Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

I had a quick go on fellow forum member Pete Greenwood's CS and it is a fantastic bass.The neck felt nice and slim,and it sounded amazing.

I played one at a show once (Thanks Mike) and I was in heaven. Undoubtedly the best bass I have ever played, and I was SO nervous about putting a mark on it!!

One of Fender's painstaking (pain-causing?) relic's it isn't. And it's probably close enough for most Squire fans.

Not a Yes fan here, but I do love the 4001CS. If the opportunity arose and planets and stars aligned, i'd grab one. Love the color, the vermillion wings, and the one I played had a sweet neck and sound.

As a huge YES fan, I was more than a little dismayed to see Chris Squire so down on the Hall family! I shall therefore reconsider the degree to which I am a fan these days of Chris Squire as a person, but I am still really a fan of his music, no doubt. What does he mean, ****** pickups?

He said that son John Hall did not understand marketing. Chris, despite what you say, it looks like John has done pretty well for himself after all!

Here is what I mean, the quote from his 2004 interview with Nick Beggs:

"CS: It is the same one. It’s a brilliant brilliant guitar. But I have a relationship with it, it just plays itself really. Even though the pickups are all **** eyed and ******, by modern standards they wouldn’t figure as being efficient at all. But it’s the inefficiency that makes it so good.

NB: And you run it in stereo?

CS: Yes! Still! I invented that whole thing and then RICKENBAKER started to make them in stereo.

NB: Did they give you a royalty on that?

CS: No but in those days they were just the guys who bought RICKENBAKER. The father was a business guy who saw a business opportunity and knew nothing about music. The son JOHN HALL persuaded his dad to buy it. I went in there I guess some time in the 70s and tried to explain to them the business they were in. And you know at that point in time they didn’t even give THE BEATLES free guitars. I said, “ You’ve got to give PAUL McCartney a free bass, it will be good for you. You’ve got to understand marketing.”"

I thought by referencing the pickups, he is talking about his sad old bass and the condition it is in, and that the pickups are so old that they would hardly be considered "hi-fi". John has also stated that CS has a rather different view than what is actual fact...especially considering Ric-O-Sound was around before then and his bass was a mono bass.

Anyone can turn any two-pickup bass into a stereo bass, just by replacing the jack itself and separating the two pickup hot leads to the two different signal tabs of the jack.

Chris said once in the 70s that one of the first things he did to his original Rick 4001 mono bass was to do what Entwhistle did. He removed the four screws from the mono jackplate, replaced the two-conductor 1/4" phone jack with a three conductor phone jack, soldered the treble pickup to one of the center conductor tabs and the neck pickup to the shell tab. You screw the jackplate back into the bass and voila! You have a stereo bass.

Rickenbacker supposedly caught on early to this practice among bassists of the 50s and 60s who had two-pickup basses from various manufacturers, copied the idea, invented a trade name "Rick-O-Sound" for it, then wired their 3-conductor "Rick-O-Sound" jack precisely the same as Chris Squire and hundreds of other horizontal bassists of the 60s era (me included!) and even the 40s and 50s did, and called it "new". It certainly wasn't new, and the idea of wiring a stereo bass by replacing the normal 2-conductor 1/4-inch phone jack with a 3-conductor 1/4-inch phone jack was something that neither Rickenbacker NOR Chris Squire "invented". They just copied what was standard practice among us all then.

IMHO,

The bass stands on its own merits. It is a FANTASTIC instrument. I've owned a many basses that cost MANY times what my CS did. Even at today's prices, I feel it is STILL a great investment.

The bass has a sound and feel all its own. Mine is a 1995 and to my small hands, the thing is a dream. But the SOUND, the SOUND! The darn thing just SINGS.

MY problem is that I compare ALL of my later RICS to my CS. It was my first REAL bass. I don't know if it's the Vermillion or a combination of factors, but I just LOVE the darn thing. Accurate or not, I wouldn't change a THING on it!

Sigh....

John, you could always go the Dane Wilder route for about half the cost of a CS...

I've been considering that recently. Use my MG and have the neck shaved a bit. Too busy enjoying the tone with the SS/Alnico5 treble pup!

Mr.Hall wrote to Bass guitar Magazine and cleared up on some of the points that Chris had made.

Wish that Bass Guitar Magazine article could be quoted here. I never got to read it. Hey, is it on the web anywhere, like at the magazine's web site? Which month and year was it?

I will look it up over the weekend and find out when it was.

Thanks, Shawn!!