Hey guys. So today we're talking about the big subject of varnish and I'm going to center it around what we do here at Upton Bass and why we do what we do, and by no means do I want to speak poorly about different styles and different opinions. However, I will say we do what we do for a reason and we don't do what we don't do for many reasons. So the bass I have with me if you're listening, you can check this out on YouTube to see it the bass I have with me is a very dark finish but it's got some highlighting. It's one of our mitten wall patterns and if we didn't highlight the edges and do things to it, you would just see this kind of dark reddish brown. You know antique-y, cool varnish. Now what's so important about this bass is that the wear patterns that are on here there's yellow and then you can look and there's some raw wood and there's some black in there. What I like about using this as my example for this video and to talk about is that people might think that this area is something we put some yellow on. This is actually showing you kind of like a topographical map. Like, imagine you're looking at the top of a mountain and in a topographical map you get to kind of see as the grade of the elevation changes. This is not added on later to make it look yellow. All of that yellow is under all of this red-brown. So how do we varnish our basses and do we use, and why do we do it?

We start with a wood sealer. Essentially it's a water-based material that goes into the wood. It raises the grain. It has some different additives in it that actually make it so that when we put our next material on, it doesn't go as deep into the wood as it could. Does that make sense? So let's call that our sealer. After our sealer, we will use an oil. Now you're saying, wait, water and oil. Yes, the water-based product goes on. It completely dries. A lot of times we actually will hit it with a little bit of heat from a heat gun to pop the grain after we've scraped the top and scraped the ribs and things.

So we put on an oil, depending on how much we want to see of the under levels of the wood. What I mean by that? An example, easy one for you flame If we use poplar, that's, you know, cut on the slab. It wouldn't be flame, you'd want to see those growth rings. So that's how you get that funky, cool old look. Depending on what level of that we want for the final product and depending upon how dark the bass is is what varies how dark that oil is. Does that make sense? Let me recap If I were to finish your bass really really dark, dark, brown, whatever you want, and you want to see those rings or that flame underneath, I'm going to have to kind of burn them out more.

Now this is where some makers will say, oh, that's going to stop the flame from moving and you're not going to get that transparency. Well, if you don't do that on a dark instrument, you won't see the flame. So pour sealer, let it dry and then oil. After our oil, which is a penetrating oil, we're going to go around the bass, make sure there isn't any glue sizing. That means that, like someone's gluey fingers might have sealed the wood and the oil can't get in. We might clean those up and readdress them. After that we get to this yellow level. So that ground yellow level. All of our basses, pretty much all of our basses, start with almost a canary yellow or like a baby chick Like, if you come in and see our basses. They're almost offensive.

That is spirit varnish and that's the final product. From this point on to the end of the process, the oil needs to dry for 48 hours. It is fully polymerized. It's a very lightweight linseed oil material. There's not any crazy petroleum distillates and all that stuff. That's really bad for you. That's why I don't like oil varnish. The oil we put on is again, it's a secondary sealer. It's not a varnish. I don't like oil because if it has petroleum distillates and different additives in it, it never actually dries. If you take your bass out of the case or any instrument out of the case and you get that kind of ah, that smell, you're like, oh, it smells so nice. That's not good for you. Those are volatile compounds. You shouldn't be breathing them in and they never, ever cure on the instrument. So that's why I don't use that. So the oil we've done the ground, we've done the secondary ground and then we're onto the yellow. That's a light finish with spirit varnish. Now, when you, when I say spirit varnish, sometimes people will say to me oh, you mean lacquer? No, not lacquer. That again is a nasty, nasty chemical product. You might as well just put plastic on your bass Spirit varnish, which we make here in-house.

