F Bass BN5 Coral Sand to Blue Burst

F Bass BN5 - Coral Sand to Blue Burst

This is not a BN5 you’ll mistake for any other. The centre of the body glows coral pink and fades out through violet into a deep blue at the edges, and F Bass have carried the burst up onto the headstock and even colour-matched the pickup covers, so the pink runs uninterrupted from bridge to neck. The finish is matte, which keeps the colours soft and dusty rather than candy-bright, and the natural grain of the ash shows through underneath. Black hardware and a dark Macassar ebony board with pearloid block inlays frame it all.

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 mid-October. Under the colour it’s a full-spec BN5: F Bass’s own design from the ground up, where the scale, the neck carve, the pickups and the preamp were all drawn to work together. You hear that the moment you play one.

Body, Neck & Woods

The body is ash – the classic F Bass starting point, a firm, quick-responding wood with a clear top end and a low end that stays tight rather than spreading out. Here the grain is left natural rather than filled, and under the matte finish you can both see and feel the texture of the open-pored wood. A satin surface also plays differently from gloss: it doesn’t grab your forearm on a warm stage, and it wears in gently with the way you play.

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, so it feels faster than its 45 mm nut suggests. The fingerboard is Macassar ebony, the hardest surface F Bass offers: dense and quick under the fingers, with a crisp, defined note that suits a low B. The pearloid block inlays are an upgrade over the standard dots and make the board easy to read on a dark stage. The compound 10 to 16 inch radius is 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 notes stay in tune under a firm grip and you hear more of the fingerboard.

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 add what you ask for. There’s no scooped starting point and no guesswork. Pull the master tone knob and you’re fully passive, which works both as a fail-safe and as a great vintage voice in its own right. Controls sit in two rows: neck volume, bridge volume and master tone up top, the three boosts below, all under black knurled aluminium knobs that are easy to find by feel.

This is the BN5 for the player who wants an instrument with real personality on stage, but no compromise on what made F Bass famous: studio clarity, live authority and a low B that spoils you for everything else. Reserve it now and we’ll ship it the day it arrives.