Mayones Jabba HF 5 Fretless Monolith White

Jabba HF 5 Fretless – Monolith White

Hadrien Feraud is one of the most fluid fretless players of his generation, and the Jabba HF is the bass he built with Mayones to match that voice. This is the fretless version in Monolith White Satin — a clean, modern top over a swamp ash body, with the same Velvetrone preamp and Delano J-J pickups that define the series. Hand-built in Gdańsk, Poland.

Where the fretted Jabba HF is about clarity and articulation, the fretless leans into expression. The mwah is right there, the sustain is long, and the headphone amp built into the preamp means you can chase it at 2 AM without waking the house.

Body, Neck & Woods

Swamp ash gives this bass its character — light enough to play standing for three sets, with a midrange honk that cuts through any band setting and a low end that’s tight rather than woolly. The spruce top adds a touch of high-end shimmer you don’t get from ash alone, most noticeable when you dig in for fast articulated lines. The Monolith White Satin finish on top against Trans Natural Satin on the back is a striking combination — modern from the front, traditional from the back.

The 1-piece maple neck is reinforced with two carbon rods, and that matters more on a fretless than anywhere else. No fret slots means no fret-level work to compensate for seasonal neck movement — the neck has to stay dead straight on its own. Carbon does that. The Pau Ferro fingerboard is harder and denser than traditional rosewood, which is what you want for fretless playing: less roller-wear from the strings over time, longer life between dressings, and a slightly brighter mwah than rosewood gives you. White pearloid block markers with fretlines and side dots between the fret positions keep you oriented without forcing you to commit to lined-only or unlined visual reference.

The 34.25″ scale is just long enough to keep the low B defined while staying comfortable for fast fretless work, and the 20″ radius is flat enough for modern technique without losing the contour your hand wants when you’re sliding into a note from a half-step below.

Electronics, Sound & Feel

Two Delano JMVC 5 FE pickups in 60s J-J spacing handle the input. Delano builds these in Germany with ferrite magnets, and the white bobbins are matched to the pearloid pickguard — small detail, but the bass is genuinely beautiful in this trim. Wired in J-J, you get the burp-and-growl of the bridge pickup soloed, the round fullness of the neck pickup alone, and the scooped clarity of both blended at center.

The preamp is where this bass gets unusual. The Velvetrone Musashi Nitōryū 3 is a 3-band active circuit, but it also has a built-in M-Headphones amp — plug headphones into the 1/8″ jack, pipe a backing track through the AUX input, and you have a complete practice rig running off the bass’s onboard battery. No interface, no amp, no monitors. For a touring or studio player, that’s a real feature, not a gimmick. Controls are Volume (push-pull for active/passive), Pickup Balance, Treble, Middle, and Bass — everything you need, nothing you don’t. The push-pull bypass keeps a usable tone even if the battery dies mid-set.

This is a serious instrument for serious players. Hadrien Feraud doesn’t put his name on a bass that doesn’t deliver, and Mayones doesn’t build basses that don’t. If you’ve been playing fretless for years and you want an instrument that holds up to the technique, the bench, and the road, the Jabba HF Fretless is built for exactly that.