Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

Beautiful!

Wow! Kudos to Dane and John. What a great looking bass. To echo Joey, how does it sound?

That's a very beautiful bass !!! Congrats to John and Dane !

John - Congrats! What a great looking bass.

Dane - Kudos! You Sir, are one talented individual.

After drooling over those pix for the past 1/2 hour, I can't help but wonder how that procedure would look on my purple 4004Cii. Mmmmm, gold plexi on purple flame maple - I can see it now...

superdick2112 wrote:After drooling over those pix for the past 1/2 hour, I can't help but wonder how that procedure would look on my purple 4004Cii. Mmmmm, gold plexi on purple flame maple - I can see it now...

Mmmmmmm, that would look nice!

sloop_john_b wrote:This is one of my favorite projects ever. Dane, killer execution on this one. I love every element of it.

John, what kind of camera do you use?

+1 @ both.

The pickup placement reminds me a little of a Jazz Bass. I bet this one's a growler.

sloop_john_b wrote:This is one of my favorite projects ever. Dane, killer execution on this one. I love every element of it.

+1

cassius987 wrote:The pickup placement reminds me a little of a Jazz Bass. I bet this one's a growler.

My son has a Squire J bass. I'll have to check. Jazz basses have a slightly longer scale, but IIRC, the 4002 pup placement, was intended to be modeled after the Jazz Bass.

winston wrote:Wow! Kudos to Dane and John. What a great looking bass. To echo Joey, how does it sound?

It does sound nice! Still has the Ric tone. I just put on some DR Lo-Riders. Both on single coil sounds nice and smooth, and going to humbucking on either one one of them adds meat, and both on humbucking seems fairly heavy. Dane might kill me, but after I get a bit more discretionary cash in a year or so, I want to research toasters, scatterwounds, etc, and perhaps put two of them in instead. But if I don't get around to it, well that's okay as it is really sweet right now anyway. Wait...... I'll get a new 4004, have Dane do it again, but with toasters!

superdick2112 wrote:After drooling over those pix for the past 1/2 hour, I can't help but wonder how that procedure would look on my purple 4004Cii. Mmmmm, gold plexi on purple flame maple - I can see it now...

I think it would look killer. Paul Wilczynski had some shots posted a while back of an acoustic he did with a bluish/turq/aqua that looked really sweet with a gold pg and hardware.


But what really drew me to purchasing this actual bass in the first place were those red horns. To me, they represent the perfect balance of scale, contour, finish, and color of a Ric. I really dig it. There's a certain svelte-ness yet seriousness to them.

coolhandjjl wrote: Dane might kill me, but after I get a bit more discretionary cash in a year or so, I want to research toasters, scatterwounds, etc, and perhaps put two of them in instead. But if I don't get around to it, well that's okay as it is really sweet right now anyway. Wait...... I'll get a new 4004, have Dane do it again, but with toasters!

I don't think there'd be much audible difference if any with Toasters when you consider the fact that with the coils tapped, each pickup drops to 7.5K, which is right about where Toasters are. Now if you do get another 4004, we could do this again with a RIHS pickup and an overwound Toaster.

superdick2112 wrote: After drooling over those pix for the past 1/2 hour, I can't help but wonder how that procedure would look on my purple 4004Cii. Mmmmm, gold plexi on purple flame maple - I can see it now...

Just my humble opinion, but Jon's Cii does not have the radically figured wood that yours has and yours does have a unique finish. I wouldn't cover it all up with a pickguard if it was mine. This mod also would look cool on solid finishes like Jetglo and Midnight blue or other trans finishes with plainer looking wood as the Laredo's usually have.

That is a great looking Rickenbacker bass! What a cool idea.

Wow!

All good points about the wood. The graining on mine however, was fairly plain, sort of ho-hum as Joey mentioned. I wasn't missing much by covering it up.

aceonbass wrote:Now if you do get another 4004, we could do this again with a RIHS pickup and an overwound Toaster.

That would look great on a Maple body, RIHS only. And re-finished with an amber tone.

aceonbass wrote:While I can see not wanting to cover up really nice wood, if you're going to have any wood showing, shouldn't it be really nice? I've never heard anyone complain about the pickguard on a 4002 covering up all that birdseye maple. Unfortunately it's very rare to see a 4000, 4001, or 4003 with really nice wood, and that's what I want in a transparent finish..really nice wood.

+1!

I agree the 4000 guard would be great on solid finishes. And having a lot of highly figured wood is great too, but in the case of other models that have a guard, as long as there's a fair amount of figured wood showing, it's still good as far as I'm concerned. Now, being the grain/figure freak that I am, sometimes the 4004s can have almost too much figure ( Did I actually say that? ), especially, in my opinion on the trans/color finishes.

I guess I see the trans/color finish as accenting the wood, whereas Mapleglo is just pure wood. So, adding some more accent via a pickguard can dress it up a bit more...