Why do you love your alembic?

[Jure the second]

A couple of years ago I went to a distant large music instruments store (more than 500km away). Having spent a lot of time to save the money I wanted the best bass for me. The environment of musicians living around my home was (still is) very Fender or MusicMan oriented (some of them might also consinder Warwicks as acceptable brand), so naturaly I was aiming for a nice 5-string Musicman. But after taking an Alembic Orion into my lap just for fun, I stood amazed. No other bass just couldn't come close this baby. I managed to scrape the last bucks (just to have enough for gas to get home) and returned with mixed feelings - how will my musician friends react.
It's still the same. Because it's not a "traditional" shape, they think it's a warwick, but when I plug it in, it's a new experience for them.
I just wanted to point out, that it was definitely not the status, but the tool itself. As how it should be - no matter what logo you have on that headstock !

Jure

 

[dnburgess]

I just got an interesting book called, "Giants of Bass" by Stuart Clayton (ISBN 1-94492-075-5). The author looks at 20 bassist who have, in his view, "made a difference to the way people either regard the instrument or play it".

I was fascinated by the amount of detail in the gear breakdown and made a table of bass makers and players from the data in the book.

No surprises that Fender was the most played maker with 15 out of 20.

Next was Alembic with 6 out of 20!!!

The only other makers with more than 2 players were Warwick (5) and Musicman (3).

The Alembic result was particularly impressive, considering that of the top four makers it is the only one that doesn't do endorsements.

As a matter of interest the mean number of makers played by each player was 2.5

The Alembicians on the list are: Cliff Burton ('tallica), SC, JE, Flea, MK, JPJ