Music videos that feature Thunderbirds

[Ken]

Found it.

Jeff Beer @ Zero One Guitars from Wales.






Apparently the restoration was already done in 2020

Wow, thanks.  Still not sure what the bridge pickup is, what the switch on the pickguard does, and why two jacks.

[gearHed289]

Glover had a Ric toaster on that 'bird. Possibly from his old 4001 that ended up with a pair of Jazz pups at the neck.

[uwe]

Watson, I'm sure it can only be coin-
cidence with you, but you might in
fact be on to something for once ...

[Ken]

Ah, that's a Ric pickup.  What about the two output jacks?

[uwe]

For Bi-amping, what else?

By the way, Roger must have owned more than one TBird, these days he still owns a natural fin Bicentennial, apparently unmodified.



But he also had a natural fin Bicentennial already with Rainbow, so maybe he got that fixed and it's not the 60ies one with the 60ies bridge and the Ric pup on facebook:



Even more confounding, a sunburst fin Bicentennial seemed to also still exist in 1981 when Joe Lynn Turner was the singer of the band (and not Graham Bonnet). I always assumed he broke the headstock at a gig with the previous line-up in 1979/80.





But that modified 60ies one from Facebook existed too, it can be seen here at 01.13 and 01:57 (clearly with a Ric toaster pup in the bridge position) in the 1979 vid to Rainbow's most cringeworthy song lyricwise:



Here is Roger's depiction (from an interview in 1991, Slaves & Masters era) on how he turned his TBird into a Steinberger (which he was playing at the time):

Bearing in mind that you used a Precision for a long time, did you ever
get backache from wearing that big old thing?

I get backache, but I thought that was just old age! But funnily enough,
I was given a '62 reissue Precision by Fender Japan, which was really nice,
but I couldn't believe the weight of it! By the time I'd put it on and tuned
it, I'd had enough! Actually this Steinberger is pretty heavy, but it's a
lovely guitar to play...

Did you have any trouble adjusting to the headless style?

Yeah, it was a bit strange at first. I kept thinking I'd fall off the end
of the fretboard! Mind you, that wasn't my first experience with headless
basses... When I was playing with Rainbow, I had a Gibson Thunderbird bass,
a lovely bass to play - I wish I'd been in Purple when I had that. Anyway,
we were playing one night and it was virtually the last chord of the last
song in the encore. I was playing away, and I suddenly became aware that I
couldn't feel any strings, so I looked down and the strings were just
hanging down off the bass. I looked up at the fretboard and the head had
disappeared! The T-birds were very weak, construction-wise, directly behind
the nut, and I must have accidentally touched my mike stand with the head of
the guitar and - WHACK! - instant headless bass..!

[Ken]

Ah.  I have no experience with that.

[uwe]

Just my guess. In my bi-amping phase in the 80ies I had a little box that split the signal from the bass and I fed one into a solid state preamp for the lows and one into a tube preamp for the mids and highs, running both over a stereo slave which fed the solid state signal to one or two 18" Peavey or EV cabs and the tube signal to 1x15" and 4x10" Hartke alu cone cabs.

[Ken]

Reminds me of how Billy Sheehan runs his rig.  He's a lot of fun with gear, too.

[lowend1]

Wow, thanks.  Still not sure what the bridge pickup is, what the switch on the pickguard does, and why two jacks.

If you look at the pic that shows the underside of the bridge pickup, you'll se the word "Dawk" engraved on it. That would be the late John "Dawk" Stillwell, who worked for Deep Purple and Rainbow as a tech. He was responsible for Roger's modded Rickenbacker, as well as Blackmore's initial scalloped fingerboard Strat and his modded Marshall Major heads. I believe Dawk did the Thunderbird as well.

[Basvarken]

Doesn’t look like a Ric pickup to me.
I think it’s closer to a mini humbucker off an EB-3?

[uwe]

Who would want to put that anywhere except the parts bin?

[lowend1]

Who would want to put that anywhere except the parts bin?

Somebody's jelly...

[uwe]

Roger - also with his Ric - was on an eternal quest to clean his sound (see the interview snippets below). He wanted undistorted lows and a clean treble with little mids because he felt that the mids department was already sufficiently covered by Blackmore's and Lord's instruments feuding for sonic leadership. Hence the preference for Vigier active basses and their more hif'sh sound today. It works within the context of DP's sound, a darker, more mid'ish sound wouldn't fit. When I saw Nick Fyffe (Jamiroquai, The Temperance Movement) deputize for Roger who was having knee surgery at one gig, the lack of Roger's clean but propulsive sound made DP sound quite different.

You've been seen with a few basses in your time. Can you remember them?

After the Fender, I went on to a Rickenbacker 4001 stereo. Mind you,
before I had the Precision I used to have a Fender Mustang...

I had one of those too; I thought they were super little basses. Did you
like the one you had?

I liked it in the studio, but I found that when it came to using it on
stage it wasn't big enough - both in sound and in neck lenght - so I moved to
the Precision, then to the Rickenbacker. Mind you, all my life I think I've
been searching for a sound that probably doesn't exist, and I've come to the
realisation that the sound I'm looking for is more in my fingers than in the
instrument, although I'm sure that anything you feel good about playing
helps you to play better.

Listening to you, and watching you play that Rickenbacker through that
huge stack of Marshall's with Deep Purple in the late '60s was one of my
influences - that thundering, loose strung Ricky bass 'clank' was a force to
be reckoned with ...

To me, it was always too distorted. It was a typical case of the grass
being greener. I'd heard various American recordings on which Ricky basses
were! used, loved the sound and thought I'd try that. But it was always
'clank, clank, distort, distort' - just too distorted really. I always had a
feeling that I wasn't underneath the band the way that a bass player should
be, and that I was competing with Jon and Ritchie in the mid range, and
generally muddying up the overall sound.

[gearHed289]

Doesn’t look like a Ric pickup to me.
I think it’s closer to a mini humbucker off an EB-3?

We're talking about when Roger had it. Whoever restored it must have put that EB-3 looking pup on there.

[Basvarken]

It came in the same Oxo box whith the all the other parts. As stated above; it has "Dawk" scribbled on the back. That would be too much of a coincidence not to make part of the configuration that Glover had in this bass (at some point).