Welcome to Hoytbasses.com

The Epic Tale:
Note to insomniacs: please continue to
read on: you’ll be cured!
In 1952 I was born : very
shortly thereafter I discovered music.
Though I played trumpet in the high school band, I always gravitated to
the bass and guitar……. I can’t imagine my life without these 3 instruments in
them.
In 1978, I built my first guitar: It had a spruce top and sapele
mahogany body: I thicknessed the back, sides and
top with hand planes, scrapers, and
sandpaper. The guitar weighed 156 pounds but it played pretty well!
In 1979, I was received my first commission: a walnut
and maple neck through bass . I showed it to Mike Pedulla (I used to hang around his shop under the pretenses
of buying fingerboards or whatever and pick his brains!) and he gave me a b+
for my first effort at bass building. The ONLY problem was that I installed the
truss rod backwards, so adjusting the neck made it worse….. live
and learn. I gave the owner his 50 bucks
deposit back……..I put those dimarzio J pickups
into my second bass and played that for a LONG time……
Fast –forward to 2008 :
I’ve been married to the love of my life for 32 years, have three kids and 2.33 grandkids (#3 will be here
in May of 08).

Since 1984 I’ve been playing with the cape cod institution, Night Train. It was here that I would get the chance to
try out my bass building ideas in real-time-gig-situations. (I’m the strikingly
handsome flugelhorn player). Also in the
pic is the Web King himself, Bob Gollihur, who had
come to visit me that week and sat in with the boys. He’s playing my passive Bart MMK equipped workhorse bass that I built around 1993 or so
I was a psychotherapist for 23 years. I worked with
the toughest kids and families in residential, outpatient, and public school settings. It was a lot of
stress. To (sort of) deal with the
stress I built stringed instruments:
Acoustic guitars and basses, Electric basses and guitars, electric
upright basses. I gave away a lot of
stuff, sold some stuff to cover the cost of my next project, and finally, in
the late 90’s I sold a few instruments for actual profit. I even had a web page
that was more cheesy than this one, yet somehow,
people dared trust me to build their dream instrument!
Then, in 2000, I was blessed to be able to land a job
teaching woodworking and
Teaching, however, takes a
With any luck, I’ll be retiring from teaching in a few
years. At that point, I hope to jump back in to the world of luthiery. It was said that Stradivarius’ “golden years” of violin building were his
60’s and that’s my goal as well. ( That and to stay on THIS side of the ground
long enough to catch a few more keeper striped bass, see all my grandchildren
graduate from high school and see the Patriots win their 10th super
bowl!)
THANK YOU SO KINDLY FOR VISITING: If you’d like to e-mail me you can do so : karl (at) Hoytbasses (dot) com.
Karl Hoyt;
** A
board of Brazilian rosewood was brought in by one of my students
a couple of years ago. It had been in the back of her dad’s garage for 25
years, so we built a couple instruments out of it. I would NEVER knowingly contribute to the raping of
the rain forest to build a guitar from newly harvested rain forest wood. In fact, in our guitar building class, we’ve
switched to domestic hardwoods for our guitars. Personally, I love the sound of
a cherry or walnut guitar, and I can get the wood in my own back yard of