The bass he couldn’t put down.
Bacci GuitarsPescia, Tuscany
NAMM 2025, Anaheim. The introduction came from a mutual friend, the bassist Dave Marotta. On the stand was a stock Marleo five-string. There was a queue of people waiting to try it. Eventually he passed it on, and then he and Bruno started talking about building him his own.
“I sat down and started playing it, and couldn’t put it down.”
Derek Frank, on the stock Marleo at NAMMWhat caught him first was the B string, the opposite of what players expect from a shorter scale.
Scale and string spacing are specified separately, so the two were decided on their own terms.
Specified with Bruno in Pescia, then built and assembled in his workshop.
The Marleo is made at 32″ or 34″, four or five strings, with the pickups and the circuit you choose.
Several months of texts and video calls came before the first piece of wood. A built to order guitar or bass at Bacci starts as a conversation about the gigs you actually play, and Derek has an unusual range of them: he is one of the most called-on bassists in Los Angeles, trusted by Shania Twain, Gwen Stefani and Shakira, on the road with Don Felder and Melissa Etheridge. See who he plays for.
So the question was never which model. It was: what does this instrument need to do that the others already in the room cannot?
Then he flew to Tuscany and spent time in the shop with Bruno, choosing woods by hand, working through the custom touches, and drinking espressos and Aperol spritzes, because it is Italy after all. You can do the same: it is the Bacci Experience.
Twenty-something years of touring left him a wall full of basses. Each one bought because a particular gig called for something a little different.What the commission had to answer
The Marleo is built at 34″ or 32″. The 34″ is the traditional choice, firm and authoritative. The 32″ sits closer to the hand and stays fast across the whole neck. Derek had settled it at the booth, before any of it was theoretical.
An NP5 in reverse position, a Bigman 5, and a 2B-4C preamp. The Marleo is built either fully passive or active, and this one is active. The two pickups are a P-style and an MM-style, so the instrument covers both families and the blend of the two.
Nitrocellulose, leaning on the 1970s, the decade the whole Parato line is drawn from. The star inlays were drawn for this instrument, in place of the abalone the line normally carries, and the fingerboard is ebony rather than the usual figured maple.
Nothing here is in stock, and nothing ever will be. Your decisions would be taken exactly the same way: a deposit, a call with Jo, then the specification written down together.
Bruno sets the neck up to its own body, tuning the two until, in his own phrase, they resonate in the same key. Eight frames from the bench, from the first drawing to a stage.
Every Bacci is designed, built and set up by Bruno, one instrument at a time, in Pescia. It starts with a conversation, not a form.
He filmed the bass for his own series on the instruments behind his gigs: why the 32″ scale works, how the look came about, the custom inlays, and the Nordstrand pickups through a full tone demo, blend, P and MM, with slap and fingerstyle at the end.
“It exceeded my expectations in every way. All I can say is WOW.”
Derek Frank, the day the bass reached himHe took it to NAMM 2026 in Anaheim and played it on the floor. The instrument earned a place on the wall next to twenty years of others, and then got pulled straight back off it.
Nothing here is in stock, and nothing ever will be. Every instrument is claimed by one player before the first cut.
You can play a Marleo, as Derek did. You cannot play your own finished one before it exists: that is what the conversation is for.