Name: John Nania
Hometown: Omaha, Nebraska
Bass: Blade Runner Bass
The emerging parts market in the ’80s, a luthier friend, and a cousin who studied acoustic engineering helped this bassist create a one-of-a-kind instrument.
Thank you for allowing us to share our bastardized beauties with you. I built this bass with the help of my friend Drew in 1980 or ’81. It was an instrument born out of necessity. Stock instruments of the time weren’t keeping up with the musical progressions that were happening in the ’70s and ’80s, so if you wanted to advance your art, you had to get creative. Fortunately, parts manufacturers and inventive minds were there to accommodate.
I wanted to build something different that would take advantage of the emerging parts market that was becoming available to players and that would also accommodate my playing needs. My neighbor was a carpenter, so I built the body and the electronics cavity cover from a piece of wood in his shop. I don’t recall what kind of wood I used, but I remember there were no knots, and the grain was very tight. The neck was from Philip Kubicki. The bridge is one of the first issues of the Kahler bass tremolo. The pickups are an original first-year set of EMG active PJs. The tuning keys are from Schaller. It has an original Hipshot D’Tuner and a Fathead attached to the back of the headstock for added sustain. I did the paint job ... I know ... it was the ’80s.
This bass was the prototype for a guitar that Drew built the following year that would eventually become the Guild Blade Runner. The Blade Runner is the guitar most people recognize Joe Perry playing in the Aerosmith/Run DMC “Walk This Way” video.
It sounds incredible and plays like a dream. The holes were strategically placed. My cousin was an acoustic engineer, and he made some suggestions as to where to make the holes based on the properties of the wood and acoustic instruments he’d studied. While it looks like an ’80s trainwreck, it has amazing unplugged resonance, tone, and sustain. I’ve never played another electric bass that resonates like this one. I’ve used it on jazz gigs as it can sing like a Jazz bass, it can give you the illusion of an acoustic bass once you dial it in, it’s great for soul and R&B, and it’s ferocious for hard rock and metal. It saw a lot of action in its day and, unfortunately, suffered some damage from a 15-foot fall off a stage.
While it looks like an ’80s trainwreck, it has amazing unplugged resonance, tone, and sustain.
When Drew made the Blade Runner for Joe Perry, he followed many of my cousin’s suggestions and a lot of what went into this bass to determine where to make the holes in the Blade Runner body. If you’ve ever played a Blade Runner or talk to anyone who has, they’ll tell you it’s an incredibly loud guitar unplugged and has endless sustain. The cuts weren’t random: There was a lot of thought and science that went into how it was done.
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My years-long search for the “right” Bigsby-outfitted box finally paid off. Now how do I make this sumbitch work in my band?
Considering the amount of time I’ve spent (here and elsewhere) talking about and lusting after Gretsch hollowbody guitars, it’s taken me a remarkably long time to end up with a big Bigsby-outfitted box I truly love. High-end Gretsches are pricey enough that, for a long time, I just couldn’t swing it. Years ago I had an Electromatic for a while, and it looked and played lovely, but didn’t have the open, blooming acoustic resonance I hoped for. A while later, I reviewed the stellar Players Edition Broadkaster semi-hollow, and it was so great in so many ways that I set my sights on it, eventually got one, and adore it to this day. Yet the full-hollowbody lust remained.
I’ve long been more of a single-coil player than a humbucker guy, so the more I thought about it, the more intrigued I was by the idea of a hollow with pickups that weren’t of the Filter’Tron variety. I also liked the idea of a lower-key aesthetic. So in early April, after a bunch of research and listening, I pulled the trigger on a beauty from the other stellar “G” hollowbody brand. With its transparent blonde finish and P-90-esque Franz single-coil pickups, the Guild X-175B Manhattan I picked up ticks both boxes nicely. And for a very reasonable used price, too.
After outfitting it with a set of Thomastik-Infeld flatwound strings, I ended up loving the Manhattan’s woody resonance so much I had to try it with my band. Problem is, I play in a drums-and-guitar duo where my Vibrolux Reverb runs in tandem with a bass amp to fill out the sonic space (two of my main band axes are baritones, and a keyboard goes through the same pedalboard and amp array). As you might’ve guessed, the Manhattan did not initially love the bass amp. When I plugged in with my usual settings, the howling was so rabid I figured the Guild would never work out at band volumes—or at least not in that band.
You can’t ride the wild horsey without widening your entire playing mindset to be much more cognizant of when something … threatens to cause a fit of mad buzzing.
But the more I played the 175B through other amps and at quieter volumes, the more I realized I had to give it another go. The guitar’s acoustic depth and the Franz’s clear-but-mellow, almost Jazzmaster-esque response are so old-school charming but big and bold and vibrant that I decided it might be worth revamping settings for the entire bass-and-guitar-amp rig.
Figuring it all out has been a wild mustang ride. Tremolo and vibrato intensity needed to be increased a tad to yield the same vibes they do with other guitars. But my usual gnarly fuzz tastes are too out-of-control and indistinct with the Manhattan, so fuzz might be off the board indefinitely. The good news is that you can work that howling susceptibility to your advantage and create huge, pulsating sounds that are as bombastic in their own way as a fuzzed-out solidbody.
To bridle the beast, I tried shoving a sock or four through the f-holes. It worked a bit, but it also deadened the sound and killed that “alive” feeling that makes the resonating body so cool to work with in the first place. So out the socks went. Interestingly, bringing down the volume of the Vibrolux—not the bass amp—helped significantly, though I refuse to take it below 3 because it just won’t sound right. Being mindful of how playing positions and proximity to the amps exacerbate the problem are also key. Even so, you can’t ride the wild horsey without widening your entire playing mindset to be much more cognizant of when something—most often it’s simply sustaining a 6th-string note—threatens to cause a fit of mad buzzing. It’s an entirely new world of dynamics, dampening, and muting, with both your fretting and your picking hands.
We’re still experimenting with how all this might shake out in the band, but so far the sounds and overall vibes are so cool we’re considering adjusting song arrangements, instrumentation, and tunings to better coalesce around the Guild’s wonderful sounds. (The simplicity of one guitar, one keyboard, and not too many pedals has its attendant benefits, too, including a streamlined sonic aesthetic and reduced time and technical issues between songs.) Anyway, wish us luck!
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