| Author | Message | ||
| poor_nigel
Member Username: poor_nigel Post Number: 71 Registered: 7-2003 |
Hey Boyz and Goilz, as promised, I am posting some bits on Alembic from a book I have on the history of the bass guitar. I have slowed down at work to less than 70 hour weeks, so I have a bit of time to type up some of this. I am a slow touch-typer, please be patient. If ya like it, I will type up and post the other 80% of the Alembic related parts. If ya don't, let me know and I will gleefully quit and use me fingers fer utter thangs. Notes: I take no blame for this book’s poor punctuation. It is typed in verbatim from the book, mistakes and all. I started this with the last two paragraphs of a section that was talking about experimenting with different aspects of the bass guitar, which leads into the section of the creation of Alembic as a company. Bits from The Bass Book by Tony Bacon and Barry Moorhouse . . . . Some makers’ experiments of the late 1960s were geared to expanding the simple electronics used so far in bass guitars. Burns in Britain had been the first to incorporate ‘active’ electronics into a bass: their semi-solid TR2 model of 1963 featured an on-board battery-powered pre-amplifier that enabled the player to boost treble and bass tones (normal ‘passive’ circuits only cut from existing tones). Gibson issued their Les Paul Bass in 1969 (Gibson screwed up their serial numbering, and everyone uses this date as the beginning of this line, but I have yet to find a 69 out there. Open up one listed as a 69 and you find 70 pots, so . . . – TKS) with low impedance pickups, designed to offer greater tonal character and quieter operation when connected to low impedance equipment, such as some recording gear. However, the Les Paul Bass was supplied with a special cord that had a built-in impedance matching transformer to boost the output from the low impedance pickups to a level suitable for use with normal (high impedance) instrument amplifiers. By 1971 the Les Paul Bass had been renamed the Les Paul Triumph Bass, and redesigned with a built-in matching transformer and a different control layout. In general, bass players ignored these apparently complicated basses produced by the Gibson company which appeared to have been designed with recording engineers rather than musicians in mind. ** Personal injection: The Les Paul ‘Recording’ Basses were extremely heavy, and I mean much heavier than any other bass I have picked up. They are at least a half-inch thicker than an old series semi-hallow, large body Alembic, have at least an equal surface area, and are made of solid Honduras mahogany. This is the main reason for the change over to the smaller and much lighter Triumph model. You had to have a back of iron to gig with one of these. ** Deadbeat A more significant development of bass guitar electronics was going on at the same time in a setup that was about as far removed from the orthodox business environment of a big-league guitar organization like Gibson as it was possible to get. Alembic started out as one observer put it “as more of a concept and a place than a company”. The place was San Francisco, the time was 1969, and the motivational force was one Augustus Stanley Owsley. His main source of income was from the manufacture of (then legal) LSD, a great deal of which seems to have been consumed by the premier psychedelic group of the time, The Greatful Dead. Part of the community of roadies, friends and acid freaks that gradually grew up around the Dead was a sort of electronics workshop known as Alembic, named after an apparatus used by distillers (and also apparently by alchemists) “to convey the refined product to a receiver”, as the dictionary defines it. Owsley had created Alembic in the warehouse where The Greatful Dead rehearsed in Navato, California, about 30 miles north of San Francisco. At first the idea was for Alembic to come up with new ways of providing clear, accurate recordings of Dead concerts so that the band could improve their live performances. This developed into a general interest in the improvement of studio and live sound quality, primarily by examining and refining all the different elements of the musical process, from instruments and microphones through to the PA systems and recording equipment that come at the end of the musical chain. ********************************** Next section is entitled Alembic Sound Wizards. The one after that is Hippies and Cashflow. The last is Myrtle Meets Vermillion, and yes, it does list cocobolo, for fanatics in the crowd. | ||
