Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

Gee whiz, Jeffrey, I gave RIC the benefit of the doubt as to whether they could create something astounding that nobody had bothered to, and your answer seems to say THEY CAN'T and that THEY NEED NOT EVEN TRY. Maybe they do, and maybe they don't. Mr. Hall can respond to that one. However, once upon a time they DID.

BTW, I certainly DO have an outboard processor called a SansAmp RBI that I use with the 4004L. And I MIGHT install an Aguilar OBP-1 or something similar in the 4004L, but I certainly WILL change out the CTS pots to Alps Black Beauties or something else more "high end" and modify the controls along something more in line with Jeff Rath's 4004L5.

Did it ever occur to anybody here that Rickenbacker is credited with inventing the electric guitar??? Asking them to stay stuck on the past is to ask them to abandon their founding principles. Maybe they already have. No skin off my back if they did. I said it was OK to build the old models if that kept selling in the market, for the sake of financial solvency, but at the same time it's OK to advance the state of the art, IF THEY DESIRE. Rickenbacker was once state of the art in electric guitar and bass technology. My 4004L is BLACK LIKE A MODEL T, and if they decide that is as far as they are going, at least I got a good color choice.

Why would anybody assume that any bass or guitar that anybody could possibly want is already being produced? Never did I say RIC should attempt to copy Warwick or anybody. I said thay could SURPASS them.

A great many other manufacturers DON'T make me happy. I am picky. RIC should be happy that somebody as picky as me owns a couple of their instruments, and would buy another if it were what I wanted. And Jeffrey, YOU own more 'other' instruments than I do, and probably always will. I'll probably own less of both types, because I'm picky, and something REALLY different isn't being made by anybody else right now.

I know one thing, when I got on the phone to SPECTOR, the guy on the other end of the line was VERY INTERESTED in my DADS (dual-action, dual-section) truss rod idea, which I presented here FIRST on the Rickenbacker Forum, and nobody at all bothered to ask, "what's that?". I'll tell you what it is, it's an end to the infamous S-curve neck some of you may have been cursed with, as I was. If that means nothing to anybody here, and if getting rid of an S-curve on something like a Rickenbacker neck that can't be changed out due to it's neck-thru design is not important, then YES, Jeffrey, I AM CERTAINLY IN THE WRONG PLACE AND TALKING TO THE WRONG BUNCH!!! How RIGHT you are! My design would let you CUSTOM CURVE your neck to YOUR TASTE. OK, that's NOT important here. You may go back to the past now.

For all of you that might think your 'other' basses and guitars are high tech, even if you had a Status Graphite Buzzard Bass, it's an old worn-out shoe compared to some of the stuff I was thinking of.....at a lower cost, of course.

But enough of this, I think I'll go play with my NEW patented state-of-the-art high-output ozone generator (and to think that I could have had an OLD traditional one with LESS output and LESS reliability for MORE money) and kill some Texas mold in my ventilation system with it. That cigarette smoker next door had better be careful as well!

Jeffrey ... I would never complain about Rickenbackers .... damn mute! ... damn ric-o-sound! ... oh gee was that out loud ...

"For all of you that might think your 'other' basses and guitars are high tech, even if you had a Status Graphite Buzzard Bass, it's an old worn-out shoe compared to some of the stuff I was thinking of.....at a lower cost, of course."

Perhaps you should start a business designing and manufacturing basses and guitars Phil?

Robert, I've already talked to a machinist friend of mine about the DADS truss rod idea. He has a home shop where we could start production. If I go out soon on retirement, I'll need another business to work into.

It really isn't even necessary to produce entire instruments. A designer can produce better components to go into other companies' instruments. Few people understand that this is how many small companies operate anyway. You can have 3 different brands of basses or guitars, and the necks might be built by the same company that produces those as a specialty.

My dad has an old army metal detector that detects non-metallic objects in the ground (for locating plastic mines). You can bury a football, and it will find it! How about new pickups that detect non-metallic string movement, besides the piezo pickups already in use? You also get to sell the new type strings the pickups would use, and that's recurring income.