We don't use anyone's stuff. Spirit varnish is shellac flakes and we actually pulverize them to break them down a little bit, to make it easier, and then we put them in denatured alcohol. There are some additives, some natural additives, that we put in there for plasticity, elasticity in the varnish, for durability, which are essentially essential oils, but we won't go into that. We put on the yellow and then from there we start building with sand coats, we start building up. Whether it be a brown or red, it really depends on what your final destination is, and it's not in the in the direction you think Sometimes. If, if a red becomes too hot, we actually will put a little green in it, does that make sense? So we're not saying that if you wear through your bass, you're going to see your bass is green. There's not a, there's not a green level to your bass, because we have to think about that. What do we have to think about when I say that we have to think about longevity? I've taken a lot of time since 2006,. I still have a test running where we have the materials that we use, the colorations that we use, and we have them out being destroyed by UV light to see how they can handle holding up for the next 50, 100, 200 years.

This process started in the back of a car. We actually had a piece of varnish on a piece of wood and we check it versus a section that's taped off to see how it was aging. There's a lot of violins out there, you'll see. There was a material called dragon's blood was a pigment that was used in varnish. A violin would start out dark brown 10, 20, 30 years later after exposure no longer brown In the other direction iron oxide. A lot of the early makers like Abraham Prescott, a lot of the early Czech makers they would use this stuff American makers and the bass would be a nice chestnutty brown when it was finished.

But the problem with this material suspended in the oil is it continued and continued and continued to oxidize, which I do think is beautiful. But it just gets darker and darker and darker and darker. That's not something I want. I don't want a varnish that I finish and it gets lighter or that I finish and it gets darker. I'm going to argue that they will marginally change over time. But the amount of UV that we've given, the abuse we've given the wood and the tests that we've done on the materials that we use, I would venture to say, with direct sunlight, for day after day after day after day, years.

This is something an instrument will never see. If you put your instrument through the riggers that we have these test pieces, you just have a pile of kindling. So we've got a ground, we've got our secondary ground, we've got yellow spirit, we continue on with a light brown, dark brown and a series of finish all the way to the end. So what I'm touching here is spirit varnish. Right, this is the same thing. This is really fun. It's the same thing that's on a jelly bean. If you eat a jelly bean, that shiny material that's on the outside, you're eating shellac. This material is also used in children's wooden toys. It's used on countertops. You can put it in your mouth. There's no toxicity, and that's what I really love about this it's easy to touch up, it polishes well, it ages really nicely. Now, this bass I'm holding.

It was requested that we actually make it look a little old. Generally speaking, you'll see a bass, probably back behind me. If we go this color, we leave them generally even and let the customers do the dings and scratches. That's what's great. When you varnish in layers, as it gets the treatment over the years, the use over the years from you, you'll start to see this stuff naturally. And that's something I didn't do when I first started with the entirety of the instruments and what we were doing. We just got to go in and then it's like, well, wait, we're making a lot of basses and they're going to be out there for a long time. Let's think about what our basses are going to look like. Now. I'm not saying we didn't properly address the situation when we made the instruments at first, but what we're doing now we just continue to keep turning that level up. With help from friends in the industry and input from you guys as players, we continue to turn that quality level up and make the basses nicer.

So on the outside of your Upton bass is something that I'm not going to do. It. You could lick it if you wanted to. Nothing bad is going to happen to you. Everything that's underneath it is cured and is gone. There's nothing off-gassing. Maybe if you smell the inside of the bass you might say, oh, there's a nice little sweet smell in there. That's a little secret. We do that on purpose. Again, you could eat it if you wanted, but I wouldn't recommend it.

Very important for me, this is something that I like to contrast to a lot of the imported instruments with sprayed lacquers and oil varnish. It's not stuff I would use. If you've seen the factories which I have, the way in which they're disposing of the product, the way in which they have the employees around the products, what it's doing for the environment and then what the basses are doing I mean, think about the showroom. There's hundreds of basses here at Upton Bass and at any given time, perhaps 100 basses with varnish and we have to be around them. I don't want it to smell like you're hanging out in a house with a bunch of imported furniture that's off-gassing. Hopefully you know what I'm talking about. That kind of like oh, we just got a new floor from that big blue and yellow logoed store or a new cupboard and yeah, it's kind of smelly in here. That's not what we're looking to do. They touch up nicely.

