More SFII stuff & NGD soon.

[idealassets]

Here is a somewhat good quality 1967 video of one of my favorite songs. It has a Starfire II bass in it, and a Guild guitar. What type of pickups are on this bass, since the newest model it could be is a 1967? Also please note the bass player wearing inexpensive tennis shoes and pants that are too short.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hg8uWTxlNlI

Also I have a 1972 starfire II bass on the way. I will attempt to post some images when it arrives in about 1 week, or so. Sorry that it is not one of the early ones that seem to be quite interesting. I want to thank everyone so far for their help with info, and interesting blogs about these.

Craig

 

[mgod]

For some reason those get called "Mickey Mouse" pickups. No idea why - I bet Hans knows.

If you'd been in the right place at the right time a few years back you could have bought that bass for $20,000. Maybe you still could. Nice finish.

 

[fronobulax]

Bassist is Steve Boone, right? He's mentioned as an early adopter of the Starfire bass in Hans' book. Hans IDs the bass as 1966 in this thread which is about the sale mgod alludes to. Another thread which I am not linking to suggests that Boone's bass started out as a Starfire I.

Obligatory picture of the "who knows how it got the name" Mickey Mouse pickup in situ below.

 

[idealassets]

the "who knows how it got the name" Mickey Mouse pickup
This is how it may have gotten the name. In engineering the terminology of "Mickey Mouse" is somewhat old school, is perhaps derogitory and refers mainly to the appearance as being overly-simple, and a totally plain solution. In my early days I was often told to rework a project in verbage such as "see if you can take this Mickey Mouse job and fix it up". Think of a Mickey Mouse car or boat in the early cartoons.

To every musician that sais "yes but what about the sound it makes", there may be another one that wants pizzaz and flash.

I can see how the Humbucker pickups are not considered Mickey Mouse, since they add some chrome and flash to the appearance of a guitar.

So, where "Mickey Mouse" at one time was not so incredible, it may have gone full circle and the simplicity can become something quite desireable all over again.

CG

 

[fronobulax]

Calling something "Mickey Mouse" was always derogatory in my circles and often applied to something done in a half-a**ed fashion. That is curiously inaccurate since what Disney does, in general, they do well.

A little Google turns up the suggestion that the bass pickup was called Mickey Mouse because of its similarity to the guitar pickup referred to as Mickey Mouse. This site and this site say, without attribution, that the name came from the small size. The latter gives credit to Guild factory employees for the name.

 

[mgod]

It looks like a DeArmond. But a lot of pickups had that look in those days. Its sound is, in my never-very-humble-about-Guilds-opinion, pretty terrible. Weak, where the Honkmaster humbuckers are cloudy and too aggressive. Of course Dark Stars have the same kind of output as Honkmasters, but they do it with the bandwidth and clarity of the Bisonic. You'll find interviews with Rick Turner in which he discusses the evolution of the usage of the Hagstrom pickups in the Alembic story into the Alembic pickup.

Guild hit it out of the park twice, and in hindsight it just seems serendipitous - once with the incredible single coil guitar pickups of the early years, and then with the Hagstroms. But I also wonder whether the people who made the pickup for Hagstrom had any idea what they were doing. It all seems random to me until the 70s - and then you get this divergence of the Turner school on one side, and the deification of old guitar pickups (PAFS, etc) on the other. For bass players in studios it was defined as Alembic vs. P.

And P won, hands down, so it was always fun to show up with something else and shock smart guys.