How about new pickups that detect non-metallic string movement

A LightWave pickup will work with any (opaque) string.

An old guy once gave me two gems that he said were the only universal truths:

"There's no accounting for what a woman won't say and a dog will chew."

"There's people that talk and people who do, but they're not the same people."

These must be chanted with some kind of drawl.

So we get to talk about it and you get to do it ...

but you're not telling us until it comes out ...

but I can't wait to buy my new 4002 5 string light show that Ric is producing ...

"There's no accounting for what a woman won't say and a dog will chew."
That's the best one I've heard in a long time.

No matter how good looking a woman may be, there's at least one guy who's tired of her BS.

If you throw a rock into a pack of dogs, the one that yelps the loudest is the one that got hit.

Just as there is no end to what a dog chews, there is no end to the dogma a man will choose.

I retain a bit of Minnesota accent, sorry.

Mortivan, there was or maybe still is a company (Finial?) that made a turntable with laser beam phono pickup for $15,000. It was made for museums/collectors that had rare records so that they could be copied with no degradation of the record grooves as a contact stylus would have done. Maybe the lightwave pickup is based on that. What I was talking about is an 'anomaly detector' that would even detect your fingers. This mine detector of my father doesn't actually detect the mine, but the absence of dirt, or a 'change in the ground matrix' as the manual put it. Outside of the ground, the detector couldn't detect a car! The army let them go cheap, and the build quality was way above commercial metal detectors. I think it was made for non-technical operators because of the lack of controls due to semi-automatic operation. But mine detecting is a field best left to experts with sophisticated tuneable machines. Since the above machine operated at a very high frequency to get the most feedback from a change in ground matrix, it was incapable of penetrating to any respectable depth in iron mineralized ground. Probably why the army dumped them. Great for a coral sand beach, but worthless in northeast Minnesota iron country. VLF pulse detectors took over that job, and retained dumbass one-knob simplicity with higher sensitivity. Inductive balance coils (like in a commercial White's detector) would pick up string movement as well, without heavy magnets in a pickup and the windings could be mounted in grooves routed into the wood body. Why not lighten the load and eliminate ugly bumps? But you have to do something ELSE to make it work.

You can also detect strings on the capacitive principle, rather than the magnetic principle, when using steel strings, or any conductive material, or material with conductive coating. It requires a power supply like an electret microphone does.

But it's all overwrought BS, because something like a better air cleaner design, which MORE people REALLY need in a toxic world, will make you a hundred times more money than a guitar pickup, or anything to do with musical instruments. The guy that invented the HEPAsilent filter technolgy in my new Swedish Blueair air purifier got rid of noise pollution and air pollution at the same time, and did it with MUCH LESS electrical usage than the old noisy conventional HEPA filters. Blueair AB will soon be much bigger in much less time (if they aren't already) than Fender and Gibson combined.

The LightWave is a bit lower-tech than the laser beam record stylus; I believe it uses infrared emitter/detector pairs in the bridge. I've never heard it, but I imagine it's awfully quiet, and based on its location, bright.

It would be totally immune from electrical interference, but i wonder what your TV remote control would do to it? Can you imagine that some guy buys one of these, and then you take your TV remote to the club at his gig and proceed to mess up his axe all through the night.

An Air Force techno guy I knew once did this with a model airplane remote control. He would mess up this guy's TV set, then when he got out of his seat to straighten it out, he would let the TV go back to normal operation. After he got settled in his seat, he would mess it up again. Over and over he did this. Man, that guy was PO'ed at his TV set! He was cussing it out and almost ready to smash it.

Heh!

Our local cable company lets you order pay-per-view adult movies using just your cable-box remote control. Since everyone in the neighborhood has the same cable-boxes (digital cable), I wondered if anyone ever got the idea to walk around in the summer with a remote, ordering movies at any house with a visible TV through an uncurtained window...

John, you have a devious turn of mind. I'll send you my address off Forum...

You guys are making me paranoid....