This is a custom bass that was put together for me by the guys who owned Guitar Works in Santa Cruz, Rick McKee, and John Toushar. It has a body that looks like a Fender. The body belonged to one of their former clients and the whole top had been just chopped like a piece of firewood where they had installed holes for a variety of different pickups. It was sort of a mess, but I thought it was cool and asked Rick to rebuild it. He inlaid the giant empty cavities with matching alder, which is what the body was made out of, and then he overlaid it with a birdseye maple veneer and did the finish.

“I have a neck that I built for Tiran with a partner back in, I think it was 1976. That was part of a custom build we did for him,...I remember this one in particular, it was an extremely difficult one based on an old instrument that was partially renovated and then we replaced the neck and the electronics. It's kind of like building a hot rod. You find an old, rusty car under an apple tree and you drag it home and you strip it down, paint it, and put a new motor in it and all of that,...so I remember this bass specifically. We replaced all the pickups with pickups of Tiran’s choice, which were two jazz bass pickups and one P bass pickup. And of course, then a badass bridge. The bass had schaller tuners. It might have even had an ivory nut. I remember it was either bone or ivory. And fancy diamond of mother pearl inlays. So basically, I rebuilt the body to his specs and made a custom neck for it. Tiran went through phases of all kinds of wacky ideas. He was a really great customer. “I want you to build something that you've never done before” and those are the kind of guys I like.” - Rick McKee, luthier and owner of Guitar Works, Scotts Valley, California