The Twine Bass is composed of a pair of very special instruments: a modified cello and a traditional Kenyan fretless stringed instrument called a Bolon. We strung the cello with rough hemp twine in various tunings and played it as a stand-up bass. The resulting sounds are deeply sonorous, with rich, warm resonance, powerful low end and a woody, soft quality. The bolon has a cow’s horn for a neck and a gourd as a body, with four twine strings and a goat-skin resonating head that the strings pass directly through. In addition to deep-sampling the strings with 10x round-robin and up to 14 velocity layers, we sampled a number of other sounds such as legato slides, string mutes, tuning peg pluck/twists, finger taps and brushes, and other percussive effects on the instrument’s body.