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NFBD! (F is for fretless) (Vintage content)

Eddie Booph

Eddie Booph

Dec 13, 2022
56
262
Maine
#1
So I went to my local guitar shop today to look at a very different bass, but this caught my eye. So I plugged it in. Then I heard the noises that I've wanted to hear from a fretless for a while now (I've tried several over the last couple years). It played well and sounded great, so it came home with me.

She is a 1973 Rickenbacker 4001 fretless. I don't know what the color is called or have any history, but it appears to have seen a decent bit of play time. If I'm being honest, I didn't know what all the Ric fuss was about until I played this, but I hear it now! So please, feel free to educate me if there are quirks or resources I should know about!
IMG_20230930_153317487~2.jpg

Apologies for the construction, my house is a bit of a disaster...
 
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#6
An early '73? It's got most or perhaps all of the '72 features that were phased out in '73: wavy Grover tuners, toaster pickup, checkerboard binding, aluminum bridge (no tail lift!).

It's hard to be certain from the picture, but it looks like Fireglo. It looks beautiful, and like new.

I play fretless (Fender), and I have a (fretted) Rickenbacker. I'm seriously jealous.

Things to know:

The truss rods don't adjust like a Fender. If you try to adjust the neck that way, you'll probably crack the fingerboard or neck. Check over on the Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum - Index page for the proper procedure.

If it has the usual bridge pickup of a '72, it will have slotted screw heads for pole pieces. They look adjustable but they are not; if you turn them, you'll destroy the pickup.

Unless it has already been modified, there is a capacitor in the bridge pickup circuit that cuts bass from that pickup. Some people prefer to defeat this - just short across the capacitor, don't remove it.

Try the Rick-O-Sound output - use a cable with a TRS ("stereo") phone plug at one end and two separate TS ("mono") phone plugs at the other end (or equivalent adapters).

Edit: oh, yeah, one more thing - try LaBella Gold White Nylon tapewounds or Thomastic-Infeld Jazz Rounds. I've used both on my fretless and they are two different flavors of awesome.
 
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#11
Very nice! The bass I play almost 100% of the time is a '92 Ric fretless. The strings I found right for me are a light gauge nickel roundwound set that Ric no longer offers, .040, .055, .075, .095. The bass came to me with a very old set of Ric tapewounds (also no longer offered) that sounded muffled and congested to me, like my ears were blocked. Other flats weren't much better, including the Optima flats that recreate the stock Ric strings from the '70s. I swapped in a toaster at the neck, and everything is good now.

Regarding the adjustment instructions that Rickdog referred to above on the Rick Resource page, pay attention to that advice. I will mention that for that section of the menu to show up, though, you need to join the website. It's not visible otherwise. The old-style hairpin truss rods do not adjust like normal compression rods, and trying to flatten the neck by continually tightening the nuts could result in splitting the fingerboard off the neck, always tragic but doubly so for a fretless Ric. But those rods are stable. I have one Ric with hairpins that I adjusted once and it's not needed any tweaking since.
 
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#14
@rickdog & @farace - thank you for the heads up! I'll make sure and do my research before adjusting the truss rods. I'm excited to hear down the Ric rabbit hole and figure it what these basses are all about!

@TheReceder - sorry about your keyboard... Maybe wear a bib when scrolling through TB?
 
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#16
In october 1998 I went searching for my stolen fretless in every music shop in town.
Thinking that the burglars might have sold it to someone who traded it in a shop.
So I ended up in a shop that I hadn't visited before, in the western part of town.
They had a 2nd hand white fretless Rickenbacker for sale.
Similar neck, no cover on the bridge pickup.
Off course I played it for 10 minutes or so.
It was way above my budget. So I left it there.
A couple of weeks later our guitarist gave me his Jolana D-bass (Rick-copy), to have something to practice on.
 
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