Bass Guitar

Between August and October 2025 I designed and built a bass guitar from planks of ebiara, padouk and linden. I had wanted to build a real instrument for a long time — I'd tried a bamboo flute and a strummable toy guitar before, but those were more like games. When I started learning to play bass myself, I decided to build one properly. A bass guitar is a good first step towards a professional instrument: simpler than an acoustic, but still full of challenges, like making a truly accurate fretboard. The design is my own. It's a neck-through construction — the neck runs the whole length of the instrument and the body attaches as two wings — which makes the guitar stronger against the tension of the strings. I mixed curved and angular shapes, rounding the instrument only where it meets your body, and replaced the usual plastic parts with wood: the pickup covers and the knobs are walnut and padouk. Much of the build had to be improvised with the tools I had. I made the truss-rod channel by drilling a hundred holes in a line and carving them into a groove, levelled the frets by hand with a felt-tip-pen trick, and built my own sanding tools along the way. The Antutna logo is burned into a walnut plate that covers the truss-rod opening. I also wrote my 11th-grade physics paper about this project — the design, the build, and the physics of how an electric bass works. You can read it here: drive.google.com/file/d/1_9iV6wmrh9j48Ekd2UuBlcY3xp58XA7z/view