mellowgerman
Senior Member
Thought this might be interesting to some of the Lesh and Casady fans here on the forum.
Warwick Star Bass, which is clearly a Guild Starfire inspired bass -- semi hollow with two big and very responsive single coil pickups, though she is medium 32" scale, which I'm happy to say I'm finding super comfy. Excellent balance, both sitting down or standing up with a strap.
But the really fun part is that I managed to get my hands on an ACG EQ-02 preamp, in the same family as the Alembic Superfilter system, except that it runs a super broad low pass filter along side a high pass filter for both pickups, as opposed to the Alembicized Starfires which I think had a separate low pass filter for each pickup. ACG has discontinued production of the EQ-02 and now only offer the EQ-01 for sale, which runs dual low pass filters and I believe LTGer HappyFace has an EQ-01 system in his JS-II bass.
The installation was a doozy... I managed to get everything in through the F-hole, which are thankfully generously large on these Star Basses (don't think it would have been possible with the smaller Guild F-holes), but there really was no way to mount the preamp board and the battery, working through the F-hole, so I ended up having to make a rear-access cavity, on the cover plate of which I mounted the two 9volt battery holder clips to hold both the board and the battery.
So far, I've gotta say, I'm head over heels in love with it. Hoping to get some recordings to demo the bass for others to hear. It's capable of getting awesome Casady and Lesh tones, but beyond that, the flexibility of tone with this preamp and these pickups is truly remarkable. It's definitely a different approach and there is a learning curve. The hardest part to tame is probably the part of the frequency spectrum where the two filters start to overlap, but I'm starting getting the hang of it!
Warwick Star Bass, which is clearly a Guild Starfire inspired bass -- semi hollow with two big and very responsive single coil pickups, though she is medium 32" scale, which I'm happy to say I'm finding super comfy. Excellent balance, both sitting down or standing up with a strap.
But the really fun part is that I managed to get my hands on an ACG EQ-02 preamp, in the same family as the Alembic Superfilter system, except that it runs a super broad low pass filter along side a high pass filter for both pickups, as opposed to the Alembicized Starfires which I think had a separate low pass filter for each pickup. ACG has discontinued production of the EQ-02 and now only offer the EQ-01 for sale, which runs dual low pass filters and I believe LTGer HappyFace has an EQ-01 system in his JS-II bass.
The installation was a doozy... I managed to get everything in through the F-hole, which are thankfully generously large on these Star Basses (don't think it would have been possible with the smaller Guild F-holes), but there really was no way to mount the preamp board and the battery, working through the F-hole, so I ended up having to make a rear-access cavity, on the cover plate of which I mounted the two 9volt battery holder clips to hold both the board and the battery.
So far, I've gotta say, I'm head over heels in love with it. Hoping to get some recordings to demo the bass for others to hear. It's capable of getting awesome Casady and Lesh tones, but beyond that, the flexibility of tone with this preamp and these pickups is truly remarkable. It's definitely a different approach and there is a learning curve. The hardest part to tame is probably the part of the frequency spectrum where the two filters start to overlap, but I'm starting getting the hang of it!
