Austrian custom bass builder BITE Guitars welcomes 2024 with a lavish 5-string model, the Night Flash. Its body evokes impressions of gold & white flashes and stars against the background of deep black space. Others may look on it as a shapely work of art chiselled out of exquisite black marble. But fear not, the body is made from alder, the whole bass comes in at 3.8 kg (8.4lbs), as spine-friendly as it gets for a 5-string with 24 frets. 

The underlying bass model is BITE’s proprietary premium model, the Evening Star, with its signature inward curved horns. The neck is made from roasted hard maple, the fretboard from roasted flamed hard maple, the hardware includes a GOTOH premium bridge and is 24-carat real gold-plated. And all that flashing and marbling is just another hand-painted masterpiece by BITE’s chief artist who previously worked as a scenic painter on Oscar and Palme d’Or movies. 

The sound, you ask? Unsurprisingly, we’re dealing with BITE’s own 1000 millivolt high-output passive pickups, this time in a PJ configuration. BITE never installs other than its own pickups, certainly one reason for BITE’s 4.9/5 average customer rating. To complete the rundown, the wiring is a standard Jazz-type parallel circuit (Volume-Volume-Tone).

Full specs: https://bite.guitars/product/the-night-flash-bass/

BITE ships its basses worldwide door-to-door. 

Night Flash price tags including insured express shipping:

New York 3,906 USD

Berlin 4.118 EUR incl. VAT

London 3.008 GBP

You want exactly the same bass, just different? 4 strings, left-handed, short-scaled, blue flashes, different circuit? Rebuilds are available with all individual modifications you’d expect from a top European custom builder, start at the online Evening Star builder: https://bite.guitars/product/evening-star/