Okay, I now have some time to talk about my Lakland CAR/rosewood 'board 55-01, now equipped with the Dual Coil pickups and the new Nordstrand preamp.
Wow. I mean, wow... Even if it's still in an unfinished state.
I got the call last week from Mike Cooper saying that my bass was ready for pickup. With great joy and anticipation I made the under-two-hour scenic drive to the base of the mountain range where the Boys of Nordstrand resided and worked.
I ran the bass through their reference amp rig and was astounded by how good it sounded, even with slightly dead strings (I forgot to leave a fresh set). I was just twisting knobs and flipping switches without knowing what they did. The original knobs were used except for one new feature; the stack knob. I didn't think to ask them to get knobs for this, so I was reduced to turning the shafts themselves. I asked Mike which knobs did what. Rather sheepishly, he said "I don't know, I didn't install the preamp. I just put in the pickups."
Mo (Maurilio) was the preamp installer, and he was not working that day. Mike and I managed to figure out the obvious on some of the knobs (vol/blend), and we figured that one push/pull knob was active/passive switching, and the other push/pull was (maybe) a switchable mid control. But the stack knob and one other knob was a mystery to us at that time. The series/single coil/parallel switch settings were easy to figure out. I didn't care...all I knew was I got my bass back, and it was utterly transformed into something more.
Back home, I played the bass at a couple of church services. This was a good way to run it through its paces in a real-world situation without having too much stress. I managed to get good sounds coming out of it anyway. I was going to try it at one of my band gigs, but decided against it. I knew the guys would give me crap about playing a bass with knobs missing.
I PM'd Mo (maurilio) and asked him to tell me the control configuration, and even he was a little confused at first about what he did
. After some exchange of information we finally had it figured out, and it's really something!
:
volume (pull for passive), blend (w/ center detent), passive tone control (works in active, too! ), switchable mid (down=400hz, up=1khz, w/ center detent), stacked bass/treble (w/ center detents). Separate switches for each pickup: down toward the floor=series, centered=single coil, up=parallel.
I'll put this bass up against any other (er, those w/out Nordstrand electronics)! The Dual Coil pickups are fantastic, and Carey Nordstrand's preamp is the real deal. I could get deep, dubby lows for reggae, Jaco rear-pickup burpiness, P-bass hollow grind, slicing modern tone, slap sounds of all kinds, all without bad extremes of frequency range. Highs were shimmery, not icy bright. Lows were deep and substantial, but not overly muddy. Lotsa mids to play with, and there's a lot of possibilities with having "dual tone knobs" to work with. Some folks might find all this tonal capability too complex, but I like having all these options available to me. If those folks want to play this bass, I'll have them switch it to passive and only deal with three knobs.
Ah yes...the knobs. The Nordy Boys said I could get stack knobs from Allparts, so I checked out the website and saw that they carried both "stack" and "concentric"...and they sure looked the same to me. I wonder if there's a difference. I also saw that Hipshot carried a stack knob set that had rubber rings on it, making for a cool look. Both of them had them in the color I need (black chrome). Decisions, decisions...
All I need besides the stack knobs are a fresh set of strings, and my joy will be complete. "KC" will be one badass bass!!!
Thanks again to the Boys of Nordstrand for the great work they did.
Joe Hilgeman
