Ludlow Guitars® XL4 - New

This is Ludlow Guitar's very own bass: designed and manufactured entirely in house (with the exception of the paint job for which we thank Gerhard's Guitarworks in upstate New York).

The original concept started for the guitar that we are building which is not yet completed. And then someone said "why don't we do a bass as well" and putting common sense aside and with scant thought for the consequences we jumped right in. And we are glad we did. We took the guitar shape and stretched and tweaked it to work for bass. Here is how the design came about. Like a lot of people, we had wanted to come up with our own instrument, as much as anything, to show that we could do it. So what did we want in a guitar? The Telecaster was the prinicipal design influence; the first and simplest of all guitars. But we really liked the wild shapes that Gibson under Ted McCarthy had come up with as the burgeoning guitar industry burst into the '60s (the ones that were so unpopular at the time but which are now iconic designs). So with these body shapes floating in our heads and a pickguard that we think we had seen on a one-off guitar somewhere we had a design concept which we first drew up in outline, then cut out of paper and then dummied up out of masonite (hardboard) before we committed to real wood. And the basic shape seemed right for bass as well, if it was just a bit bigger.

So what we have ended up with a is a standard Fender scale-length instrument (34") that, unlike a Fender, has a set neck, allowing excellent access to the upper reaches of the fretboard. We felt that it was difficult to beat a Precision bass for basic tone and we placed a custom hand-wound Precision bass pickup in the regular 'P' position. (The neck width too is close to that of a Precision.) However, to greatly increase the tonal range, we added a Gibson EB style pickup in the neck position (actually a DiMarzio humbucker built to emulate these pickups but also to avoid the noise problems). The switching is Fender Jazz style, with two concentric volume/tone pots for each pickup.Finally the neck pickup has a coil tap switch. The body is made from poplar. The neck is maple with an ebony fingerboard. The pickguard is brass with a lacquer finish.

So what does this sound like? Well, with the neck pickup dialed out this is quite similar to a Fender bass but a little brighter, perhaps due to the ebony fingerboard or the set neck or the shape or... Moving to the neck pickup, this bass really does the Gibson EB thing, a huge bottom that you think must involve active electronics but there is no battery inside. You can cut the low-end with the coil tap switch to get a lighter neck tone. And then you get into the combinations of the two pickups. Like a Fender Jazz bass, all the action is in the last 10% of the volume taper. The two pickups on full together get you a nice mixture of the two very different bass tones which is as at least as useable as either pickup by itself.

All the work on the guitar was done by our technician, Erich. You can see more about him on our "About us" page.

Sale Price: $4 000.00

Freight cost (contiguous USA): $35.00

Reference #: 3707

Out of stock.

Call or email us for an in-hand description of this item. 212 353 1775

Hard-shell case included. For orders shipping to a confirmed address in the contiguous USA, buy this now with your credit card or PayPal using our secure server. For all other orders, please contact us. We must provide individual shipping quotes for all overseas destinations.