Scott’s Little Basses
I’ve been all about short scale since my first bass build in 1998. A few years back, I applied all I’ve learned to a 25.5” SUPER short scale, and it worked!
The Birdsong Sparrow, Companion, and Sport followed. While still running Birdsong, the “pocket basses” have followed me to my own workshop.
“In a world full of basses hard to pick up, may these be the ones you can’t put down.” Click the pics for more info.
SPORT
STYLE B
AMIGO
Since we’re here talking about basses…
Birdsong Guitars is a workshop in the Texas “Hill Country” making high end short scale basses since 2004. I started the brand in 2000 and still Captain the ship; head Luthier Jake Goede is making the classic 31” scale 4 and 5-string models that made us. Shown is a cherry and maple Corto2 in my hands, and Jake with a C5 in walnut and rosewood.
“Texas made, world played.”
Check it out:
www.birdsongguitars.com
My bass guitar journey.
Six strings have buoyed my soul; four strings have carried my ass.
I started playing bass to do some recording in the mid 1980s, and by ‘88 was on the road with rockabilly legend Sleepy LaBeef. At 19, that set the course for the rest of my life in making music and rolling the highway. I was originally a guitar player (still am), so the bass was always a tool to me - something that should work and sound right in a studio, hang and handle comfortably on stage even in the third set, and sit in a mix nicely, being heard without getting you fired. That rumble and clank just sucks - you need a note.
So, as my playing path morphed into designing and building the tools in the late ‘90s, the guitar world was vast - but there was something BIG missing in the bass world, a great smaller bass. I threw all of the concepts and thoughts I’d gathered together into what would become the Cortobass, and Birdsong Guitars. Short scales weren’t taken all that seriously then. Ours were. These days I’m settling into a mojo-full old workshop on an 1876 farmstead, and building super short “Pocket basses” on a (ahem)… smaller scale.
I can’t really go on about my favorite basses, because for much of my life I’ve made them. And everything else I’ve owned relates to that in my world; the beat old ‘69 Gibson is “the neck shape.” That incredible vintage P bass “The bass I tone-patterned the Birdsong Cbass from.” My last full-scale as a player before going exclusively short was a great parts J-bass, and its memory inspired the Corto2. So it all relates to Birdsong.
Heck, my whole LIFE relates to Birdsong. The bass, this instrument I’ve never been awash in the mystique of or deep in its culture, became my life’s work to refine in my own way. Maybe that made it easier to be critical about its function. And that gave me the career no other part of music did. That brought me the adventure of the past 25 years and floated it, and all of that added up to all of this, here and now.
If you’re young and a road band asks you “Hey - do you know any bass players?” Say yes, and get in the van. That road goes somewhere.