Mayones Jabba HF 5 Aged Yellow

Mayones Jabba HF 5 Aged Yellow

The Jabba HF is the bass Mayones built with French virtuoso Hadrien Feraud, a player who asked for one instrument that could cover everything from pop sessions to straight-ahead jazz, with punch, clarity, sustain and comfort. This is the aged version, and it’s one of our favourite Jabbas to have on the wall: a relic’d Monolith Aged Yellow nitro body, a caramel-coloured birdseye maple board with white pearloid blocks, and gold hardware all over.

We’ve had this exact spec through the shop before, and we were happy to see another one arrive. From across the room it reads like a well-loved 60s J-bass. Up close, everything underneath is modern Mayones: graphite-reinforced neck, 24 frets, noiseless Delano humbuckers, an active 3-band preamp and a headphone amp built right into the bass.

Body, Neck & Woods

The body is swamp ash, the classic J-bass wood: open and airy with a strong fundamental and that slightly scooped midrange that lets a J sit so naturally in a mix. It’s finished in thin nitro and then aged by hand: worn through to bare wood on the edges and the forearm area, with fine checking across the top. Nitro this thin lets the ash move, and you can feel it resonate against your body when you play. The headstock carries the same aged yellow finish.

The neck is a single piece of maple with two graphite rods running through it, and both neck and fingerboard are Mayones T.E.W. (Tonally Enhanced Wood), the process that gives them that deep caramel colour and adds stability. On a 5-string that matters: relief stays put through Danish winters and summers. The fingerboard is 5A birdseye maple with a white binding, white pearloid block inlays and Luminlay Super Green side dots that glow on a dark stage. Maple gives you a brighter, snappier attack than rosewood or pau ferro, and the 24 Ferd Wagner nickel silver frets on a flat 20″ radius make the whole board feel fast and even.

Scale length is 34.25″, a quarter inch longer than standard. It’s a small change you won’t notice in the hand, but the extra tension tightens up the low B and gives it more focus and definition. The 6-screw bolt-on joint is mounted in ferrules with a contoured heel, so the upper frets are easy to reach and energy transfers cleanly from neck to body.

Electronics, Sound & Feel

The pickups are a set of Delano JMVC 5 FE/M2, German-made twincoil humbuckers in J-bass housings, mounted in the 60s position. You get the growl and bite of a J-bass, with the neck pickup round and woody and the bridge pickup tight and nasal when you dig in, but no single-coil hum. Solo either one on a noisy stage and it stays quiet.

They feed Mayones’ own Velvetrone Musashi Nitōryū preamp: volume with push-pull for active/passive, pickup balance, and separate middle, treble and bass. The mid control is where this bass gets its range, from a scooped slap tone to a forward fusion voice that cuts through a horn section. Pull the volume and you have a straight passive J-bass. And the Musashi has a trick most basses don’t: a built-in headphone amp with an aux input, running on a rechargeable internal battery. Plug in headphones and your phone and you can practise or warm up backstage without an amp.

At 4.17 kg it sits well on a strap, and the gold hardware (Bigfoot bridge, Hipshot Ultralite Clover tuners, Schaller security locks) gives it a warm, jewellery-box look against the aged yellow. This one’s for players who love the J-bass voice but need a modern 5-string underneath it: tight B, quiet pickups, a preamp with real range. Hand-built in Gdansk and shipped in a Mayones Hybrid Bass Case.