After we get the finish that we want, we actually use a compound to grind it down, and this is very much so like we're using our finish like a French polish. So we grind it down. We make it kind of hazy and then we build it up depending on how shiny you want your bass. Most bass players are like hey, man, I want that nice feel. I want it to feel kind of buttery, touchy, nice, but I don't want my bass to be shiny. You could take steel wool to our finish and just scuff it up Not recommending it. If you did it would be 4-0, so quadruple zero steel wool, but careful where you go and how far you go. That's our varnish.

I don't like oil. I like some of the traditionalists that use oil, kind of top-end guys. For me it's very thick, it's very gummy. If you look at the ingredient list and you look at the raw ingredients themselves, if you look at shellac, the stuff that we use to make our varnish, it's almost glass-like, right, but not like the bass is breaking, but it's a very thin layer. It still lets me stay in touch with the wood. I want to use as little as possible With oil. It's coat after coat after coat. It's thick and I do believe you know top end frequency, bottom end frequency, vibration of plates, especially in the bass world.

They're impeded by those materials. I've heard basses that are nasty, caked with rosin, and the player's saying I've lost the top end in my sound. I sit there for hours cleaning off the rosin, don't do anything else, and they play their bass like, oh, it's so much better. Yeah, well, you had like half a millimeter of caked up on the top of your bass. So that's the varnish process. We apply it in many different ways and we do not do just one thing. Those are the materials we use. Those are always the materials we use, but that process is varied, in which different layers go at different times and different application process to get different desired results. Not to say it's all about Vardish, but how your bass looks is really important. Which bass you have, obviously it's sound. Those are very important things.

But we love really satisfying people with you know in their mind's eye the color of what they wanted. One thing I'll add when you're getting an Upton bass, I always say to people it's kind of a three-way situation there's what you want, there's what we understand that you want, and you send me pictures or you show me a bass in the showroom and then your bass is your bass and it's an individual thing and that's what makes it very, very, very special. It's a combination of all three of those and I want to say it's as much what you want as what we want and as what the bass wants to be. It's an Upton Bass at the end of the day, but it's your bass. And then, if you could think, the bass itself has its own identity. It's like hey, I'm not an Upton Bass, I'm a piece of spruce from Germany and a piece of maple from Bosnia and I'm ebony from Africa and maple from France. Okay, cool, what they want to be. And that's my favorite part, that's like the music you play, that's like the freedom of jazz and all of the different performance that happens. So I'm kind of waxing on here, guys, but that's varnish.

And if you could smell your bass, I'm kind of concerned. If you could smell your furniture, it's kind of like new car smell, right, like a lot of us love that smell. And then if you look at the research on that, npr did this big thing on pregnant women and new car smell and the amount of toxins that were in their body. I don't want to be contributing to that. I want to protect the bass. Most important thing, I want to keep the thing that I've made for you safe and durable from the weather from your use. I want it to sound as good as it can, because it's very important, and I want it to look really great too. So that's why we use what we use the other things that are out there, the economical lacquers that are sprayed in like automotive booths, oil varnishes, some of the I've seen heirloom varnishes, kind of like boat varnish stuff. If you've ever gone on a wooden boat you can smell that stuff.

It just never stops. Now people will say, yes, it does, it eventually cures. No, it just gets to a level where you can no longer sense it. If you subject it to heat, you will reactivate it. Uh, and that plasticky goopiness think of something like molasses or maple syrup and you poured it all over your bass. Versus if you heat up sugar and you put it on your instrument and it's in that like crystalline structure and as it cools off it's glass-like, right, it could shatter. You could pick it off. I'm not saying that is an entirely fair comparison, but that molasses would just sit there goopy wet. That's kind of to me. Oil varnish I like that.

Shellac is very thin. We can get a lot of color over a lot of time. We can get a lot of durability. We can touch it up, we can come back in If we didn't like how this looks. We can come back in, bring it back down, top coat it, keep on it going and we're good to go. I take our basses all the time. When I see our old basses that are that are, you know, 10, 15 years old, and I'm like, oh man, we're so much better, I go to the guys downstairs let's just knock it down and give it another top coat and kind of bring it up to snuff. So that's the kind of thing that we're working with and I hope you guys understand and appreciate that. If you have any questions, let me know, um, and we'll talk to you soon.