The Last Bass Outpost

Fair shout, every forum has a different vibe. 

If y'all real nice I'll tell you how I got banned from Talkbass. 

Apart from Heesey, some select Wishbone Ash live cuts, Nirvana (eek) and isolated bass tracks from Who's Next and Quadraphenia, where can I hear some nice old Thunderbird basses in the wild?

I have to watch what I say round here. 

Slap is a valid technique; Peg by Steely Dan wouldn't be the same without it. Slapping seems to be the go-to technique for a lot of Youtube videos and, for me, it doesn't really tell me a lot about how a bass sounds. To give the example before (possibly the Bluesman vintage dude), there is a bald fellow on Youtube that demoes a bunch of '70s Rickenbacker 4001 basses. He A/Bs them in some videos. He talks about the nuances of the tone, but he has a really spiky, peaky slap thing going on the whole time. Or he tries to play finger style as fast as possible. Nothing else, and you can hear the acoustic sound of the Rick over whatever amp he's using. It seems like a wasted opportunity to hear some cool old Ricks.

I don't yet own a Tokai Thunderbird so I don't have the pickups in front of me to study. I've pulled apart about a dozen cheap soapbars at this point in time, and often 'epoxy potting' is nothing of the sort! I suppose I could bury the coils of the Tokai pickups in something like Envirotex Lite, within the chrome covers sold on Ebay? That way madness lies. I would also have to check that there are other aftermarket pickups that fit the Tokai routes.

I purchased an Epi T-bird body off of Ebay last year which is slowly turning into a Thunderbird II Fenderbird with an original WRHB as the engine. The previous owner routed it (with a flathead screwdriver and dremel sanding wheels) for some aftermarket chrome T-bird pickups and it looked like the pickup routes needed a fair bit of widening to accommodate vintage repro pickups.

The hardware looks a cut above the BaCH stuff, and the pin striping is a nice touch.

An interesting diversion. 

I went through all three of Heesey's videos. I guess he is one of these guys that comes alive in a band setting, as he fumbles through a bunch of grooveless riffs. He also seems to always have both pickups on?

Hello all,

I'm getting bad GAS for a white/cream Tokai Thunderbird. I quite like the contrast of the black hardware, but I quite like the chromed out look of the originals. There is a seller on Ebay that has empty T-bird pickup shells and pickup rings for sale. How easy is it to bury the Tokai pickups in the shells and mount the rings etc?

Next weird bit:

"If your pickups look rusty, you’ll want to unscrew their faceplates with an Allen wrench and, being careful not to disturb the wiring, clean the rust with a rust-dissolving agent."

The only time that would remotely apply would be for Dimarzio or Schaller pickups, and even then you would be removing the pole pieces. Pickups also tend not to have 'faceplates', so I really don't know what they are getting at. Clearly this was written by a non-player, which perhaps nicely summarises the root of a fair few problems with Gibson at the moment.