Nearly 10 years after the first (http://club.alembicguitars.net/Images/411/4519.html?1055019057 target=_top">http://club.alembicguitars.net/Images/411/4519.html?1055019057) here comes the second in my collection of koa-topped Alembics!  It's S/N 88S4828, 32", watermark koa top and (flame?) koa headstock veneers, oval inlays, Schaller tuners (chrome)  With koa you get very different aspects of the same piece of wood, depending on the light and the viewing angle. By day it's kind of brown with black speckled all over it, maybe like a piece of clothing painted in clair-obscur by Rembrandt. And there's a pair of lion's eyes pinned to the top corners of the neck pickup.  

  Then at night, what can I say: it turns to gold.  

    Well you can only see his left hand - he looked kind of goofy when I took the picture - but my 3-year old son can sure get a headstart on me playing bass. He's leaning against the sofa, by the way.    Here's he striking a pose -    

  (Message edited by adriaan on December 28, 2003)

You-hou!!!!! I'm Baaaa-ack!
Echt een geweldig exemplaar! Daar ga je nog heel wat plezier aan beleven!
That's a great one! It will bring you a lot of pleasure!
 
Paul the bad one
 
oh huh .... and the guitar too of course

Yeah, he's already quite a handful. Oh uh ... and the boy too of course (ROFL).

... wrong photo ...
 
(Message edited by adriaan on December 29, 2003)

Ah, what the heck - here's a nice set of koa tops together.  
 

 
The necks looked crooked on the photo, so I cut them out.  

Ha die Adriaan,
welcome to the world of the Spoilers. Let's spoil the rest of the world. Any progress with your ideas of changing the electronics of the Spoiler? I'm having similar thoughts....
 
Mattheus

Beste Mattheus,
 
Are you thinking about changing the Q switch level, adding a panpot, ... ?
 
My brother knows electronics, and he could understand that it's not a simple operation to change for instance the level of the Q switch, because when you change one thing in the filter you often have to compensate something else.
 
It's probably not very easy to replace the pickup selector with a panpot, simply because the circuit board is very crowded and it is constructed around the pickup selector so there isn't much space to play with. I don't think it's a big problem electronically, but I'm waiting for the details.
 
Adriaan

Congratulations on the growing collection.  That koa is really nice and looks so much different than the koa on the Epic which has great angles to the grain by the way.
 
Sam

I really love that grain on the Epic as well. This picture is a bit dark, but it shows more of the grain, which gets lost when there's too much light.
 

 
We visited a botanic garden in November, and they had this specimen of a koa tree - actually just the first shoot with a few twigs. Apparently the tree starts life with very small round-shaped leaves, then when puberty strikes it changes to slightly bigger and elongated leaves. But when the tree gets stressed, it starts to grow those smaller leaves again. FYI, the specimen had both types, so it must have been stressed even in the botanic garden ...
 
There is a good story about koa, and its role in Hawaiian culture, buried somewhere on TalkBass.

what are the stock electronic features of the Spoiler basses ? One of my favorites.

Stock Spoiler electronics are a 4-position pickup selector (neck/both/bridge/standby), a volume, a filter, and a Q switch.

This bass is actually a bit dysfunctional right now, as the electronics are back at the mothership.
 
They'll replace the p/u selector with a pan pot. For the Q switch I was thinking about a 0/3/6 dB 3-way, whereas the standard 3-way is 0/6/9 dB. The 8 dB boost is much too rich for my taste.
 
The good people at Alembic are looking at another idea I had for the Q switch, but no news on that yet. Will keep you posted.

Well, it's been more than a year since my last post here. The electronics have been reunited with the bass months ago, like this -
 

 
- but that doesn't really tell you what has changed, does it? (Besides a better camera.)
 
The 4-way pickup selector was replaced with a balance pot, and the 0/8 dB Q switch was replaced with a 0/3/6 dB switch.
 
The crazy idea I had was to have a 0/1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8 dB rotary switch - a poor man's CVQ, or Discreetly Variable Q (DVQ). Apparently something like that would be doable, unlike a true CVQ which they won't do on anything other than Series electronics. Just that it would take a couple of months before Mr Wickersham would have time to make it happen, and I was getting impatient ...
 
Anyway, the 3 and 6 dB positions for the Q switch are much more usable to my ears than the standard 8 dB position, and the balance pot makes for such a wide palette of sounds ...

Nice camera! Or, wait, no, I meant the bass...
 
Very pretty figuring in that Koa, and this is such a classic shape. And for my tastes, I agree that the 0/3/6 option is much more useful than a standard 0/8, and would go for a balance pot any day.
 
Nice to hear that it's all back together again, with you. Enjoy.
-Bob