This Rickenbacker 4001S Bass Burgundy Glo dates to February of 1973 and was built, like all other Rics, at Rickenbacker’s facility in Santa Ana, California. It has clearly been played and used as intended, and is bright, resonant and crisp.
The Rickenbacker Electro D12 is a rare model. Many of Rickenbacker’s multineck steels were 8-strings per neck, and the D12 has six; the doubleneck with a total of 12 strings gives it its name. Its better known sibling is the D16, with two necks of eight strings each. From their first production in 1940, the Electro D and T models used a combination of a cast metal body and a Bakelite neck, with Lucite fingerboards.
The Ken Roberts model not only has a pickup, the neck is also ‘extended’ to meet the body at the 17th fret, and it has a vibrato tailpiece designed by Doc Kaufman. This exceptionally rare example is in good playing condition. Most people associate the first electric guitars with Leo Fender or the Gibson Les Paul, but the Rickenbacker ‘Frying Pan’ lap steel guitar predated those by almost two decades, appearing in 1931.
Based on the same body outline as the classic Model 330 series guitars, the Rickenbacker 381-12 adds hand-carved top and back of premium figured maple, for a much thicker and contoured body. The body is bound top and back with classic checkerboard purfling. The characteristic ‘Cats Eye’ bass side soundhole is also bound. The body is entirely Maple, and the neck is a Maple / Walnut / Maple layered construction, and has a bound, finished Rosewood fingerboard with Slash position markers.
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The Cole Clark Violap is based on the classic Weissenborn steel guitar body shape, but built as a semi-hollow for amplified use without feedback. The concept is similar to the thinline Gibson ES-335 series, with a solid center block in an arched-top body. Cole Clark was founded in 2001 by Adam Cole and Bradley Clark in Melbourne Australia, and focuses on building quality instruments using sustainably harvested tone woods mostly native to Australia.
As one of the most recent versions of the 4000 series, the Rickenbacker 4003 Bass has the most up to date features and hardware. This 2007 example sports the Blue Burst finish, colour of the year for 2005. Rickenbacker is arguably the first builder to market production electric guitars, in both the lap steel format and the Electric Spanish format, in the Ken Roberts model.
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