Bustard
Big bass tone.
The Bustard bass is all about big bass tone. A large single-cutaway body with optional fully hollow construction pushes out deep, resonant, woody tone. State of the art pickups and electronics and the optional magnetic + piezo pickup system give the player a huge variety of tone options in one instrument. Ergonomically designed, you can comfortably pump out crushing tone all night. The Bustard was conceived as a fretless instrument, but it is also delivers incredible performance to the bassist seeking a fretted instrument.
Ultra-rigid, stable necks.
Your neck is the foundation of your bass and we view them as the most important part of the performance chain of our Our necks use more than twice as much carbon fibre as a typical reinforced bass neck strategically sized and placed to maximize neck stiffness and stability. This arrangement results in adding 225% more stiffness to the neck than the common twin bar arrangement.
Our neck woods are selected first for stability and then for the beauty of their grain. Woods are selected for superior seasoning and proper moisture content and then monitored in our shop until they reach equilibrium. This reduces future movement in the woods and ensures that your neck will require minimum truss rod adjustments to maintain your desired relief and string action height. We often use laminated necks of different species to enhance the look of your bass. Unlike some claims, this lamination process does not enhance the strength of the neck - this strength is the sum of the individual pieces. With our seasoning process to ensure that stable woods are used in building necks it also doesn’t increase the stability of the neck. We just think it looks good and can allow the pairing of stronger woods with weaker woods that may not be considered ideal choices when used alone.
We use what we believe is the best truss rod available on the market. These dual-action, all stainless steel rods with spoke nut adjustment ensure that your neck can be precisely dialled in to your needs.
Optimized ergonomics.
The Bustard’s deep set 28 position neck allows the body to be heavily sculpted to provide unhindered access to the entire fretboard. A carefully selected neck angle pushes the neck comfortably back into the fretting hand while maintaining optimal string height over the bass body.
While its body is large, the Bustard feels natural against the body due to its large radius body edges and generous arm and tummy bevels.
State-of-the-art hardware.
You can be assured that your Condor bass is equipped with nothing but the best available hardware. Careful thought is put into the selection of every component and indeed every screw or bolt that is on your bass.
The Condor is available with either a Hipshot® or ETS® two-piece bridge. In the headless configuration the bridge options are expanded to include Riviera® bridges. We believe these are the best bridges available on the market in terms of sound transmission, adjustability and finish quality. We use tuners from Graph Tech® and believe that their Ratio® tuners provide undeniable tuning benefits to the E and B strings. We also offer optional Hipshot® Ultralite® tuners.
For out other components, we exclusively use Jescar Music® fretwork, available in the clients choice of stainless steel, EVO Gold® or nickel-silver. We use Dunlop® Dual-design Strap Lok® strap buttons with custom ground extra long mounting screws. We use either bell brass or Graph Tech® Tusq XL® nut material.
We typically custom make our control knobs to match your bass body, but metal or plastic knobs are available on request.
High-performance electronics.
The most significant impact to the tone of a bass is the pickup system. We use what we believe is the ultimate pickup system for producing an articulate, full range tone that can form the basis of tone shaping for any type of off-board signal processing. We also offer a variety of onboard electronics options to meet your needs for onboard tone-shaping.
Our magnetic pickups are produced my Mike and Melissa at MJS® Custom Handwound Guitar and Bass Pickups in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. These pickups are the results of many discussions and testing to develop a wide-range pickup that could be used with parallel, series, and single-coil operation to offer the player the ultimate bass pickup. Based on the very best Jazz Bass® pickups, these true dual coil pickups use two Alnico V pole pieces per string per coil to give the clearest and most articulate output possible. We believe this is the best bass pickup on the market.
We offer a variety of onboard preamplifier options for those seeking complete onboard tone-shaping. We recommend and offer preamplifiers from Bartolini®, Trickfish®, Richter® and Flexcore®. These can be combined with a variety of additional options including active/passive switching, passive tone control, pickup coil selectors and EQ frequency selector switches. We also offer a hifidelity onboard headphone amplifier.
Piezo pickups offer the very best approximation of an acoustic bass tone from an electric bass. We offer two systems that use saddle transducers and piezo/magnetic mixing circuits to integrate the pickups with the onboard magnetic pickups - the Graph Tech® Ghost® and Acoustiphonic® system for Hipshot bridges and the ETS® / Richter® system for ETS bridges. These are both world class, ultra low noise systems and we believe that the ultimate pickup package includes both our MJS® pickups mated with a piezo system.
Your electronics system cannot perform its best if it suffers from the induction of extraneous noise. We use fully shielded electronics and pickup cavities using a product that we’ve tested and believe offers the very best noise rejection of stray EM signals and interference from noisy nearby electronics.
Unlimited options.
We believe that most people seeking our instruments are seeking something truly unique and personalized. Therefore, we strive to be able to deliver any option you can dream up. While we offer a standardized options lists to let you understand the price of your dream bass, we welcome additional challenges. Our experience with customers ideas outside of our standard offerings has been entirely positive and has resulted in some truly unique and beautiful instruments, inspiring the creativity of our clients.