Wow! Can you explain the process and how you changed things around? Looks very interesting.
Well, it's been a long journey for this bass. It's a '67 that I got in 1994 for $275 because they were really unfashionable. It started life as a single pickup (neck) bass. The first set of mods were installing a pair of Bartolini triple coil pickups that were sized for replacement for the Westerly Guild humbuckers. Each pickup had three coils, two of which have magnets, so it's like a mini Alembic series setup per pickup and then a Badass I bridge. I played it like that with various preamps (try getting a Bart preamp with batteries through those f-holes!). It sounded really nice. The next step was the small door on the back. I tried to explain to the luthier that I wanted a very large door so I could properly shield it and have access to all the pots, etc., but he didn't really understand and made the door too small. Eventually, I got a very early pair of Dark Star pickups and went with that along with a ACG 01 preamp. That also sounded pretty cool.
After that, Marko Ursino in Scandinavia was experimenting with building Alembic style bridges, so he built me a bridge, sustain block, tailpiece set (and was later requested to cease and desist). It worked nicely. A little while after that, I found an early 70s set of Alembic Series pickups (cool caramel ones with trapezoidal magnets and 800 ohm resistance! They sounded amazing, but were a bit noisy and eventually broke) along with a bag of Series parts with a preamp board, also from the early 70s from a different seller. I had the pickups installed and took the bag of parts and turned it into a functioning preamp. This was all still through the small door, so finally I took it back to the luthier and showed him pictures of various Alembic modded Starfires and this time he got it. It worked out perfectly because the preamp card fits perfectly on the small door and then I can open up the whole bottom half of the bass to really have access to the whole thing and now it's properly shielded. The final mod was to have Alembic install their own bridge, tailpiece, sustain block in there. The next move is to get a new fingerboard because the frets are cut slightly out of tune, which makes it impossible to get the whole bass to play in tune. I'm thinking of having Alembic do it and maybe get LEDs!
So, that's it in a nutshell, although there were other side experiments along the way. Lots of holes drilled here and there, but the bass sounds wonderful and is a pleasure to play.
Oh yeah, here's a picture of it with the Dark Stars that Guild posted on their website, although they got my name wrong. I appreciated the endorsement, but they didn't even give me a free bass!