INVENTION IV

This electric upright piccolo bass was inspired when I walked out of my building in New York and found a broken buffalo skull sitting in the top of the garbage can immediately outside of my building. It was the 1990s, and these things happened back then in Alphabet City. I took the skull upstairs and cleaned it extensively, staring at it for a long time. I pulled out my notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, who had once built a cello from a horse's skull, and considered his designs which took great advantage of the resonant qualities of sinus chambers. In the end I chose to use this skull in a way that featured its face more prominently and took advantage of the missing pieces to layer wood to create what is, to me, a much more interesting sculpture than a complete skull could ever have been. ​

Functionally, it plays as an electric violoncello or more accurately, an electric upright piccolo bass. Its scale length is 33", and it is tuned A'DGC. It is currently strung with cello strings and uses a piezo pickup. This setup has gone through a few changes and likely will go through further changes. It has a three-piece neck of ipe and padouk with an ipe fingerboard. The skull is built out in layers primarily of mahogany, padouk, and canary wood, with some purpleheart and zebra wood. It has a Madagascar rosewood bridge and a Madagascar rosewood and mahogany tailpiece. The leg is, I believe, poplar; it was a decorative table leg discovered near the skull and only slightly altered. 

I built this in the early days when I was first working with Carl Thompson, and most of the decorative woods were scraps from his scrap-bin. 

Photos by Adrian Buckmaster