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What's so special about it? It's beautifully made, it sounds wonderful, and it's properly left-handed. It was expensive, but every detail shows how much time, care and skill went into building it, and you'd have to pay a factory about as much to persuade it to produce a left-handed version of a stock model, and this is far from stock.One of the most obvious features is the sound hole - it's moved out of the way to an acoustically dead area by the cutaway, to let the area between bridge and fingerboard vibrate properly. Its odd shape is partly determined by its position, and partly a reminder that the bass was built in the year of a full solar eclipse (2000). This shape is also echoed in a single marker dot at the 12th fret.Through the soundhole you get a glimpse of the internal construction, which is quite breathtaking.
The next thing you notice is the headstock; this is based on the Fender Telecaster design that was also used on my first acoustic bass. I realised some years ago that a right-handed version of this design on a left-handed bass offered the space to extend the bass string past the nut to give a low D, below the usual E. As I play quite a lot in A and D, this was a very attractive option. I think Phillip has come up with a very elegant implementation of this design.One of my favourite aspects of the headstock is the way the pale creamy maple of the neck is faced with curly maple. This comes from a piece that my grandfather bought at least fifty years ago to make a viola with; my mother appropriated it to make a breadboard, which she later gave to me. It gives me great pleasure that it is finally incorporated in a musical instrument, and I'm very grateful to Phillip for the trouble he took to make such a lovely job of it.The very elegantly carved bridge contains a Headway pickup. I'm currently using a SansAmp Programmable Bass Driver as EQ, going into various home-made and professional amps, depending on gig.Isn't the cedar front lovely, too?The strings have to be custom wound to get the low D - but this is less expensive than I was dreading.
After a couple of false starts, and being fitted with a new pickup, the Eclipse finally made its public debut at Bristol's Ashton Court Festival 2000, in a reincarnation of Strange Affair (for one afternoon only). My friends out front told me it sounded just as I would have wanted.Since then it has been used at a number of Knott Brothers gigs, and always sounds lovely. The special strutting that makes it relatively loud unplugged means that it is fairly sensitive to feedback, so it doesn't really do loud, but I've got other basses for that! Page updated
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