model has a bolt-on neck, so now I’d really like to try one of the earlier set-neck models.

Unfortunately the electronics and pickup rings are shot. I know for sure that the neck pickup works, and the bridge pickup reads 7.5k on the multimeter, so it should be okay. The pots, switch and jack will need replacing.

A cool thing about these basses (which I didn’t know until a TalkBasser pointed it out and I pulled off the control panel) is that the pickup leads where wired to 1/8″ mono plugs. The control panel and electronics were assembled, and the volume pot was integrated with two jacks. Once it came time to assemble the bass, the pickups were mounted and simply plugged into the control panel before the panel was screwed into the body. Pretty smart…….

So if you know of somewhere I can pickup a few spare Klira pickup rings, let me know!

Green With Envy – My Hollowbody Parts Bass, Pt. 1

Brandon — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 12:44:08 +0000

A while back, our singer (and fellow bass player) told me about an old guitar of his that had suffered damage from a fall. I inquired a little further and found out that the guitar was a 70′s Univox/Electra/Teisco ES-335 copy in greenburst. I immediately offered to buy the carcass from him. Later he brought it to practice and just gave it to me.

Fast forward 6+ months when I finally had the new hardware and access to a drill press:

Before I got the guitar body from Ryan, I had already grabbed a NOS Univox bass neck from eBay. I bought it and was waiting for the right body to come along. The neck pocket for the body is a perfect fit for the neck. I’m pretty certain that the basses and guitars of this type were manufactured at the same time, with the only real difference being the position of the pickup routing.

Widening the tuner holes was the most harrowing part – they were just under 1/2″ (for those crappy old Japanese tuners) and needed to be 9/16″ for the MIK tuners that I had ordered. I tried a drill press, but ended up chipping the edges of the paint on the front of the headstock (luckily the washers for the tuners covered my screw-up). You can’t tell from this picture, but the buttons are white pearloid.

The Allparts Hofner-copy tailpiece required some extra holes to be drilled on the edge of the body, so I’m going to fashion a small plate made of pickguard material to go under the tailpiece mount to cover the original holes (the new tailpiece is a little smaller than the original).

A couple more shots:

The finish on the back is a little more vibrant than the finish on the front:

Now I need to get some pickup surrounds created that match the originals (so I don’t have to bother with more routing and hole-drilling). I’ll be using a set of DeArmond Turbo-Jet single coil pickups. Still haven’t decided on the wiring scheme yet. The bridge is a floating Hofner-style.

I was thinking about all the hardware for this bass the other day, and before it’s all done, this will be a ‘MIAJKG’ model – the pickups are MIA (made in America), the bridge was made in Germany, the tuners in Korea and the body and neck in Japan.

Sekova Hollowbody ReHab

Brandon — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 04:07:17 +0000

My grandfather bought this bass from a yardsale for $20 back in the 70′s or 80′s. He kept it as a backup for his EB-2. He gave it to me to learn on when I expressed interest in playing the bass.

Shortly afterwards, the electronics crapped out on me. So it spent many years in the corner. I’d pull it out and fiddle with it if I didn’t feel like plugging in my Epiphone Thunderbird (circa 1995, non-reverse style). It stayed at my parents house after I left for college and has been in my dad’s care since then.

At some point I gutted it. Not really sure why. Probably out of curiousity. I’ve still got the pickups somewhere, along with the control plate. I’m going to try to fish them out. I’m pretty sure the pickups are not working in their current state.

Anyway, here are the ‘before’ pics I just took:

Yamaha’s Guitar Guru is All-Knowing

Brandon — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 02:09:22 +0000

If you’ve never heard of the Yamaha SA-17 Hollowbody Bass, you’re not alone. I doubt many people have. After ten years of guitar collecting and drooling over guitar books, magazines, websites and eBay auctions, I’d never seen one myself until this past month. It came up for auction and I was willing to pay anything to have it.

Anyway, I won the auction, got the bass, but couldn’t find any information on it. I knew it was a cousin of the SA-15 guitar, but that was about it. So I emailed Yamaha’s ‘Guitar Guru’ (the email address can be found on Yamaha’s website) asking if they knew anything about this instrument. Within 24 hours, they had responded with the model number and a link to Yamaha Japan’s Guitar Database.

Guitar Guru, you are my new hero. Talk about customer service!!