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Hear is a pic of my nearly finished bass uke. The body shape was taken from the Sott Antes baritone plan. Determined a cross brace pattern after examining a Kala Ubass. I'm fairly new to building instruments, having done two kit guitars and one from "scratch", with a few serviced parts. I had alot of fun with it and it was fairly inexpensive to build. The most costly parts were the tuners at around $90 for the set. The finish is french polish. It's not perfect but it looks better than my brushed on KTM9 finishes, and I had more fun doing it. I still have some setup to do. I have to make another nut because I didn't leave enough for the slots to be deep enough for the strings. They are some thick strings! Intonation is suppose to be a pain on these as well so we'll see how that goes.

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Kyle

love the look so far I am interested in hearing her played

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Nice looking little beast. One of those is on my "to do" list. Have you given any thought to a pickup for it?

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D..

Thanks. I'm looking at the K&K acoustic bass guitar pickup. I think they call it pure bass.

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Kyle

I was scrolling through this section and noticed that I didn't post a link to the video I shot of a friend playing the bass uke at a back yard jam session a while back. It's not the greatest video, it was shot on my iPad, but you'll get an idea of the sound.http://youtu.be/GzA2abfcfmM

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Kyle

I like it but can't open the video for some reason. I'd like to make one of these some day. What does the bracing on one of these things look like?

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Bryan Bear PMoMC

Take care of your feet, and your feet will take care of you.

Not much to it, just an x brace and UTB. There's not much string tension on these, so not much bracing required. I'm sure I could have went a lot lighter and probably will if I do another.

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Kyle

Very nice little bass!

I just looked back at this thread and noticed you are still deciding on a pickup. I guess I assumed you were using an undersaddle piezo, but perhaps not. Are you playing this unamplified?

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Bryan Bear PMoMC

Take care of your feet, and your feet will take care of you.

I used the K&K pure bass pick up. It sounds nice amplified. Unamplified it's loud enough to practice with at home, but of course because of its size doesn't carry enough volume to play in a group. Great fun to play around with.

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Kyle