Wishbass
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Wishbass is a custom bass guitar company located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The company owner and head luthier, Steve Wishnevsky, specializes in making unorthodox bass guitars out of both exotic and domestic woods.
[edit] Overview
Wishbass are hand-crafted electric basses made from fine domestic and exotic woods. They are generally inexpensive due to their simple electronics and design. Wishnevsky is also often ridiculed due to his radical and sometimes unaesthetic body shapes, and for his trademark open headstock, which he claims adds sustain.
Wishnevsky focuses attention on using minimal metal in the construction of his basses to improve tone. He often features many different wood laminates on the bodies of his bass guitars, giving them an unorthodox appearance. The woods he usually uses are domestic, such as walnut and maple, but he does frequently use exotic woods such as cocobolo and bubinga. The nuts and bridges on his basses are made of Corian. The nut is glued in place and the bridge is held down by the tension of the strings. Wishnevsky builds mainly fretless basses with no trussrods for cheaper construction costs, though he will add frets and a trussrod if they are requested. Though he emphatic in using minimal amounts of metal in his basses, most of them feature an aluminum control cavity cover plate. According to Wishnevsky, this is because aluminum is much cheaper than many other materials. Because his basses are mainly built with passive electronics, tone knobs are usually not present on Wishnevsky's basses. This does, however, disallow the player to manipulate the tonal qualities of the bass guitar, which is another point of criticism with his instruments.
Steve Wishnevsky has currently built over 750 bass guitars. He also builds mandolins, acoustic guitars, electric upright basses, cellos, arpeggiones, viols, mandocellos, and ukeleles.
