F Bass BN5 Matte Black

F Bass BN5 - Matte Black

This one is currently in transit from George Furlanetto’s workshop in Hamilton, Ontario, and you can reserve it now – we expect it on the wall within 5-6 weeks. It’s a BN5 built about as quietly as the model gets: solid black under a matte finish, black hardware, a roasted maple neck and a Macassar ebony fingerboard. No flame, no burst, nothing to look at from across the room. Then you plug it in.

The BN5 isn’t a J-bass copy with a boutique price tag. It’s F Bass’s own design from the ground up – the scale, the neck carve, the pickups and the preamp were all drawn to work together, and you hear that the moment you play one.

Body, Neck & Woods

The ash body is the classic F Bass starting point – a firm, quick-responding wood with a clear top end and a low end that stays defined rather than spreading out. Under a matte finish there’s less lacquer damping the wood, which is a small thing on paper and a noticeable one under your forearm: the body feels alive when you dig in.

The neck is F Bass’s three-piece quarter-sawn construction in roasted maple. Roasting drives the moisture out of the wood before it’s ever cut, so the neck arrives already settled – more stable through seasonal swings, and a touch drier and snappier in attack than untreated maple. The Macassar ebony fingerboard is the hardest surface F Bass offers: dense, tight-grained and fast, and it sharpens note definition right where a low B needs it most. The compound 10 to 16 inch radius rolls rounder at the nut for chords and grooves, flatter up high where you want the action low.

The 34.5 inch scale is one of the BN5’s quiet masterstrokes. That extra half inch over a standard 34 inch scale adds just enough tension to tighten and focus the low B – without making the bass feel any different under your hands. Pair that with the ebony board and the roasted neck and you get a B string that speaks instantly and stops when you tell it to.

Electronics, Sound & Feel

The two F Bass stacked single-coils give you genuine single-coil clarity – open, woody, articulate – with the hum cancelled by the stacked design rather than by compromising the voice. Solo the bridge pickup and it barks; blend in the neck and the whole bottom end blooms.

The F Bass preamp is all-boost: with everything flat you hear the instrument itself, and the bass, mid and treble knobs only ever add what you ask for. It’s an honest design – no scooped starting point, no EQ guesswork. Pull the master tone knob and you’re fully passive, which doubles as both a fail-safe and a genuinely great vintage voice. Controls sit in two rows: neck volume, bridge volume and master tone up top, the three boosts below.

This is the BN5 for the player who wants the instrument to disappear and the sound to do the talking – session work, dark stages, in-ear mixes where definition matters more than sparkle. Blacked-out F Basses don’t come around often, and this one can be yours before it lands. Reserve it now and we’ll ship it the day it arrives.