Description
Lots of info and documentation to come
Fleetwood Mac John Mcvie graphite neck Alembic, one of Alembic first with a crazy electronic package and neck LEDs
Sounds and plays amazing.
It’s the bass from The Chain Photo
Alembic series bass
Ebony top and back
One of the first graphite necks by Jeff Gould
Electronics are like a combo of series I and IIs
32.25 scale
An email from Rick Turner when asked about the electronic setup…
from Rick Turner today let me know if this helps
Yeoww!
I think…(scratching old memory banks here…)…that this has Alembic
“SuperFilters” in it…but the knob configuration puzzles me just a bit.
It probably has a “stereo” output…that is, two channel output with neck
and bridge pickups on tip and ring of the 1/4″ output and on pins 2 (neck
pickup) & 3 (bridge pickup) of the XLR five pin. Pin 4 is for +
voltage…15 to 20 volts, and Pin 5 is for – voltage…same, 15 to 20 volts
supplied by an external power supply.
The knobs closest to the strings are likely master volume, neck pickup
volume, and bridge pickup volume.
On the regular “Super filter” circuit, there were separate volume controls
for straight-through unadulterated volume and filtered volume…you mix
those two together. Then there would be a knob for frequency, one for
filter Q, and then a switch to select filter type: high pass, low pass, band
pass, notch (which can be thought of as negative band pass), and maybe a low
pass with a treble boost.
It would probably be best to wring it out by going to one pickup and then
see what is what with the pickup volume control and then it’s neighbor which
is probably the filtered volume. If you can isolate it down to just
filtered sound with the direct sound turned all the way down, you can then
suss out what is what with the other controls. The filter frequency should
be pretty obvious, and then you’re just left with a few other things.
It is remotely possible that this bass has passive treble cut tone controls
on there, too. I’m a bit thrown by the number of what look like switches.
Is that pointer knob on a pot or a rotary switch?
I did this for Phil Lesh a few years ago, but the layout on his “Big Brown”
bass…a totally modded Guild Starfire also known as “the Godfather” (you
can look ’em up!) is different from this one.
We sure stuffed a lot of shit into that thing! What were we thinking?
