I love my 370/12. Ever since I heard my first Byrds recording that sound has been my favorite sound in all of rock and roll. This one has had some mods though. To make it easier for me to play, I had work done on the nut, bridge and frets to give me more room for my big hands, which made quite a difference. It also started as a double-bound 360/12 and I added the middle pickup myself. I played with a bunch of wiring configurations and finally settled on one with the middle pickup wired all by itself to the Ric-O-Sound jack. Now I get standard 360/12sound out of the normal jack and if I want, I can run the middle pickup with its own cord out of the other jack to another amp or recorder channel and mix the two sounds. It's not critical to getting great sound, but can come in handy at times.
I guess you would mostly call the stuff I play on it "rhythm". I'm certainly not a lead guitarist. When I played professionally, I played bass 95% of the time and my brain tends to think in terms of bass phrasing, not lead guitar phrasing. So I'd probably call what I usually do on the twelve rhythm, or maybe "texture" would be a better term for it. I almost never strum the twelve. To me at least, it just doesn't seem to take advantage of what it can do. If I want to put strummed twelve-string into a song (Eagles-style, for example) I do it on my Martin. The Rickenbacker is saved for picking through the chord changes with a lot of pull-offs, leading notes and hammer-ons to present kind of a "wall of jangle", which works well for the type of folk-rocky stuff that I normally play.
This is a typical example. There are three guitar tracks and a bass track on this one. The first one you hear is the 370/12 in 360 mode (no middle pickup, Jangle-Boxed) and it's played bare-handed by thumb-tapping the low strings and tapping and plucking the high strings, sort of like bad banjo frailing. It runs throughout the song. The second guitar comes in on the third verse and is a Yamaha Silent Guitar (semi-acoustic six-string). It plays the twangy little western licks. The 370 comes in on another track on verse #4 in a more conventional manner, flat-picked. No changes were made to its tone, just a different playing style.
http://webpages.charter.net/tbradshaw/M ... wayman.mp3
If you're a glutton for punishment, there are four more here, three of which have Rickenbacker content. These are all demos I recorded by multi-tracking in my office when I was supposed to be working and playing all the parts myself (no adult supervision). The harmony voices were generated with TC Electronics, "Harmony G" or "Voice Live" stomp boxes. Percussion was done by tapping it out on the keys of my old synthesizer. I don't play keyboards, so it's pretty funny and extremely tedious. I put colored tape on the keys I need for the different sounds and end up doing about ten tracks. Sitting there for four minutes tapping the same key over and over without screwing up will drive you nuts after a while.
http://www.broadjam.com/artists/songs.p ... stID=61713