| 1stbass
Junior Username: 1stbass Post Number: 21 Registered: 11-2002 |
This is great thanks for taking the time to type it up. Keep going. Doug | ||
| poor_nigel
Member Username: poor_nigel Post Number: 72 Registered: 7-2003 |
You got it Doug. Here ya go: Alembic Sound Wizards Alembic quickly branched out into three main areas, becoming a recording studio, a developer of PA systems, and a guitar repair/modification workshop. The combination of the wood working talents of Rick Turner, a one-time Massachusetts folk guitarist and guitar repairer, and the electronics knowledge of Ron Wickersham, who came to Alembic from the Ampex recording equipment company, soon turned the workshop into a full-fledged guitar making operation. Alembic became a corporation in 1970 with three equal partners: Rick Turner, Ron Wickersham and recording engineer Bob Matthews. “We started to customize instruments,” explains Turner, “what we call ‘Alembicizing’. Some Guild Starfire hollow-body basses were Alembicized for Phil Lesh of the Dead and Jack Cassidy of Jefferson Airplane in 1970 and 1971.” The very first official Alembic instrument made to the company’s own design was made for Jack Cassidy in 1971. By 1973 the Alembic recording studio in San Francisco was becoming a financial headache, but in Septenber of that year a savior appeared in the shape of a two-page article about Alembic, “Sound Wizards to The Greatful Dead”, in Rolling Stone magazine. Turner says, “The article was seen by the guys at L D Heater, an instrument distribution company based near Portland, Oregon, owned by Norlin. They had been given a mandate by Norlin to go find some new manufactures’ product to distribute, so they came to us and said, “What would you do if we gave you a purchase order for 50 instruments?” At that point I think we’d built only 32, but it looked like rescue from bankruptcy to us. So we went to the bank and got enough for me to go and consider how to tool up the Alembic factory.” Hippies and Cashflow In that Rolling Stone feature from summer 1973 Charles Perry described the young Alembic team as “the Greatful Dead family’s coven of hi-fi wizards”, and quoted them as “aiming for that thing electric music has. Its ability to transcend technology”. Turner was Perry’s guide through the Alembic workplaces: he explained to the Rolling Stone writer how he had combined his own design pickups with Ron Wickersham’s electronic systems, showed Perry yet another bass being built for the Dead’s Phil Lesh, demonstrated the sophisticated controls of a typical Alembic bass, and described the Dead’s Alembic PA system. “All our experimentation is aimed at giving the musician as much control as possible,” Turner said, and photos accompanying the Rolling Stone piece showed the company’s two main premises: the workshop at Cotati, about 40 miles north of San Francisco, where Alembic’s woodwork, metalwork and pickups were made principally by Turner and Frank Fuller, and the Alembic office in nearby Sebastopal where Wickersham dealt with electronics production. The image propounded by the Rolling Stone feature was of amiable, talented hippies who rolled with the flow and did their best to indulge the ‘straights’ of the business world. “There seemed to be enough cashflow happening by this point and we had a fairly star-studded clientele, to the point where we got away with it,” laughs Turner in reflective mood. “We started to slowly standardize a line of short-scale, medium-scale and long-scale basses, at first based on the Guild Starfire Bass, and with equivalents in guitars – although at that point we probably made 19 basses or more to every guitar. Bass players were far more interested in a new, clear approach, whereas guitar players seemed satisfied with what they had. Guitar players appear to be inherently more conservative than bass players when it comes to equipment.” | ||
| poor_nigel
Member Username: poor_nigel Post Number: 73 Registered: 7-2003 |
There is one more section to go. If the Pauls all bang their mugs and shout loud enough, I will also type in the section that follws it, entitled Stan the Man. I have little idea of what obsecure bass player they could be yakking about? Stanley Yablanowitz, the famous two-fingered bassist for the Milton Klafkoff Orchestra, which used to play on the boardwalk in Alantic City in the 1930s? Yowza! Can't wait for that! | ||
