Help me identify this bass

[Spooge]

Sorry to hijack, but also needing help identifying this bass. Looks alembic? Friend sent it to me from several states away and this is the only picture I received. Can anyone identify and possibly value this? Please and thanks.

 

[UpperBout]

Sorry to hijack, but also needing help identifying this bass. Looks alembic? Friend sent it to me from several states away and this is the only picture I received. Can anyone identify and possibly value this? Please and thanks.

Looks like a 1975 - 1979 Series I that has the pickup selector moved to the electronics cavity. You should do you own pricing research, but a similar one sold in the UK for something near 4.5K USD. The truss cover is non-original. That sticker prominently displayed in the case is often considered to be a 'red flag' in pictures like this, but the rest looks legit (I have a 1977). As you probably know if you get a serial, Link Removed, although turn-around times on that process varies.

 

[Jason Weiss]

Thank you for all of the input guys. I can post more photos if you think it will be helpfull. Please let me know what would be most helpful. Back of the neck? Inside the electronics? There is no serial number so I'm moving into the camp of custom one off. I'm a guitar player and have about 20 guitars, but when I saw this bass, I thought to myself, why the hell not!

Can any of you recomend a bass tech in LA? I have two guitar techs here, but they don't specialize in the bass.

 

[Jason Weiss]

I cannot. However interesting enough, my brother (plays guitar) came into a situation where he had to go to some old ladys house whose husband recently passed away. The reason being is that my brothers friend owns a pest control company and when he was in the house he noticed bass guitars/amps everywhere (about 47 total) and the woman just wants all of it out of her living room & basement. So pest control guy knows nothing about bass so he enlists my bro for help. But before my brother went to the house, his friend sent him about a dozen photos of basses that were out of the case and then some pics of stacks of hard cases.

My brother came over my house to show me the pics of what his friend sent him (since my brother knows I am the authority when it comes to bass guitars . As we are sliding through the pics (they weren't easy to identify because my bros friend didn't know exactly what key features on the basses to take pics of so we just got a standard view of the entire instrument head to toe from a distance) there was a bunch I wasn't quite sure what they were but I remember freaking out because I saw what I was 99% sure an Alembic and then also freaked when I was 99% sure I saw a Wal.

My brother was like "Are those any good?". I said just think, if I'm seeing an Alembic & Wal & there are still around 45 more basses to go through....what other gems are in there? If he has an Alembic & Wal just out in the open, just think of the basses that are in all of those hardshell cases!

My bro goes there because the ultimate goal for the woman was to sell them but she has zero clue what any of this stuff is worth so my role was to try & put a rough figure to the instruments (plus good luck trying to sell 47 basses with amps one by one unless you are someone like Dave Ellefson, Bill Wyman, Flea etc).

Turns out that the Alembic I saw in the pic - not an Alembic.It was the bass in your pic. If the original picture I saw was clear & closer I could have told just by the bridge. The Wal? Not a Wal - just a knock off. And believe it or not, every other bass (and amp) was trash no name brands and were from the 70's & 80's. I think maybe most of us have at one time owned a no name brand/$99 pawn shop bass but to think that this guy nearly had 50 basses and not one of them was legit is odd. I'm not saying he had to have a quiver of high end instruments but who needs 47 beater basses?

So my short, temporary dream fantasy of going to someones house to rifle though a mountain of bass guitars thinking that there were jems like Alembic & Wal in there with god knows what else only lasted for a short while haha.

Sorry for the long, drug out story but your post totally took me back to my experience this summer. Cheers!

Thank you for the story. SO you saw this exact bass there? Can you tell ne where that was? I bought it from someone in Los Anges.

 

[adje]

Thank you for all of the input guys. I can post more photos if you think it will be helpfull. Please let me know what would be most helpful. Back of the neck? Inside the electronics? There is no serial number so I'm moving into the camp of custom one off. I'm a guitar player and have about 20 guitars, but when I saw this bass, I thought to myself, why the hell not!

Can any of you recomend a bass tech in LA? I have two guitar techs here, but they don't specialize in the bass.

... uh, responding to Spooge's post, actually. as the instrument in the OP is most definitely not an Alembic.

On 70s Alembics, the serial is likely to be on the very top of the headstock. There should ALWAYS be a serial number, regardless if custom-ordered (and most of them are just that). The serial starts with two digits for the year, then the sequential number. And if it's not a Series instrument, there should be one or two letters for the model after the year - but that started from 1978 (with a few exceptions before that). As to setups, they are made so you can do setups yourself.