Dig. It.

Awesome news, Todd.

I "almost" bought a swamp ash Lefty Bass VI body from USACG last week. It was in their web specials page for $99 bucks. I want to build one of those one day, just not sure I'm ready to go down that road right now.

Oh wow. Good find regardless.

He's got an Alder two piece "gibson style" lefty guitar body (two humbucker/AM Std trem rout) for $65. TOUGH to not pull the trigger there but it would cost me another 500-750 bucks easy to do the build justice.

I know. The body "feels" like so much more of the battle than it really is.

My guitar was supposed to be in yesterday, but it's on back order. Gotta wait until the first week in June.
So anxious to get my hand on it!

uuuuugh, sorry man.

What, no one noticed the collings in the kickstarter video?

Fuck yes I noticed the slot-head. What's the donation level to have that pretty bitch shipped to Boston?

I noticed the slot-head, too. It was a Collings? Those things are flippin' incredible-sounding.

Get someone there to book a house concert, and I'll bring her with. I'll cook.

Side note: They've been cracking down on those - did you see the articles about cops posing as "punk rockers" online and trying to find the house parties so they could shut them down?

Curtis Novak has produced and is going to start selling Hagstrom/Darkstar pickups. Stoked:

So what's the deal with those? I'd never heard of them pre-thread.

Phil can probably elaborate on this tale better than I, but here goes...

The Darkstars made by Fred Hammond of Hammond Engineering starting a few years ago were copies of these old Hagstrom pickups from the 60's. They are a gigantic single coil pickup with (I think) a really balanced sound that responds incredibly well to both minor tweaks of the tone knob or one's playing attack. (sorta like playing through a tube amp you can make them growl if you bear down) They are definitely the highest output passive pickups I've ever played, no preamp required.

So this guy Fred Hammond basically had a cottage industry going with these things. Lakland started selling some of their basses with Darkstars as well as other smaller builders. But a couple of years ago he stopped taking orders and responding to people's emails and sort of fell off the face of the earth. Since then, I think a few people have been messing with making something similar since there is pretty obviously a market for them.

I have one in my Regenerate and Phil had a Gibson EB (can't remember if it was a "0" or a "3") with two.

Yeah, the Hagstrom Bi-Sonic pickup was a great pickup, that's what shipped in the old Guild Starfire basses. Those and the Hofner staple pickups are my favorite bass pickups. Jack Casady from Jefferson Airplane played a Starfire. Barry Oakley had one in his Tractor Bass with Allman Brothers. They also have adjustable pole pieces so you you can get your string response even in case you have a wierd mix of string gauges or your bass neck starts doing funky things and you don't have time to set it up. I had an EB-0 from the sixties. They were popular replacements back then too because they fit nicely in that Gibson Humbucker slot, that pickup that sounded like mud. Good mud, but mud.

Oh yeah, forgot the adjustable pole pieces which are awesome. I've messed around with the one under my E mostly...The magnets are so strong that it will reach up and grab your string and make a loud click if its set too high (mine came like that, quite a shock the first time it happened).

Phil Lesh from the Dead ("Darkstar" is a Dead tune from that era) was another Bi-sonic guy before he started having the Alembic guy build him silly stuff like this:

I've read about Jerry's contraptions before, and ... all of my jokey Dead hate aside, what a collosal waste of effort. Holy fuck. Soooooo much work and trouble for a guy to then just play normal-sounding guitar through it. Like, get a telecaster and a chorus pedal and be done with it.


The bass pickups sound intriguing.

I dunno, with Jerry, he was using a synth pickup to play those like flute and string sounding lines in the latter years. But really, his main two custom guitars (Wolf & Tiger) were pretty much a BC Rich Warlock (haha) with two humbs and one single and not terribly different from the SG he played in the 60's just made with crazy woods and over the top electronics.

The thing with Phil's bass was that he had individual control over each string that were then sent to their own amp and mixed around in different parts of their huge PA setup...They basically got very carried away in the 70's.

It would be like if someone had give us money in our early 20's and said "go buy whatever the fuck you want" and better yet, "imagine something and we'll build it"

I did my best to go overboard in my 20's, but lacked the funding to do real damage. Remember when I ran two amps with an a/b/a&b box for awhile?

We should've sawed that peavey 4x12 in half like we wanted to.

In hindsight we could have made some better decisions, gear wise, but you only know what you know and life is all about learning hard, inconvenient lessons.

at one point in my life I had three peavey amps and none of them worked.

no one should own 3 peaveys.

I only paid for one, thankfully. I left one with the garbage and gave away the other two to folks that like to fix things, I doubt they fixed them.