| poor_nigel
Member Username: poor_nigel Post Number: 74 Registered: 7-2003 |
Myrtle Meets Vermilion Alembic’s unique alliance of design elements had been relatively quickly established. The instruments featured a high quality multi-laminate neck-through-body construction, attractive, exotic woods, heavy, tone-enhancing brass hardware and complex active electronic systems with external power supplies. “The laminated necks and, for example, the overlay on the back of the pegheads really came out of my love for old banjos,” explains Turner. “Many of the really high-end banjos from the 1910s and 1920s often featured laminated necks of contrasting wood stripes. I liked the aesthetic, and it made sense to me structurally as well. As for the neck-through-body, it was frankly a much easier way to put together a nearly hand-made instrument than figuring out how to make a really accurate joint and glue it. “We felt that we were getting our tone from the solid, rigid neck-through, and that what we then put on the wings of the instrument was far less important … in fact Heater, our distributor, never knew what we were going to send them, there was no standard wood selection for an Alembic. I’d go buying wood, and what I saw and what I liked I’d get, whether it was California walnut, or myrtle, or zebrawood, padauk, vermilion, cocobolo, whatever. The wood selection was whatever we happened to want to do that day or week or month. And I think Heater turned it to advantage: it was the craftsman’s inspiration as to what woods were going to be, and no two were alike. That became a selling point in itself.” Wickersham describes his experiments with the Alembic bass’s active electronics as primarily an attempt to get more high frequencies from the instrument without having to boost the signal at the amplifier. “The pickups in those days had very high inductances,” he says, “and we found that even going through a short run of cable reduced a lot of top-end response from them. So we had to mount the active circuit directly into the bass.” That is the end of the Alembic sections, with the exception of going into Stanley and some of his history and some minor footage in the graphite neck section. Posted for light entertainment purposes only. So I hope ya had fun. | ||
| davehouck
Senior Member Username: davehouck Post Number: 421 Registered: 5-2002 |
Thanks for posting this Nigel; it's an interesting read. For those of you who may not have read the official version, you'll find it here: http://www.alembic.com/family/history.html | ||
| dean_m
Advanced Member Username: dean_m Post Number: 282 Registered: 7-2002 |
Hey Nigel, Thank you for that. Very informative. Either you're good at typing or this took you a while to transcribe. Peace, Dino | ||
| keavin
Junior Username: keavin Post Number: 19 Registered: 12-2002 |
more info please! | ||
| poor_nigel
Member Username: poor_nigel Post Number: 76 Registered: 7-2003 |
I am a slooooow typist . . . More later. I will post the Stanley Clark and the graphite parts later this week. Even it the information has been read before, it is interesting and entertaining. Hey, just like Gillian's Island reruns - Gillian, drop that coconut! Anyone have a custom made out of coconuts yet? OK, OK, I'm outta here . . . Hmmm, who was hotter, Maryanne or Ginger? | ||
| keavin
Junior Username: keavin Post Number: 37 Registered: 12-2002 |
hey did you see the price tag on that book?...$150.00 bucks! | ||
| davehouck
Senior Member Username: davehouck Post Number: 430 Registered: 5-2002 |
Keavin; unless I'm looking at the wrong thing, at Amazon it's $16.07. | ||
| keavin
Junior Username: keavin Post Number: 39 Registered: 12-2002 |
yeah i had the wrong book, (the john entwistle book) is what i meant thats going for a $150.00 . | ||
| poor_nigel
Member Username: poor_nigel Post Number: 77 Registered: 7-2003 |
Hey, for $16.07 I highly suggest purchasing this book. Not only does it have a nice picture of Alembic 001 (And several other Alembics) in it where you can see how the pickups slid back and forth, but it even has some playboy center fold type pics of old Fenders and such. I paid more than that on eBay for it, so go for it! $150? I don't think so, but it is a nice book and well worth $16.07 and shipping. A nice addition to any players' shelf. Thanks for the heads-up Dave! Why should I type this stuff in, when y'all can have this so cheaply, and with spiffy pictures, too! |
