The Last Bass Outpost

But for that $50K The Demon hangs out at your house for a few hours, raids your refridgerater, uses your toilet and tries to sleep with your wife.  It's a bargain if you think about it.

At 1:07 is David peering into the back of the crowd because someone told him Sykes, Murray and Dunbar had crashed the video shoot and were coming after him?

I was less concerned about the pickguard, That could have easily been replaced when the original cracked.  The thing that would make me steer clear of it is the sloppy routing work on the electronics cavity and un-even line & spacing on othe string through holes. 



If you zoom in more on the aution image it looks like the cover is nice and straight while the cavity itself is meandering around a bit.



The overall shap of the body seems off, the uppor "horn" almost looks like it is flattened out a bit to me.  It also seems to have an inconsistent round over on all the body edges and I cant make out any belly carve or angles carved on the face (but this may just be due to the angle of the photos).  To my eyes it looks like a roughly cut two-piece slab body vs the production RD's.  Unless it was the first RD body they ever made you would expect it to be much more consistent with the production models.

Anything's possible with Gibson I guess but there are a lot of things about this bass that would make me run the other direction before bidding without a physical inspection.

Yup. With that little amp I always DI either with the head or the REDDI.  Its good enough for the drunken Oktoberfest patrons 

Nice!  What's your signal path there?

Not much of a path really, just the '64 Bird into a little ampeg PF 500 and no effects.  I picked up the amp a few years ago because i was tired of lugging a 400w tube amp around for smaller gigs. In this case I knew I likely wouldn't be able to pull close enough to the stage to unload so I just rolled this little guy a few blocks to the stage.  It lacks some of the fullness of a big tube rig but gets close enough for me to be happy and my back prefers it!

Tonight was an "Oktoberfest" gig in North GA. No Devil's Wheel though so Im not sure it can really count as an Oktoberfest...

You can see the differences in the headstock. 

Do those pickups sound any different to standard ripper pickups?

Id say so yes, but not hugely different. They sound much more like Rippers than they do mudbuckers but still like they are a missing link between the two.

But if you take away its testicles is it still a mudbucker? Maybe instead of Mud Jr we should call it a Unic-bucker 

Ive seen 5 including yours Uwe.  This auction (2), Daves guitars in Wisconson(3) one in Malaysia with VVTT config like the latest auction popped up on the Gibson forum a few years ago (4) and mine (5).  Mine has the l5 marking in the electronics cavity like this one as well as an Custom L-5 truss rod cover. I wonder if they had plans to call it that at one point but thought better of it.  It does follow the pattern of being a styled after a hollow body like the L5S guitar.