Here's my 1988 Modulus 12-string.
It's got a bit of an interesting story. This guitar was built for Paul Kantner, but they made an error on the order and routed for two humbuckers instead of a single coil at the neck and a humbucker at the bridge. You can buy EMGs that have single coil pickup guts inside a humbucker casing, but this was more about playing space between the pickups, so they built another one for him. It's a really thick cocobolo top with a maple accent layer and mahogany body. Before anybody asks - no, there's not a giant knob sticking out of the middle of the neck, that's the guitar stand that it's sitting on! This one has an unusual neck pickup, a "Geoff Gould special" custom made by EMG. It's got two coils, but just one magnet (one air coil). It sounds really cool, with sort of an "airy" tone, not like anything else. Works really well with the 12-string. The other pickup is a stock EMG-85. The bridge was an old Stars Guitars bridge and the tailpiece was custom cut out of a graphite plate:
It's a really neat sounding guitar. The bridge pickup is all rock, the neck pickup is sort of acoustic like, and with both pickups on it's got an unexpected jangly tone. It takes forever to tune a 12-string Rickenbacker because tuning one string throws everything else out out. With the Modulus, the neck is so stable that no string affects the others when tuning. I live close to the old Modulus factory when it was in San Francisco, so I got a call one afternoon from Geoff asking if I could bring this guitar up for Steve Miller to try out. He loved the sound and hated the weight of the guitar (he has a shoulder problem where he prefers very light guitars). It's also had a capsule review in Guitar Player magazine as well. David Fung
