I know that other than amimbari,
no one here makes a habit of playing basses upside down... but I spent the better part of 10 years playing nothing but upside down basses when I couldn't get anything else, and I play strung righty. So although I rarely play any right handed basses these days, I do still have a stash of collectable vintage right handed stuff that I hang onto just for investment--and a few still make the occasional playing rotation-- all of them double cut semi-hollow and not available lefty (Acoustic Black Widow, Kustom K200D, Gretsch 6072, Harmony H22/1).
Anyway, I just recently picked this up by virture of it's unusual-ness, and thought you guys might be interested in seeing it. It's a prototype Waterstone Carnaby semi-hollow set neck bass. Unfortunatley Waterstone doesn't do lefties
, but they do a lot of one- off prototype testing before they settle on brief runs of production models. The metallic gold finish, and bridge/ tailpiece hardware were not offered in the production Carnaby, which has since been discontinued- but the body and electronic configuration did make it to production. The body mimics the standard Gibson EB2 format, but I'd never seen a semi hollow bass with 2 MM humbuckers in it before! Curiousity got the better of me, and I bought it. The overall build quality is very nice, but the real treat is the SOUND of this thing- wow! It's a true semi hollow, so there is a big tone block down the middle, but you still get pretty decent resonant tone. Once you plug in though, it just comes to life. Huge sounding, almost natural kind of sterophonic-chorus-like quality, with rich warm clean low end, smooth mids and very tight highs--kinda reminds me of a really good sounding A/E bass without the big body/feedback hassle.
I gave Waterstone an earful about how much left handers wish somebody would offer more options like this for us- and how given the nature of their limited run business model this could be a nice niche for them. The response was typical-- "we do not make left handed instruments due to costs and rarity". How hard could it have been to have this made in a left handed version? Oh well. If I ever got around to custom designing a lefty Semi hollow short scale bass, this would now be on my short list of design concepts.
