The Last Bass Outpost

Samla Mammas Manna. Twisty turny Swedish progressive rock.

Epiphone built a new factory to make guitars, could they be making these pickups there? Could the Chinabuckers have been built in that factory to test manufacturing, and quality control, and sold them un-named to test acceptance?

So we were all unwitting beta testers? The cheque is in the post, right? 

The construction of the Chinabuckers fits this hypothesis. The braided shielding on the hookup cable is not something I commonly associate with pickups from Chinese pickup plants. It is a nice period feature, but I would expect to see generic PVC insulation (and 4-wire + shield hookup) pretty much as standard.

Also, the Chinabuckers weren't simply generic Epiphone/Tokai black Thunderbird pickups with a different cover glued on top. It seems like they went to some effort to get these close to '60s specs. For what reason? To flog them on Eyguitars? I wager that Chinabuckers, or some variation thereof, are going into these new Epiphones.

The octave strings are lost in the mix. Looks like a Marshall backline?

A much more sensible look.... dunno about angry tho.

Anywho, that added middle pickup is no EB mini; soemthing else.  Can't quite tell (vid quality and reflections of the stage lights) but it could be Jim Lea.  You know he could have taken the bass to him more than once, and this was just the stage 1 modification.

They look like John Birch mini humbuckers, I just couldn't see the bajillion pole pieces that JB pickups tend to have. It could be down to image degradation or the film it was originally captured on.

Slade had a close working relationship with John Birch, so I wouldn't be surprised if the bass made multiple trips to him. When the bass was refinished white it also lost the mudbucker and gained a bigger batwing pickguard. After the mods the bass was closer to the custom basses John Birch built for Jim, so maybe Jim requested the mudbucker be removed and it was the refinish that was above and beyond the work requested.

Quite a reworked Rick there. Looks like a mini humbucker in the neck and a PAF-sized humbucker in the bridge?

...Wait, I'm not actually sure what he was going for there.

Just mildly stirring the pot by suggesting a TB-II might be on par with a good P bass. 

I don't think so Alan. I found it on a british site

Nah I didn't think so either, but it is the sort of vacuous noise you hear from the pro-Brexit crowd all the time. Spitfires will once again climb high into the sky over Kent and The Special Relationship will mean we get first bite at US-made/shipped goods before the rest of the EU. Again, LOL!

I didn't say overdrive the pickup itself....

True, but steveonbass did!

Cool.  I love the Dark Stars but different strokes...  They are the only pickups I've tried that i can really overdrive with my right hand.

 

Good violin makers have been doing artificially aged finishes for ages. It's not considered or perceived as not honest.

If a bass feels better I'll play it better. And distressed finishes - real or artificial - feel better than shiny new under my hands.

My brother had a violin made for him, and it had an aged finish. It wasn't like a worn in/out finish, it just looked like a subtle sunburst which I think was a copy of one from an old Italian violin. Maybe. There weren't patches of bare wood!

Oddly the violin sounded like you would imagine a new violin to sound like; sort of bright and fresh! My brother had a friend who was allowed to play a Stradivarius cello at an auction. The cello was basically going to make the jump from one bank vault to another, so my brother's friend was surprised that they were permitted to play the cello for a while. Two things happened, apparently. Firstly the sound of the cello stopped everybody in their tracks. Secondly, the cello took a while to warm up and come back online as an instrument.

As boys we all reckoned that our violins sounded better when we had been playing them intensely. When we came back from, say, a holiday they didn't sound as played in. A pleasantly worn finish wouldn't have helped us out any, and I still wince when I think about some of the relic'ing I meted out on those instruments by accident or out of frustration!

With the cello in mind I'm surprised by the trend of favouring 100% authenticity for vintage mass-production electric guitars. It is pretty much a given that the Stradivarius cello will have been worked on over time. The fingerboard might be replaced, the sound post might be replaced etc... a Stadivarius can be extensively rebuilt and still worth top dollar.

Personally I like to roll the fretboard edges on my guitar and I prefer parchment pickguards to bright white ones. I don't mind relic finishes, but I don't like mass-production relic finishes like Fender's various Roadworn offerings. Plus, some genuinely worn pre-CBS Fenders look fake. We have a slightly perfect-world view of how old guitars should break in and wear down.



When I was a teenager I used to keep my viola in its case next to the radiator. At some point the fingerboard dropped off the instrument! I cleaned up the glue join and then re-glued it with white glue. I didn't get the alignment perfect, so there was a subtle overhang on the treble side of the neck. When I went to university my viola playing lasted about 6 months... oh well, I was quite good at one point! I'm the viola player in my band, even though I'm playing bass. Honestly, if you get stuck in a rut playing bass, listen to some string quartets and work out what the viola is and isn't doing.... anyway! My parents took the viola to a local luthier a few years ago, and he was spitting tacks about the state of the fingerboard repair. I never told my parents of my DIY repair, so they considered it something that the previous owner had carried out. Luckily the viola is back in one piece and the fingerboard is fitted correctly.