About — Actually Acoustic Bass

I’m a bassist, a pickup maker, and a philosopher, roughly in that order of hours spent. I live in Port Townsend, Washington, where I build handmade guitar pickups at Krivo Pickups.

Jason Krivo Flores playing a Rob Allen fretless bass under a canopy, wearing a hat — The Rob Allen fretless. Photo: River Siobhan, Sensation Media.

I’ve played bass most of my life — electric, upright, and for nearly two decades the Mexican guitarrón, including years with Trashcan Joe, Portland’s old-timey jazz band. My formal bass training is thinner than you’d guess: exactly one semester of lessons, on upright, with Dr. Mark Tatum at the University of New Mexico. He fixed my right hand in the first few weeks, and I have played with the whole flesh of my fingers ever since. Everything else I taught myself.

Four grinning musicians in hats on stage: two with trashcan basses, one with a washtub bass, and Jason Krivo Flores holding a guitarrón — The lone guitarrón among the trashcan and washtub basses, at Trashcan Joe’s twentieth anniversary. Photo: Jules Montes.

The rest of my education went sideways, productively. I studied music at the University of New Mexico and the University of North Texas, where I switched to composition. I also hold a philosophy degree, with minors in linguistics and psychology; my specialty was the cognitive science of language, mind, and perception. In 2015 I published “Hume in the Light of Bayes: Towards a Unified Cognitive Science of Human Nature”, which, I noticed only years later, explains why the best acoustic basses I own sound the way they do.

This site is where those two halves meet. The manifesto makes the argument. The measurements test it, and What the Instruments Said Back says where it held and where it didn’t. The FreeBass Standard turns it into numbers anyone can check. And I’m building the instrument.

Jason Krivo Flores sitting on the floor at home, laughing, holding an acoustic bass guitar — With a Kingslight acoustic bass guitar.

If you want to argue with any of it, or tell me about an acoustic bass guitar that works, write to me at krivopickups@gmail.com.