Perhaps he meant to saw the horns off someday, so it
would be neck-heavy?
Here's Rick Turner's solution:
Ask any repair guy, and they'll tell you that horrendous modifications are way more common than most people would believe. I've thought about it a lot (especially because I spent years doing setups on trade-ins as a matter of course, and every time you'd open a case some monstrosity would be revealed, it seemed), and my theory is that guys do weird stuff to guitars simply because they think; it's
MINE! Honest, I think that's all there is to it. As a reformed mangler myself, I think that' s what motivated me to do stupid stuff to guitars, before I realized that it's way more fun fixing them than butchering them.
But this Series 1 is special in a couple of different ways. For one thing, he did an excellent job. Really. The seller posted more close up pictures than I've ever seen for any eBay ad, and I can barely tell what was done. The difficulty of reshaping the horns is only matched by the bewilderment at why anybody would want to in the first place. Aside from the aesthetic appearance, I've wracked my well-wracked brain to come up with any reason why somebody would want to. It accomplishes nothing, and threw the balance off. Shrug. (Why the brass inserts were removed is another mystery altogether. Perhaps his parents pelted him with tiny brass inserts when he was a child. We'll never know.)
The electronics mod is pure hubris. These Alembic electronics just won't do, and since there's nothing better, I'll just rig up some kinda Frankenstein workaround and pack it in the cavity. Luckily, it looks like he left everything there - which is pretty unique in itself, because most of the time that's where stray Alembic parts on eBay come from.
To my mind, that bass stands as the benchmark for idiocy simply because it's one of the finest instruments ever made. He could have bought and mangled many Fenders or Gibson basses and a chainsaw for the value of the Alembic. It's like buying a Ferrari and putting fins on it, and replacing the engine with a Chevy V-8.
The weird part is that aside from a slightly odd profile, it wouldn't be difficult to correct everything and still have a decent bass. Dodged a bullet there, I'd say. (Quite a bit of orange peel in the finish as well, if you look at the reflections in those pics.)
P.S.: did anybody else notice he re-filed the string slots in the 1st and 2nd string saddles? That's pretty weird.
(Message edited by Ed_zeppelin on November 17, 2015)
