5 string Tele bass

[Simon Barden]

Good point, fender3x. You could set the bridge at the very end of the body and inset the neck by the amount the bridge moved back and maybe use a short 3+2 headstock with lightweight Y-tuners, but you lose some of that Tele vibe and it would probably still be neck heavy. And you'll still need to find a suitable 5-string bass pickup that kept the Tele feel, and lightweight tuners aren't standard Chinese kit equipment.

[McCreed]

This might be a dumb question, but would a shorter scale make much difference in neck dive?

I don't know I've seen a short-scale 5-string, but I don't get out much...

[fender3x]

I don't think I have ever seen a short scale 5 string bass either. At some point the lower string tension would make it impractical, I am guessing, bur I am not sure at what length that would be.

It would help with neck dive at least somewhat. Less weight at the end of a long lever with your shoulder as the fulcrum. I have wondered if that might be why so many historical hollow and semi-hollow basses were short scale.

Sent from my LE2125 using Tapatalk

[Simon Barden]

Short scale would require thicker strings to maintain standard tension.

0.130” seems to be the standard low B string diameter, and all the feedback I've seen on 5-string basses indicates that you don't want anything thinner/with less tension than that, so on a short scale you’d need something thicker than.

If you could find and buy a short scale bass, it would be a custom product from a small manufacturer. The strings would have to be be custom wound strings and that would make them expensive. As it would be such a niche product, I can’t see any string manufacturer making them as standard. The price of the custom bass strings alone would then exceed the cost of the bass kit, and I can't see a basic kit from someone like Pit Bull being sold without strings or the ability to go and buy a suitable set of strings from a local music store at a reasonable cost.

It would make an interesting scratch build product, but you'd probably need to check first with a custom string maker that they'd even consider making suitable strings. If they can't fabricate the strings from their stock wire gauges and need to get in one or more 500m reels of a custom gauge wire, then they may not want to do it at all.