Here are two of the prototypes of a cool bass that several partners and I developed for the SWR company in '93-'94. It was going to be called the SWR Workingman's Bass to complement their Workingman's amp line. It was a very nice design, but unfortunately the whole project just didn't pencil out financially, and got cancelled. It costs so much money to get an instrument developed and into production, and we couldn't get it into a reasonable price range.We built enough necks and bodies for about 17 instruments, but only 8 of them are around today. SWR owns three, and I own the other five. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with them. Instrument prices are so depressed right now, that it's hardly worth the money for me to finish them off and sell them. I guess I'll just hang on to them for now.
The yellowish one on the left is in the "final" configuration that we were going to put into production. The black one was an earlier iteration with a different pickguard shape. Notice the interesting angled neck/body joint and the very thin neck. The original pickup system (which I don't have any of) used a custom active preamp by SWR and a custom Seymour Duncan pickup. It was a great sounding bass, and was ahead of its time.
