The Strat Bass Idea

I was going to stop building basses after I finished my fretless project. With the encouragement from my wife (the green light to continue)

I started the plans for an idea that I had for a stratocaster-inspired bass. My son once own a Stratocaster and Fender makes a Telecaster bass, why not a Stratocaster bass?

I also saw a link for Wolfgang Van Halen's strat-inspired bass. It was really "busy" looking and had the control plate of a jazz bass on it. It had a non-working pickup for show and I think it was a short scaled instument. I also think it was built on a jazz bass body.

I found a like to a company that makes a strat inspired bass but I believe it is also a 30 inch scale instument, but I cannot find it again.

The body style of the Stratocaster is similar to the Precision bass; so that is where I started. Just putting the strat's components on a precision's body was a start, but the top and bottom "horns" were different.

Blowing the strat body up to the same width as the precision bass had the bridge falling off the end of the bass. To increase the scale of the strat to fit the dimensions of a full scale bass would result in a very wide and heavy So I morphed the two instruments together with Photoshop. I took the frame work of the precision bass and overlayed it with the stratocaster. When the stratocaster was made to be the same width as the precision, it is still too short. The outline of the Stratocaster then was manipulated to be the same length as the Precision.