Höfner 500/1 Violin Bass

The Höfner 500/1 is a short-scale electric bass shaped like a small violin. Its hollow body has an arched spruce top, maple back and sides and pale binding along every edge, usually finished in a brown sunburst, and it has no soundholes. Two pickups sit between the neck and an ebony bridge, with a trapeze tailpiece behind. A pearloid panel carries two volume knobs and three slide switches, and the strings run thirty inches to a headstock with two tuners on each side.

Walter Höfner designed it in 1955, at the factory his family had built at Bubenreuth in Bavaria after leaving Schönbach in Czechoslovakia. It was shown at the Frankfurt spring fair of 1956 as model No. 500/1. For some years it sold quietly: the company's historian Christian Hoyer notes that it was largely overlooked in the catalogue and missing from Selmer's British edition. Its appeal was lightness, and a hollow tone closer to the double bass than to the new solid basses.

That changed in 1961, when Paul McCartney, playing in Hamburg, bought one in a music shop in the Steinway house. As a left-hander he liked its symmetry, which looked less awkward reversed than a cutaway guitar. In 1962 Höfner moved the second pickup towards the bridge and changed the headstock logo and tuners. Once the Beatles broke through, Selmer's order of autumn 1963 grew from 30 basses to 1,000, and the 500/1 became, for good, the Beatle bass.

Höfner has made it ever since. Hoyer writes of more than fifty years of uninterrupted production, through lean decades, the sale of the firm in 1994 and the move from Bubenreuth to the company's works at nearby Hagenau. The range now includes versions tied to particular years, such as the '62 'Mersey', but the German-made Artist model is the plain 500/1, still sold in sunburst for about £1,700.