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What Bass


Bigbaz
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From an interview with Lee Sklar:

[color=#333333]"I had a bass built in 1973 by John Carruthers. What happened was, I had a Precision neck – no body, but the neck was real nice – and we took a template from my '62 Jazz and reshaped the Precision neck into that.[/color]

"When Charvel first started, I went out there and saw a bunch of nice alder bodies, and I hung them on wires and tapped them until I found the one that really resonated. So I took that body to John and we made a bass out of it. It's kind of my Frankenstein.

"I've got first-generation EMG pickups on it. Also, I have two sets of Precision pickups, and I have them where Jazz pickups would've normally gone. But I reversed their position, which totally evens things out. In redoing the neck, we had to strip the frets off, and we ended up replacing them with mandolin wire, which is very small fret wire. We didn't know if it would work, but it turned out great. So that's been my main bass since about 1983."

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[quote name='discreet' timestamp='1374433400' post='2148702']
From an interview with Lee Sklar:

[color=#333333]"I had a bass built in 1973 by John Carruthers.[/color]

[/quote]

Thanks for that, guess I'm not going to find one of them on the High Street....Shame.

Baz

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[quote name='BigRedX' timestamp='1374434276' post='2148720']
There was a Gibson Leland Sklar Signature, based on it that you might be able to find an example of:


[/quote]

These looked like great basses , but only a handful were ever made in the short time they were available , from what I understand .

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[quote name='discreet' timestamp='1374435175' post='2148740']
...And even if you buy a bass similar to one of Lee's, there's not much chance that it's going to make you sound like him. ;)
[/quote] I couldn't even look like him!

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[quote name='Dingus' timestamp='1374435789' post='2148754']
These looked like great basses , but only a handful were ever made in the short time they were available , from what I understand .
[/quote] Why the short time, was it limited take up or a limited production run....I would still like to get my hands on one.

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[quote name='Bigbaz' timestamp='1374442055' post='2148876']
Why the short time, was it limited take up or a limited production run....I would still like to get my hands on one.
[/quote]

They are incredibly rare , so it might be a difficult job locating one at any price . They were made by the Gibson Custom Shop . Maybe you could get them to make you one to order . I saw something somewhere where Lee was talking about how he was dissapopointed that Gibson did very little to advertise or market the model , and then discontinued it . Maybe someone in a position of power in the company didn't believe it was a potentially profitable use of their resources and pulled the plug . Even rarer than the Gibson is the Valley Arts Lee Sklar Signature from the early 1990's . That bass was more like a Fender with two sets of EMG Precision pickups .

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