F Bass BN5 Trans Seafoam Green

F Bass BN5 - Trans Seafoam Green

Seafoam green is one of the great classic bass colours, and F Bass does it the way only a wood-first builder would: as a transparent finish. Look closely and the ash grain runs right through the green, soft stripes rippling under a deep high gloss. The headstock face and even the pickup covers are finished in the same colour, the birdseye maple fingerboard adds a pale, lively contrast, and chrome hardware keeps the whole thing bright and clean. It’s a vintage colour on a thoroughly modern instrument – and it looks even better in person than it does on a screen.

The bass is finished in Furlanetto’s workshop in Hamilton, Ontario, and on its way to us now. You can reserve it today – we expect it on the wall in mid-October. 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 plug one in.

Body, Neck & Woods

The body is ash – the classic F Bass starting point, a firm and quick-responding wood with a clear top end and a low end that stays defined rather than spreading out. Because the seafoam is a transparent colour rather than a solid paint, the grain stays visible and the wood does what ash does best: punch, snap and a fast attack. Under the gloss the body is glassy to the touch, and the contoured F Bass shape sits balanced on a strap without any neck dive.

The neck is F Bass’s three-piece quarter-sawn maple construction with a varnish finish – quarter-sawn for stability, three pieces to keep it that way for decades. The carve is asymmetrical, slightly more aggressive on the treble side, which makes the neck feel faster than its 45 mm nut suggests. The fingerboard is birdseye maple: hard, bright and articulate, with a snappy attack and a sharp note edge that pairs beautifully with ash. It also looks the part – the little eyes in the figure catch the light as you move up the neck. The compound 10 to 16 inch radius rolls rounder at the nut for chords and grooves, and 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. The 22 nickel frets are F Bass’s own spec: wide, medium height, with a flattened pyramid crown, so you hear more of the fingerboard and notes don’t get pushed sharp under a firm grip the way they can on tall fretwire.

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. Pull the bridge volume knob and both pickups run in hum-cancelling mode for dead-quiet recording; push it back in for pure single-coil. Solo the bridge pickup and it barks; blend in the neck and the whole bottom end blooms. With ash and a maple board on either side of them, these pickups lean towards sparkle and definition – a great match for slap, fast fingerstyle and anything that has to cut through a dense mix.

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. The Hipshot B-style bridge holds the strings at F Bass’s 19 mm spacing – comfortable for both fingerstyle and slap on a five.

This is the BN5 for the player who wants the brightest, snappiest version of the F Bass sound in a finish nobody will forget – studio clarity, live authority and a low B that spoils you for everything else. Seafoam BN5s don’t come around often. Reserve it now and we’ll ship it the day it arrives.