Brooks - EXB-12-Q
BUILT FOR ROB VAN DER LOO
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- Mahogany body
- Bookmatched Quilted Maple top - Three piece Mahogany set neck. Glued in - Transparent black stain on top - Solid black on body and neck - High gloss transparent acrylic finish on top - Matte transparent acrylic finish on sides, back and neck - White binding - Ebony fretboard - Mother of pearl position dots - Jumbo frets - 34" scale - Buffalo horn nut - Dean twelve string brass bridge set |
- Two spokewheel double action trussrods
- Carbon reinforcement strip in the neck - Lace Alumitone Bass Bar in the neck position - Lace Alumitone DeathBar in the bridge position - Allparts stacked pots (volume/tone volume/tone) - On on switch for coil splitting (humbucker-single coil) - Gotoh GB 350 lightweight bass tuners - Gotoh Stealth ST 31 guitar tuners - d'Addario EXL 170 - 12 strings Electronics circuit by Bas Becu. www.bqmusic.nl Serialnumber: 2018004 PRICE € 3500Want me to build one for you too? Send me an email
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The Build Process
The design
This twelve string monster bass was built to the orders of Rob van der Loo, bass player of Epica.
Rob had seen a few of my EB-RBL and EB-PL basses and wanted one for himself. Yet he wanted it a bit different...
He wanted a twelve string bass, full scale, Explorer body. And two splittable humbuckers, each with its own dedicated output jack.
So I started drawing up a design. Finding a twelve string bridge for bass, turned out to be quite a needle in a haystack.
Initially I chose to use a Schaller 8-string bridge that I was gonna customize to 12-string. Until I got in touch with Dean guitars, who were kind enough to provide me with a nice genuine 12-string bridge set combination. In black!
Another challenge was the headstock with all the hardware that was gong to be attached to it. Twelve tuners is an awful lot of metal! I knew Gotoh makes excellent light weight bass machine heads. So that was an easy choice. But the eight guitar tuners needed to be very light too. I was delighted to find out about the Gotoh Stealth tuners. They are extremely light and they look very sleek and subtle to boot!
The neck is a three piece laminate. Reïnforced with a carbon strip in the middle and a pair of two-way spokewheel trussrods. The truss rod access is at the neck joint side, instead of the headstock side. So the headstock is less prone to fractures since there's no excessive wood removal there.
Finding the right pickups wasn't very easy too. I figured I needed blade magnets rather than pole pieces, because of the sheer width of each triplet (bass string plus two octave strings). Rob van der Loo wanted humbuckers that could be switched to single coil. And he wanted the neck pickup to be a bass pickup, but the humbucker at the bridge should be a guitar pickup with it's own output for a guitar amp! Most humbuckers proved to be too narrow to pick up all the strings from the outer octave E to the outer bass G string.
It turned out Lace Alumitones come in three widths. Meant for exotic multiple string basses and guitars.
And they sound killer! Very silent and very tight sounding pickups.
How do you connect all that without clogging up the bass with too many knobs and switches?
Enter Bas Becu of BQ Music. He is an electronics wizard who develops very clever solutions for guitars , basses, effects and amps. Bas made a nice design for the wiring loom. With a stacked pot for each pickup to set Volume and Tone. Plus a two way switch to choose between humbucking mode and single coil.
Last thing I did when the bass was stringed up, tuned and intonated, was finding the right spot for the lower strap button. I placed it off center, roughly at the same height as the E string triplet. I was thrilled to find that the bass balances perfectly. No neck dive!
Rob had seen a few of my EB-RBL and EB-PL basses and wanted one for himself. Yet he wanted it a bit different...
He wanted a twelve string bass, full scale, Explorer body. And two splittable humbuckers, each with its own dedicated output jack.
So I started drawing up a design. Finding a twelve string bridge for bass, turned out to be quite a needle in a haystack.
Initially I chose to use a Schaller 8-string bridge that I was gonna customize to 12-string. Until I got in touch with Dean guitars, who were kind enough to provide me with a nice genuine 12-string bridge set combination. In black!
Another challenge was the headstock with all the hardware that was gong to be attached to it. Twelve tuners is an awful lot of metal! I knew Gotoh makes excellent light weight bass machine heads. So that was an easy choice. But the eight guitar tuners needed to be very light too. I was delighted to find out about the Gotoh Stealth tuners. They are extremely light and they look very sleek and subtle to boot!
The neck is a three piece laminate. Reïnforced with a carbon strip in the middle and a pair of two-way spokewheel trussrods. The truss rod access is at the neck joint side, instead of the headstock side. So the headstock is less prone to fractures since there's no excessive wood removal there.
Finding the right pickups wasn't very easy too. I figured I needed blade magnets rather than pole pieces, because of the sheer width of each triplet (bass string plus two octave strings). Rob van der Loo wanted humbuckers that could be switched to single coil. And he wanted the neck pickup to be a bass pickup, but the humbucker at the bridge should be a guitar pickup with it's own output for a guitar amp! Most humbuckers proved to be too narrow to pick up all the strings from the outer octave E to the outer bass G string.
It turned out Lace Alumitones come in three widths. Meant for exotic multiple string basses and guitars.
And they sound killer! Very silent and very tight sounding pickups.
How do you connect all that without clogging up the bass with too many knobs and switches?
Enter Bas Becu of BQ Music. He is an electronics wizard who develops very clever solutions for guitars , basses, effects and amps. Bas made a nice design for the wiring loom. With a stacked pot for each pickup to set Volume and Tone. Plus a two way switch to choose between humbucking mode and single coil.
Last thing I did when the bass was stringed up, tuned and intonated, was finding the right spot for the lower strap button. I placed it off center, roughly at the same height as the E string triplet. I was thrilled to find that the bass balances perfectly. No neck dive!
