The Last Bass Outpost

Errr... David, that's where most of the discussion in this thread is about. We all think that is odd.

Ah I see!  I think a lot of what Gibson does these days is odd, especially when it comes to basses!

Case in point, look at the neck pickup on the SG bass. What the heck where they thinking? They took two mini humbucker coils, and then made fake pole pieces mounted in a chunk of aluminum. This places the coils too far from the strings, because they out the T shaped blades in upside-down. Then they mounted the whole thing on a brass baseplate, and that and the aluminum kill off all the high end.

It would have been a simple thing to have made an updated sidewinder like the original, but they could have wound it to be clearer, if that was their intention.

Why does this bass have (Fender) Jazz bass pickups on it?     No one finds that odd? Gibson couldn't even make some RD pickup repros?

IMHO Mister Rossmeisl is one of the biggest unsung heroes. He designed an awful lot Fenders and Ricks.

I agree! Vert talented man.

However, the Fender Coronado series was not a favorite of mine. But then I'm not a fan of those types of 335 looking semi hollow instruments. I did own a Gisbon EB-2D once though.

Here's the same neck for $39.99!

I bought several items from this seller, including one of these necks, and got them right away.

The neck is from a 1981 long scale LP bass.

http://cgi.ebay.com/Vintage-Gibson-NOS-Maple-EB-Triumph-Bass-Neck-/250864044692?pt=Guitar_Accessories&hash=item3a68a98a94

Yeah, you'd have to rout an additional space for the Badass I bridge on the Ric as well.  Geddy got a badass tone on Farewell To Kings though.

I used to use the Badass II bridges on my Rics, which don't require routing, but it leaves a big hole where the Ric bridge was recessed. Geddy put a plastic ring around the bridge to hide it. I inlayed maple in mine.  Later I switched the Schaller roller bridge.

Rics have no neck angle, so it's hard to get a bridge where the strings don't rattle on the saddles.

Thanks for the welcome Rob! I'm not sure how I missed this forum.

I've wanted a Triumph bass and LP Recording guitar since they were first introduced back in the day. I've always ended up with lots of knobs and switches on my guitars, so I guess that appealed to me! I remember when you couldn't give them away, but now they are getting pricy.

The first pickups I tried winding back in the late 70s were low-Z, as I was trying to get that Alembic tone.  More recently when I decided to go into the pickup making business I was winding low Z pickups very similar to the original LP Signature pickups, but using an external preamp instead of a transformer. My current standard pickups are high Z, but still different from most of the stuff out there. I've been planning on making a new Low Z pickup, using the heavy wire, and a transformer, and in standard soapbar style cases.

As I mentioned earlier I'm planning on building myself a version of a LP Triumph. I have the pickup covers and mounting rings, a long scale LP neck and an inlay set from a 70s LP Custom. I could make a more correct short scale mahogany neck, but I like the fact that I have a real Gibson neck, and I like long scales better. Now I just have to make the body, finish the neck and wind the pickups. I'm probably not going to use the plastic control plate, since they seem to bend and stuff after a while. So it will be a cross being the triumph and original LP bass.

Info on the pickups is hard to come by.  A thread was started over at the Pickup Makers forum back in '07, and that had some interesting tidbits.

http://music-electronics-forum.com/t3737/

That included the photo of the pickup made by Chuck Burge.

So any info is helpful. I've never had a set of the real pickups, so I wont know how close mine are since I have nothing to compare them to. I did get some specs from someone who did resistance measurements of each coil tap, and general info like magnet size. Based on that, and the over all size of the coils, I should be able to wind a pretty faithful replica of the pickups. I plan on making a rubber mold of the covers so I can cast them, since they are hard to come by.

I'm a very small one man operation, and I enjoy doing unusual pickups.   

I thought these were pretty heavy too.
See David Schwabs comments on this old thread
http://music-electronics-forum.com/t3162/

That would be me!

What's going on here is this Gotoh pickup is wound with very heavy gauge wire, so it's really a low impedance pickup. I'm not sure why they would do that, but I had heard that the early Gibson or Epi (I forget which) reissues had these 2K pickups.  This made me think they were doing this because of the reissue LP Signature (Jack Casady) bass using the same gauge wire. I guess they wanted a cleaner tone out of it.

I have a 70s EB-0 pickup that I had rewound to about 12K. I had it in my '73 Ric, and it over powered the bridge pickup. Rewound it still had a similar tone, but was a little more open sounding. It wasn't super bright though. My pickup read about 30K before I rewound it, as did the pickup in the EB2D I used to own.

The real Mudbucker is wound with standard 42 AWG wire, and has a whole truckload on each coil. You can have that one rewound, but it would be more expensive than the Mudbucker sold at www.guitarpartsresource.com, which is listed at 29k.