Andy R

If there are no visible fixings at the rear of the cab then my guess is that it’s bolted through from the inside. You’d need to remove the grill and the top driver to see if this is the case, of course - this is all guesswork on my part, as I don’t have one to check out.

I had a fretless one about four years ago - as you said, 32” scale, not 30.5” like the Gibson EB-1 and although it played well enough it seemed really cheaply and sloppily built. For example - the hole where the endpin was supposed to screw into the body wasn’t even machined on the centreline and there was no metal fitting, just threads cut into the wood. i spent a fair bit of time making a proper machined piece with a flange which let me move it to centre and had M10 threading to accept the strap button and the telescopic endpin that I was also going to machine. I lost interest in keeping it after that though, even though I’d fitted a Hipshot bridge and better tuners to it.

The Sarzo bass does pretty much it’s own thing and does that well but I wouldn’t say that it’s the most versatile bass around. It obviously owes a lot to the Aria SB-LTD, which Rudy Sarzo used, but that had Alembic Activator pickups - no filter type eq or anything though. According to RS, in an interview, he would have liked Peavey to use the same pickups but Hartley Peavey decided to do what he frequently did and use designs and hardware that he already had. Hence the use of the Dynabass preamp..... So, the pickups are basically T40 humbuckers, underwound to make them a bit more scooped and less mid-heavy and fitted in a different housing. They are genuine four wire pickups so that opens up a multitude of wiring options ( one or both coil tapped, one or both in series or parallel etc. etc. ). I’ve only experimented with coil tapping one or both and found that the most useful was to have to ability to run the neck p/up coil tapped and blended with the bridge p/up - it opens the sound up a bit more. I could easily do this because the active/passive switch was redundant as the Glock pre has a pull A/P switch on the volume control - also there’s a shed load of space in the control cavity without the big Dyna circuit board... Whether RS himself ever had one with Alembic p/ups I don’t know - he certainly had a five string version that *did* have Alembics p/ups and, by the look of it, Alembic preamp too. There’s a fretted version on a few tracks on the Whitesnake live in St Petersburg video (which looks to have the Dyna pre) and a lined fretless version in this photo which doesn’t and which is probably Alembic. There, that’s bored the hell out of you.....

The colours were called Transparent Black, Transparent Red and Transparent Violet, btw. I’ve got the violet one.... Because I had an active/passive switch going spare I used it to coil tap the neck pickup - well worth doing..

It’s more than good for me, which just illustrates how we’re all different, with different tastes in tone. Mine has a Glockenklang 3 band preamp, which is very different to the DynaBass preamp originally fitted. Very high shelving on the high EQ (18khz) so it’s more like a presence control but I find it very usable, and unlike the typical Dyna preamp it’s completely quiet, even with the highs boosted. I can’t really decide which I prefer, the Sarzo or the RJIV. I think the RJIV just has it, if only because it’s more ergonomic (for me, at least) and probably more versatile tonally. It’s a close call though....