Moderators: rickenbrother, ajish4
Some of the mods Lemmy did on his Rics was to put a Gibson Thunderbird Humbucker in the neck position...one of his Basses a mapleglo 4001s whit a Thunderbird humbucker in the neck position..was in fact a Ric 4000...(the one Pickup version of the 4001)..that had a Gibson pickup installed later in the neck position....I think he even used this Bass in his Hawkwind days.spongebob wrote:I know that Lemmy has been using his 4004's for a while now (wonder if he ever uses anything else?)
Question is - when he was a 4001/03 player, did he have them modified? I'm sure that I read somewhere once about mods carried out for whatever reason?
That's his original bass (as John states); it's not a 1999, Lemmy states it was originally a single pickup bass and it actually has the smaller headstock; I believe it's about a '70 or thereabouts. That is the bass that taught me how to play, and the bass I'd love most in the entire world. I always wondered what happened to that. It was the one with the TBird pickup and is on the Ace of Spades video; it was also the one he used in Hawkwind. In chronological order that was the first, I believe the 2nd was his original maple-necked bass (bought with no frets and "about 100 holes in the headstock"), the 3rd was the white BT, and then he started to diversify somewhat. He originally put a DiMarzio Model 1 in the white bass, then had some ThBird copy pickups made (I suspect by Peter Cook) for both that and the maple necked one, and then replaced them with Barts. When Peter Cook got the original in for some work he said it was wired all wrong and the output was very low (out of phase?). Last thing you'd imagine! I thought the original had been smashed......I hope it gets fixed up.badeggs wrote:Don't know too much about Lemmy, but didn't he install different knobs on his basses? Like big oven knobs or something like that?
And he had a 1999, I believe - it's the one around 3:00 of this excellent video.
That's an interesting one...henry5 wrote:That's his original bass (as John states); it's not a 1999, Lemmy states it was originally a single pickup bass and it actually has the smaller headstock; I believe it's about a '70 or thereabouts. That is the bass that taught me how to play, and the bass I'd love most in the entire world. I always wondered what happened to that. It was the one with the TBird pickup and is on the Ace of Spades video; it was also the one he used in Hawkwind. In chronological order that was the first, I believe the 2nd was his original maple-necked bass (bought with no frets and "about 100 holes in the headstock"), the 3rd was the white BT, and then he started to diversify somewhat. He originally put a DiMarzio Model 1 in the white bass, then had some ThBird copy pickups made (I suspect by Peter Cook) for both that and the maple necked one, and then replaced them with Barts. When Peter Cook got the original in for some work he said it was wired all wrong and the output was very low (out of phase?). Last thing you'd imagine! I thought the original had been smashed......I hope it gets fixed up.
'70 is a guess, partly based on the period he started using it. I definitely think it's pre '72 because it wasn't new when he got it (salmon pink apparently, which he hated!) and he was using it in '72. I have a feeling I read somewhere it was a '69, but I'm not sure they had the shorter headstocks then. Someone else more knowledgeable may be able to verify.badeggs wrote:Cool, nice info Shaun! So it's a '70 4000? The neck looks about 1/2" thick...
