gringopig's guitars
2021 Rickenbacker 4003S Bass
I bought this recently from Rickysounds in the UK and it appealed to me because of the similarity to the bass used by Paul McCartney in Wings. Chris Squire of Yes also used this bass as have many many others such as Lemmy, Geddy Lee and so on. It's one of the archetypal basses along with the Fender Precision and Jazz basses and has been around for almost as long.
Paul McCartney got his from Rickenbacker in 1964 and was originally fireglow; a 4001 model with toaster neck pickup and horseshoe bridge pickup and it was made for him and had a right handed neck on a left handed body, so if you look at pictures it looks rather odd.
He later had the psychedelic paintjob that was applied after a heavy night of carrot cake and espresso stripped off after the Beatles broke up. You can see the bass briefly in the 'Get Back' film recently released, still with the paintjob applied.
He used the bass extensively with Wings in a natural finish and had the upper horn shaved for 'comfort'. No idea what he was doing that needed that though!
The bass I got is a 4003S and shares features of this '60's 4001, namely the dot neck unbound fretboard. It has a modern neck and bridge pickup and the new bridge arrangement - still with the mute built into the tail and vintage style knobs like the 4001.
It also has the new unvarnished fretboard and this suits me as the varnished fretboard always put me off Rickenbackers a bit.
The pickups sound good. I was toying with buying a toaster pickup for the neck and a horseshoe to turn it into a clone of McCartney's but I will leave it as is. The 'Vintage' mode actually makes it thinner like the originals apparently.
Click on gallery for larger version
I recorded this with my Fender Rumble 40 into the interface using the XLR out. It includes a really effective cab simulator in the output, so sounds great. I used the 'Vintage' preset on the amp as seen below:
You can see below the settings I had for the demo video and the video itself below that.
