Thank you for your interest in the Cabletub Bass. The idea of using a washtub to resonate bass sounds is not new. People in the deep South have been making them for decades using a tub, a stick and a string. The problem with these early tub basses was that they had only one string and were not tunable. They relied on the musician to pull the stick back, tightening the string to the desired note.

One day while rigging my small sailboat for an afternoon sail on the waters of Puget Sound, the idea of using cables to hold up the neck of the bass came to me. In fact, the neck has come to be known as the "mast". I thought if I could attach the mast to the tub and make it strong enough, that it would enable me to use a real bass string and make it tunable. Maybe two strings! So I set about to make my bass. I was very proud of my first bass. It was beautiful. There was just one problem. It didn't work, so I shelved it. Not being one to give up easily, I continued to think about it and to try to figure out why it didn't work, or more importantly, what I could do to make it work. Eventually some ideas began to flow and I set out to try them all. Some of the ideas worked to improve the bass and some did not. (I have a garage full of masts and cut up tubs to prove it!)

My persistence paid off and I now am able to produce a working bass. Every bass is handmade by me from the finest materials available. I use a standard stand-up bass scale length and "super-sensitive" strings. The bass works very well in an acoustic setting and amplifies easily using a standard microphone. There are a lot of subtle reasons why the bass works. I'll call them trade secrets. The basses are a work in progress, as I am constantly trying to improve them.

I hope you will have as much fun playing them as I have creating them.