Celinder Custom 5 Transparent Red (pre-owned)

Christian Celinder has been building basses to order out of Copenhagen since the mid-1980s, and the Custom series is where he stops working from a model list. This one is a five-string on a 36″ scale — two full inches longer than the standard the rest of the world builds to — wearing a mahogany body under bookmatched flamed maple, front and back, in a transparent red deep enough to read as burgundy under stage light.

You don’t see many of these. Celinder’s output has always been small and mostly spoken for before it leaves the bench, and a 36″ Custom with gold hardware and a Brazilian rosewood board is a one-off inside an already small run. We’re Danish, so we may be slightly biased about Copenhagen-built basses — but this one earns it on the low B alone.

The core is mahogany, and it does what mahogany does — a warm, thick midrange with a slow, round attack and plenty of body under the note. Celinder caps it on both sides with bookmatched flamed maple, and that changes the equation: maple is hard, bright and fast, so the top and back put a rigid, reflective skin on a soft, warm core. The result is a bass with real weight in the mids that still snaps off the front of the note instead of going woolly. The transparent red lets the flame run right through the finish on both faces, and the back is figured just as hard as the top — not the usual plain slab hidden against your ribs.

The neck is three pieces of hard maple with two purpleheart veneers laminated through it, which is Celinder’s standard recipe and a good one: the alternating grain directions fight seasonal movement, and the purpleheart adds stiffness right where a long neck wants it. It bolts on with six bolts through a deeply contoured heel with no neck plate — the wood is carved away so your thumb keeps going past the joint instead of hitting a shelf. The fingerboard is Brazilian rosewood, dark, dense and oily, carrying 24 frets and pearl dots on the face and the side.

And then the scale: 36″. At pitch, a longer string sits at higher tension, and higher tension is what a low B actually wants. It stops the B from going slack and flubby, keeps the fundamental strong instead of letting the overtones do the work, and tightens the whole bottom octave into something you can hear pitch in rather than just feel. The trade-off is honest — the stretch from the nut to the third fret is real, and if you’ve only ever played 34″ you’ll notice it for the first hour. After that you stop noticing, and you start hearing the B.

Played, cared for, and honest about it. The gloss is still glossy across most of the instrument and the flame reads clearly front and back, but there is finish damage worth knowing about before you buy: several chips and scratches through to bare wood along the top edge of the treble-side upper horn, and a chip plus a couple of small nicks around the bass-side cutaway on the back. None of it is structural — it’s finish, on the edges, where a bass gets knocked against stands and door frames.

Elsewhere it holds up well. The gloss carries light swirls and handling marks under direct light, as any decades-old high-gloss finish does. The frets have plenty of life left with no pitting or flat spots in the playing positions, the fingerboard is clean and dark, and the neck is straight with a normal working relief. The gold plating has mellowed and shows light wear on the bridge and saddles, which is what gold does — it’s cosmetic and even.

It comes in its original Celinder hard case, and it’s been through our bench: set up, checked over and ready to play out of the box. Ask us anything about it before you commit — we’d rather answer a question than take a return.

Both pickups are Celinder’s own dual-coil soapbars, hum-cancelling by design and voiced to stay out of the way. They’re clear and even across all five strings without the mid-scoop that makes a lot of soapbars sound impressive alone and disappear in a band. Solo the bridge pickup for a tight, nasal growl that cuts through a loud room; solo the neck for a fat, rounded thump; blend them and you get the wide, even voice this bass is really built around.

The preamp is a Greengrove 2-band, and it’s a smart choice for an instrument with this much wood character. The bass control is active — up to ±16 dB at 40 Hz, with a centre detent so you can find flat without looking — while the treble side is a passive cut rolling off from 500 Hz upward. That combination is the point: you can add real low end when the room swallows it, but you shape the top by taking away rather than hyping, so the bass never picks up that brittle, glassy edge that active EQ can force onto a warm instrument. Four controls handle it all — volume, pickup blend, and the two-band EQ — and there are internal DIP switches for narrow or wide bass EQ, two treble-boost options and an extra 6 dB of overall gain if you want the output hotter.

At 4.6 kg this is not a light bass, and we won’t pretend otherwise — the mahogany-and-maple sandwich plus a 36″ neck adds up, and you’ll want a wide strap for a three-hour gig. What you get for carrying it is a low B with genuine authority and a mid-range that sits in a mix without being EQ’d into place. This is for the player who has already decided a 34″ five-string doesn’t give them the bottom end they hear in their head — a session player, a worship or gospel player living below E, or anyone who has been eyeing extended-scale basses and wants one built by hand in Denmark rather than off a production line.