Lowrider Bass Guitars

Ed Roman first started building bass guitars back in the early 80's with his partner & first luthiery teacher, Barry Lipman back in Connecticut at East Coast Music Mall. The original Basses were named R&L Basses.  They were nationally advertised and met with a fair measure of success. The local musicians adopted the name "Rolip" which was short for Roman & Lipman.
Ed designed all the basses and decided on what woods, pickups & components to use. Barry executed the building and painting.

After several years it became apparent that Barry could no longer meet the demand for the basses. Ed sold his controlling interest in the companies East Coast Music Mall & Roman & Lipman and set out to build guitars with a new partner. Ed's new partner was a guitar bass building guru named Ron Blake. 

Ron had been chief luthier for Carl Thompson and had been responsible for prototyping the very first Ken Smith Bass. Ron also collaborated with Les Claypool on the original Scroll Bass and built about 6 of them for Les. He also built several hundred others for Carl Thompson who was selling them quite succesfully. Ron was also involved in Ghost building guitars & basses for many famous people including Stanley Clarke's famous Piccolo Bass. Ron never got the credit he deserved but that's what Ghost building is all about!!!.

Stanley Clarke has been credited with creating the piccolo bass (essentially a bass tuned one octave higher), and although he mainly plays Alembics, the first piccolo was a Carl Thompson. Stanley owns two Carl Thompsons, both piccolos. One is a 34" scale (the first piccolo ever), and the second is a 32" scale. When the first bass was being made, Stanley was so excited, he told Carl to bring it over the minute it was completed. Carl Thompson ended up hand delivering to Stanley at 3:00 in the morning! The second bass has a more interesting story. Stanley had just accidentally broken the headstock on his CT, and it could not be fixed before his next recording session. Carl was working on a 32" scale short bass at the time, and offered to lend it to Stanley. He modified the nut, finished it up quickly and gave it to Stanley. The Funk god liked it so much, he decided to buy it and use it as his backup bass. To this day, Stanley Clarke still uses that bass for dubbing and recording.

"Luthier Carl Thompson built the first piccolo bass to Stanley´s specifications. It basically has the same intervals (E, A, D, G), scale and spacing of the regular bass, but it is tuned one octave higher. Other players have followed suit including Ron Carter who had an acoustic version built for him. But Stanley maintains: 'It was my idea.' " 

NOTE FROM ED
In Reality
My chief luthier, mentor & prototype man Ron Blake, should be getting the credit here. Ron has the ability to create anything from wood, he does not require jigs & expensive tooling. This is the reason I have built over 400 different body shapes to date with about 75 more on the drawing board. He can literally take a rough drawing and create a masterpiece from it.  Once Ron builds the first one it is relatively easy to reverse engineer it and offer it as a model

The Lowrider traditional bolt on basses were released in 1999, due to the fact that Pearlcaster Guitar line had been so successful Ed thought it would make sense to build a line of bass guitars based on Leo Fender's original designs. He made several improvements to the neck joints, electronics, woods, frets, fingerboards and numerous other smaller improvements.
The Lowrider line was less than successful, The instrument was great but Ed never spent the money to advertise and he priced it way too low. When a consumer sees something priced too low they surmise that the instrument is probably imported or of lower quality. 

Ed decided he wanted no part of building this style of guitar in his already too busy woodshop..  So he had the bodies & necks made by the same firm that built, Sadowsky's, Lakland, Tobias, Mike Lull Modulus & many corporate brands such as Yamaha, All parts and Stewart MacDonald.
 
Ed maintains the mistake was we put these up for too low a price.  People assumed incorrectly,  that because they were priced so low, they simply couldn't be any good.