Mayones Jabba HF 5 Antique Brown

Mayones Jabba HF 5 — Hadrien Feraud Signature in Antique Brown

Mayones has been hand-building instruments in Gdansk for decades, and the Jabba is their take on the J-bass — a model they only release in collaboration with players whose names mean something on the instrument. Hadrien Feraud’s signature edition is the one that defines the line.

It looks like a J on the wall, but pick it up and you’ll notice everything that’s been quietly updated: the contoured 6-screw heel, the reversed 4+1 headstock, the slightly extended scale, the ramp between the pickups, the noiseless humbuckers hiding inside J-pickup cases. Nothing about this bass is for show.

Body, Neck & Woods

The body is profiled Swamp Ash with a Spruce top. Swamp Ash is the classic American J-bass wood — light, resonant, with the scooped midrange and strong fundamental that give the J its air. The Spruce top is the less obvious move; you don’t see spruce on solidbodies often, since it’s traditionally an acoustic tonewood. On the Jabba it adds a touch of woody attack at the top end and, more importantly, gives the bass its quietly aged visual character — that vertical grain reading through the satin Antique Brown finish.

The neck is a single piece of hard rock maple with two graphite stabilizing rods running through it, which is the construction you want for a working 5-string. The graphite kills the seasonal shifts long maple necks are prone to and keeps your relief consistent through climate changes. The fingerboard is Pau Ferro, sitting tonally between Maple’s snap and Rosewood’s warmth — articulate, slightly punchy, and without the bloom Rosewood can add to the low end. Twenty-four jumbo Ferd Wagner frets give you low friction for fingerstyle and full range for upper-register work.

Scale length is 34.25 inches — a quarter inch longer than standard. It’s not multiscale, but that small extra reach makes a real difference to the low B’s tension and definition. Pair it with the contoured 6-screw bolt-on heel and the reversed 4+1 headstock layout, and the B string gets the kind of consistent feel and direct energy transfer that fingerstyle players notice the moment they sit down with it.

Electronics, Sound & Feel

The pickups are Delano JMVC 5 FE/M2 Jazzbass Twincoil Humbuckers, built in Germany by one of the best boutique pickup makers working today. They look like a pair of J pickups, but each one is a side-by-side split humbucker — full J-bass clarity and bite with no single-coil hum. The neck pickup delivers round, woody bottom-end weight; the bridge pickup snarls when you dig in; the blend pot between them covers everything from neck-soloed solo voice to bridge-soloed grind.

Behind the pickups sits Mayones’ own M-BP3 three-band preamp, running on 18 volts for the extra headroom you need when the EQ is pushed and the signal still has to stay clean. Volume has a push-pull for active/passive switching, so a dead battery doesn’t end your set, and you’ve got a pure passive J-bass voice on tap whenever you want one. The clear acrylic ramp between the pickups is the kind of detail you either need or don’t — players who use one will recognize what it’s for immediately.

This is Hadrien Feraud’s signature, and you can hear his priorities in the voicing — fast, articulate, with a low end that holds together no matter how hard you push it. If you spend most of your time playing single-note lines that need to cut through a dense mix, or you’ve outgrown a stock J and don’t want to leave the J-bass voicing behind, the Jabba HF is the instrument those players have been quietly buying for the last decade. Hand-built in Gdansk, voiced for one of the most demanding fingerstyle players alive. We think it earns the signature on the headstock.