No updates on Big Daddy. I played him Friday night after a week of not playing gut strings. Amazingly he felt just fine with the Thomastik mittels. So I think it is me moving from one extreme (guts) to the other extreme (steel medium tension). The bass has such great volume we hate to mess around with it. It is me, not the bass that needs to adjust.
We are moving onto the next project. A 1945-46 Epiphone B-5 number 811. This is a VERY clean bass that needs a new end pin and set up. Lonnie will touch up any edge delamination, but over all this is another nice clean bass from the west coast. It was owned by a bluegrass player who adorned it with a rattle snake “rattler” on the inside of the bass. The folk lore I heard behind the rattler is the Irish immigrants used to put a rattle snake rattler in their fiddle case when they made their voyage across the ocean. It supposedly kept the rats on the ship from chewing the wooden instruments. I also heard Bill Monroe was to have put a rattler in his mandolin to make it sound better. I don’t know the real reason but we will let the rattler inside the bass…it gives it good Mo-Jo!!!
Lonnie was just getting started on this bass last week and he asked that I pick out the end pin for it. I chose the house standard a ULSA ebony end pin with the big removable tip…NOPE…that did not work for Lonnie’s taste. All the trim on this bass is reddish rosewood so he asked that I special order a rosewood end pin. I did and boy tell-ya…it was the right call. The rosewood end pin is a beautiful reddish gold color and will look great on this bass. We are off to a good start even if we needed to wait a week for just the right end pin to arrive.
Lonnie’s famous words…if you are going do it…do it right!
Stay tuned.
