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Strange beast spotted in the wild!

#43
Also, horrible ergonomics unless you can walk on all 4's easily.
 

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#44
Blackjac97 said:
Cool bass. It looks a lot like John Entwistle "Buzzard" basses. I wonder which came first.
Click to expand...

John's original ideas for the 'buzzard' shape did not fly with Susan Wickersham. She straight up told him they would not build a bass that looked like that. Period. So he went off to Warwick who would. Eventually they reached a rapproachment, and the 'Dragon Wing' was the result.

My Elan Five had the Sig Electronics, and they are the best short of the full-tilt Series electronics. Filter/Q-switch on each pickup, and with the pan control you can dial up anything you can think of, and a few tones you never imagined. Of course the pics of the engine room are typical Alembic, surgical wiring with no solder joints (all gold-plated plug ins), no foil, but colloidal silver paint for shielding, and the pic of the board turned over where you can see the pots, etc.:

The blue boxes are individual gains for each pickup. So . . . . since Alembic pickups are low impedance, you run them as close or far away from the strings to find the tone you want with no worry of magnetic damping. Once you have that done, set the pan pot to the center, 50/50 click point. Then you can adjust that blend by the two blue boxes to zero in the exact blend you want. Essentially a two-channel mixer for the two pickups.

Alembics are built to a standard that few, if any approach. They make everything except screws, and the tuning keys. Nobody else takes the pains to spec stainless steel pickup screws so as not to mess with the pickups' magnetic field. The only wood screws anchor the tailpiece and the locator screws on the keys, every thing else are machine screws going into threaded inserts. And on and on.

I'll be the first to say Alembics are NOT for everyone, they just aren't. BUT . . . . if you 'get it', there is nothing, and I mean nothing like an Alembic, or the family that builds them.
 
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#46
JW56789 said:
John's original ideas for the 'buzzard' shape did not fly with Susan Wickersham. She straight up told him they would not build a bass that looked like that. Period. So he went off to Warwick who would. Eventually they reached a rapproachment, and the 'Dragon Wing' was the result.

My Elan Five had the Sig Electronics, and they are the best short of the full-tilt Series electronics. Filter/Q-switch on each pickup, and with the pan control you can dial up anything you can think of, and a few tones you never imagined. Of course the pics of the engine room are typical Alembic, surgical wiring with no solder joints (all gold-plated plug ins), no foil, but colloidal silver paint for shielding, and the pic of the board turned over where you can see the pots, etc.:

The blue boxes are individual gains for each pickup. So . . . . since Alembic pickups are low impedance, you run them as close or far away from the strings to find the tone you want with no worry of magnetic damping. Once you have that done, set the pan pot to the center, 50/50 click point. Then you can adjust that blend by the two blue boxes to zero in the exact blend you want. Essentially a two-channel mixer for the two pickups.

Alembics are built to a standard that few, if any approach. They make everything except screws, and the tuning keys. Nobody else takes the pains to spec stainless steel pickup screws so as not to mess with the pickups' magnetic field. The only wood screws anchor the tailpiece and the locator screws on the keys, every thing else are machine screws going into threaded inserts. And on and on.

I'll be the first to say Alembics are NOT for everyone, they just aren't. BUT . . . . if you 'get it', there is nothing, and I mean nothing like an Alembic, or the family that builds them.
Click to expand...

Good read on good info, thanks for sharing! :thumbsup: Is Susan Wickersham from Alembic?
 
#48

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#53
Jeff Scott said:
No idea but he had loads of money so... 💰💰💰

Here is part of his collection from back in the mid '00s.

View attachment 7461187

Note the FG one in the lower left. It was a basket case that he restomodded®. It now belongs to Geddy Lee.
Click to expand...

Jeff Scott said:
No idea but he had loads of money so... 💰💰💰

Here is part of his collection from back in the mid '00s.

View attachment 7461187

Note the FG one in the lower left. It was a basket case that he restomodded®. It now belongs to Geddy Lee.
Click to expand...
I had saved the wallpaper from the old Alembic custom archive, I recognize the 4080 collector, I had no idea he was an Alembic guy as well. I remember the double neck selling around the same time he bought the 68 4001 from New Jersey.
 
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#56
trevcda said:
What's in the two non-standard looking pick up positions? The ones that don't have "Alembic" printed on them.
Click to expand...
If I understand you correctly, the one next to the neck is the brass truss rod cover. The one between the pickups is a "dummy" hum canceller. Used in Series instruments to cancel the inherent hum of single coil pickups, they can be installed as a cosmetic feature to give Signature electronics the look of a Series level electronics package. I did the same on my short scale BalK Deluxe. It's a real hum canceller pickup but the leads are removed and not connected to the signal path in anyway. The truss rod cover is removed in the pic below.
IMG_0613.JPG
 

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