Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

Live from 'The Cavern' !!!!

great lookin' bass,mark! love that colour...

This is me! Picture taken past sunday!

Welcome to the forum, Joep!

Thank you! Love being part of the Rickenbacker community!

onstage with 2 bassists!! love it! welcome!

Nice 4001MG Joep - welcome aboard!

from a killer gig on Friday night.

Nice picture, Neil! How come the neck is right-side up but the body is upside down??!!

Nice lefty righty - added a RIHS I see, which explains your post in the other thread about magnetism.

Well, you know how things are "down under" - everything seems upside down!

Hey Neil - cool to see not only another 4001LH, but one being played righty as well! Mine's actually a 4001SLH.

damn Mark that's cool!

took me a long time to find a 400x lefty that i could string righty...this one ('79) had been converted to righty at one stage, then back again...so the nut had pieces of toothpick used to get the strings sitting correctly came with the RI HS and toaster, and new pickguard (looks like a whole V63 retrofit that Ric used to sell).

i had a luthier here fill in the nut (couldn't find any material the right size) with epoxy and dust from another nut. plays like a dream, i've rewired the rick-o-sound output to just output the RIHS - where all the girth is. plays like a demon.

i've always loved reverse-body axes but could never part with the Ric tone!

Very cool, Neil - mine's also a '79. I had it shipped sight-unseen from Southpaw Guitars in Texas in 1993. Here's a rare glimpse of it when it was mint:



The guy from Southpaw told me that it was in great condition, which I thought was a good thing, but when I got it, there wasn't one single scratch on it, which became a conflict of interest since I just wanted a back-up kick-around bass to gig with since I was in the habit of pampering my other Rick. Basically, what was intended as a kick-around bass had never been played - no fret-wear, not even one single mark on the back of the body in the buckle area. It was, in essence, the first new Rick I ever owned.

I knew I was going to strip all the paint off and do the paint job it now sports - eventually. But it took me a long time before I could force myself to actually do the deed. I also had the neck PU cavity rerouted to pre-'75 spacing, and filled in the left-over gap so I could have more acreage to paint on with the cropped pickguard. The toaster is vintage, from another bass, a 1968 I was told, and the horseshoe PU is from a 1930-40s era Spanish Electro guitar. The bridge cavity had to be rerouted a little wider to accommodate the larger magnets.

I didn't have a problem getting a righty nut - I think I ordered that straight from RIC at the time. I don't know how you get around with the knobs & switch up on top, but I just completely bypassed the tone knobs and switch since I kept accidentally bumping them and killing my volume. I switched the position of the volume & tone knobs - problem solved.

i found mine in 2007, from an online-equipped store in the US (can't remember who now!). they sent me through a huge number of mint photos, so i knew exactly what i was getting. had a good chat with them too, which gave me some confidence.

tone/volume knobs don't bother me much, since i've modified the rick-o-sound jack the switch doesn't factor in at all if i'm plugged in there.

hardly any Ric stuff down here, i think Australia is the closest country with a dealer presence (could be wrong, it's been a while).

best Ric i've ever owned, though a 4003MGBT (custom job?) i got for cheap about a year ago is a close second, but that one's got more of a fuller bass tone (hi gains) than the snarly beast my Lefty is.

you can hear the Lefty on my Myspace site...cruddy practise room demos by the fellas that i laid bass over afterwards (all single-take nastiness!)

www.myspace.com/elbajotheband

Here is a shot of Mark's bass from MARF II.