F Bass BN5 Brown Fade

F Bass BN5 - Brown Fade

Brown Fade is the finish F Bass is known for, and this is the one to see it on. The ash grain is filled black, then the colour runs from pale, almost blonde wood at the centre of the body out to a deep espresso brown at the edges – all under a high gloss that makes the grain lines look like they’re floating a millimetre below the surface. Black hardware, a streaky Macassar ebony fingerboard and a set of matching handmade ebony knobs finish it off. Nothing on this bass is painted on; everything you see is wood.

It’s on its way to us from George Furlanetto’s workshop in Hamilton, Ontario, and you can reserve it now – we expect it on the wall in early 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 play one.

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. Ash is also the reason Brown Fade works: it’s an open-pored wood, and F Bass fills those pores black before the colour goes on, so every grain line reads as a dark stroke against the fade. On a closed-grain wood like alder there’d be nothing to enhance. Under the gloss the body is glassy to the touch, and the transparent finish leaves the wood doing what ash does best – punch, snap and a fast attack.

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 streaky Macassar ebony, the hardest surface F Bass offers: dense, tight-grained and quick under the fingers, with brown and black striping that echoes the body. It sharpens note definition right where a low B needs it most, and 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. 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.

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 one was also ordered with the Hipshot A-style bridge in place of the standard B-style – a heavier, more massive plate that anchors the strings harder, for a touch more sustain and a firmer, more focused attack on the low B.

This is the BN5 for the player who wants the classic F Bass look and the classic F Bass sound in one instrument – studio clarity, live authority and a low B that spoils you for everything else. Brown Fade BN5s are the ones people recognise from across the room, and this one can be yours before it lands. Reserve it now and we’ll ship it the day it arrives.