I bought this white Chowny SWB-1 earlier this week. These are the brainchild of Scott Whitley who plays, or has played, for the Animals and Big Country. For a long time he was the lone visible proponent of shortscale basses online, running a website that collated as much shortscale info as possible. The original SWB-1 bass was a ritzy custom bass that Scott commissioned. He then developed a production model and, at some point, Chowny took over production. Mine must be a later model as it has individual bridge rails. I also don't think too many white ones were built. I actually reached out to Stephen Chown at one point to get one of these basses built and finished in 'Chris Squire cream'. We got the ball rolling, but I think the delivery time was going to be upwards of six months and I found a Mustang bass in the interim. Perhaps that cream bass is out there somewhere?
I have a thing for white basses. Next to my P bass you can see just how shrunk down the SWB-1 is.
I can understand Scott's motives. When I first wanted to look at shortscale basses, the options were mostly limited to vintage or retro designs. Floating bridges, huge hollow bodies, pickups mounted right at the end of the neck, etc. A little too much period charm! Scott's vision is to provide a bass with modern performance and ergonomics, and I think he pretty much achieved this.
Ultimately however this is a budget instrument so some mods are required. I'm upgrading the very weak stock pickups to Dimarzio Model Js. At the same time I'm applying a good quality shielding paint and building a new wiring harness. The factory shielding paint has no electrical continuity going on, and the paint in the pickup cavities isn't connected to ground (not that it makes much difference).
The headstock outline appears to be a straight lift from Hofner! I'm going to make a red tortoiseshell trussrod cover to give the headstock a bit more contrast.
The frets would benefit from being leveled and the fretboard has a weird blotchy issue that I'm going to try and rectify.
