mellowgerman said:
Hi Edwin, I linked your older thread over talkbass in a post up above. Always a pleasure to see that gorgeous instrument!! Did it start its life as a SFB-I?
It was a SFI, with the single neck pickup. I got in 1992 from a repair guy in New Jersey to whom I was referred by Wolf Ginandes in Boston. I casually mentioned I was looking for one when he was fixing another bass and his response was "I can't imagine why you'd want that. Oh well, no accounting for taste, my buddy in Jersey has one. Here's his number." I ended up getting it for $275 shipped in a big cardboard box wrapped in newspaper with no case.
The first mod, which was done by Jim Mouradian in Cambridge MA, was the addition of Bartolini triple coil GB pickups and a Badass bridge. That lasted for quite a while and when I moved to Boulder a few years later, Mike Stephens of Woodsongs Lutherie cut a door in the back to access the electronics. He did a great job, it looks like a factory option! Next, Fred started making the Dark Stars, so I got a pair of those. The electronics up to that point were Bartolini, with an 18 volt three band system. A few months after adding the Dark Stars, I put in an ACG 01 preamp. Around that time, I got the hardware together and Matt Bergdorf installed it. It sounded great with that combination and I toured with Great American Taxi for a few years like that and recorded Reckless Habits with it.
Shortly after that, I changed it back to the Bart triple coils for fun. Around that time, I found the Series pickups and electronics for sale separately and jumped on them. I also got a very nice Alembic Series I so I gave the bass to Matt and had him build the pickup rings. At that point, I had shown him pictures of Phil's modified Guilds, but he didn't really know that much about it, so he started doing some research. Even though he grew up in the Bay Area, he'd never listened to the Dead, so I lent him a few discs (notably Europe '72) and pointed him at Archive.org. It took him a few months (and about twice what I paid for the bass) to install the pickups as he really spent a ton of time to get the rings shaped perfectly to the curve of the top and by then, when I'd come in to check on it, he was already talking about different versions of the songs, etc. He became quite a fan, mostly of the early years. Meanwhile, I took the bag of electronic parts, which were mostly complete, and rebuilt them into a Series II configuration (misreading the caps in the filter by a factor of 100, thus sending the filtering into the megahertz range, but 10 minutes on the phone with Ron Wickersham sorted that out). It's a bit noisy and the pickups are microphonic (so no wild filtered feedback experiments.
Someday I might replace them, but they sound soooo good!). Now, it is without a doubt my favorite sounding bass. Bandmates and soundpersons alike also love it. It's been a crazy ride, but well worth it.
Oh yeah, it has Phil and Jack's signatures on the back of the headstock.