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Headless basses

#41
Mound of Sound said:
Here's a pic of Phil Lesh with a headless Quantum 6. I haven't seen any other pics of this bass and can't find year/specs on it. If anyone else knows (I'm sure someone here does) let us know!
Click to expand...

He played that one around 1989 I think. For whatever reason, he didn't play it for very long. It's probably too early to be a Quantum... It may be a throughbody TBX ?
 
#42
I love headless basses, and I am sure I will buy more in the future. Someday I will have a Steinberger XL. I've owned a Q and M bass. Everybody has seen the Marchlewski I had built, but what the heck. BTW some really nice basses in this thread so far. I have always wanted a David King bass.
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I thought it was appropriate that I be headless too.
 
#44
OK here we go, enjoy the wonders that are headless. I know I am a big fan of the style, it's almost all I play live anymore. I never realized how much weight and air pressure a headstock carries until I got my first headless. :)
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And the one I got here on TB:
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And there's the one I built:
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All hail headless wonders!
Dirk
 
#45
I had a headless guitar for a couple years, and I didn't like some things about the headlessness:

- limited string choice. I had exactly one option for the gauges I wanted: LaBella stainless

- I really hated the bridge tuners. Mine were very stiff and hard to turn. May have been a bad piece of hardware? Either way, they were much harder to reach and get any good torque on than regular tuners would have been anyway.
 
#46
king88uy7 said:
He played that one around 1989 I think. For whatever reason, he didn't play it for very long. It's probably too early to be a Quantum... It may be a throughbody TBX ?
Click to expand...

It's hard to see, but in the pic it says "Quantum-6" near the top horn and on the bottom it says "Modulus Graphite products". Definitely some sort of Quantum - and yeah, I guessed late '80's too.
 
#47
Limited string choice?
Yes, that's my experience, too. A few years ago Schack had strings for his headless basses with 36" scale made by GHS, but because he doesn't build that much basses anymore GHS told him that they will not make special strings for him as long as the required quantities won't go up...

So for me it was very difficult to get 36" double ball ends, 040-122 in Germany! I finaly contacted Pyramid Strings and the make "custom strings" for me...
 
#48
I bought a headless Hohner "Jack" bass today, gonna get it defretted and epoxied (the zero fret will probably need shave too). I took some photos tonight but I won't have uploaded onto my house network until tomorrow, so I'll share them then! This is my first "true" headless, even though I still consider my Kubicki a headless (in a sense). I msut say I'm loving this bass, it's going to be even better as a fretless!

As for limited string choice, Rotosound and Status make double ball end strings, so I'm sorted!
 

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