What bass is this?

[Freuds_Cat]

What bass is this?

[MikeyB5]

I'm pretty sure it's an Ovation.

[Chris P.]

Definately an Ovation Magnum. A very nice bass with some very nice features. My uncle has one. There were two versions of this bass and also two types of each version and I believe there are some owners here at the Outpost.

Couple of months ago I wrote an article about those basses.

[chromium]

That one in the clip is the Magum II - it had the active graphic eq setup.  I think Uwe one of these(?)

I have the Magnum I.  It was the passive version, with conventional vol/tone/vol/tone arrangement and stereo output:

[Freuds_Cat]

Wow, what a very interesting bass. Nice slab of mahogany. Is the neck pup anything at all like a Mudbucker? The single coil at the bridge looks pretty heavy duty as well. The bridge design looks amazing.

[chromium]

Yeah- its all mahogany, with graphite reinforced neck.  Mine has the fatest, chunkiest neck of any of my basses - freaking huge!

Despite the grandiose appearance of the neck pickup, its rather docile and polite.  Not of the same ilk as a mudbucker, which it kind of resembles.  Its insides look a lot like the Gibson EB-4L pickup - with a coil for each string, and the Ovation has little trimpots so you can adjust string-to-string balance.  The pickup has a very narrow field - if you bend a string, the note will fade into silence.  Kind of a neat effect in its own right.  Except, of course, when you don't want that to happen 

The bridge pickup is also a humbucker, with two coils side-by-side.

The bridge is a monster, but it's easy to adjust, and the mute actually works nicely for some things.

[Chris P.]

The neck pick up has four different coils. They are to big to place them in a row, so if you look at the polepieces you see that the A and G polepieces are positioned more towards the bridge and E and D more towards the neck.

If I'm right you can adjust the volume of each coil independently.

[Freuds_Cat]

Its an amazingly innovative bass or so it seems. How is its playability. Surely the neck cant be as huge as the neck on my Epi Explorer?

[chromium]

I never played one of the Epi Explorers, but I think its the thickness of the neck, and the 2 3/8" width at the body that gives the Ovation so much girth.  The basses I usually play have pretty scrawny necks, though, so it might just be my own point of reference that makes me see it as huge.

It was a very innovative design, and also built like a tank!  It gets plenty of great Ric-ish/Fender-ish/... sounds, but I think if it did one sound well that was really unique unto itself, I'd probably use it more.  Still a fun bass to play, and they can still be seen in the US $5-600 range - not bad for a 30+ year old mahogany bass.

[Barklessdog]

What Magnum has the slide switches?

[chromium]

What Magnum has the slide switches?

You mean like this-




..that's the Magnum II.  It has a three-band graphic eq.  There were six sliders, and only three slider-caps (or two, in the case above  ) - the sliders were teamed up in pairs.  Don't quote me on this, but IIRC in each pair one slider adjusts the boost/cut at the fixed frequency range, and the secondary slider serves as an adjunct to volume control - to boost the signal as you cut frequencies, in an attempt to keep the overall volume level.

Later on, they also made the Magnum III and IV, which had a sort of squished-looking fenderish-body - III being the passive model, and IV having the graphic eq.

I always liked the shape of the Breadwinner, Deacon, and the early Magnums.

[chromium]

One word of caution if anyone is thinking about trying one of these:  The wood and graphite in the necks sometimes develop irreconcilable differences.  I've read about accounts of "delamination" on this model of bass, and I believe that is what happened to mine at some point.  When I bought it, someone had already put Humpty back together again, but did not address the finish repair, nor the fact that the fingerboard was hanging on by a thread.  Those tasks were within my limited ability to fix, so I scored it cheap as a result.

Before (auction pic):


After:



Plays great now, and no signs of instability.  I don't know if that problem was specific to a range of serial numbers, or just an artifact of the early hybrid wood/graphite pioneering days.

Now that I think of it, it was a b1*c4 to adjust that neck!!  Tweaks that would normally take a day to settle in, took a week!  Guess that's the graphite (I've never owned a bass with graphite in it before - used to more pliable necks).  The good news is- once you get it where you like it, it will not budge.  At least in my experience with it.

[chromium]

More Youtube pr0n - Magnum I played by Barry Adamson: