Very nice. Just wondering what the Alembic part of the guitar is. The electronics don’t look really Alembic-like. Perhaps the body was made by Alembic? Or was it just an association with the development of the neck?
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« Reply #13 on: November 13, 2006, 02:50:52 PM »
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I'm close buddies with Geoff Gould and own a lot of Modulus instruments (as well as some Alembics!). The origins of Modulus are loosely but directly intertwined with Alembic.
Geoff worked at Ford Aerospace in Palo Alto back in the 1970s as a technician/fabricator. He was a member of a pioneering team that worked on composites fabrication and did a lot of work with early graphite construction. He directly worked on parts that went on early deep space satellites, including the antennae that they used to beam their signals back to earth. They used graphite because it's light weight made these probes launchable. He also built the first composite race car body tub, which is a standard feature of all Grand Prix and Indy cars today.
Geoff also played bass and was a big Deadhead. He saw Phil Lesh playing at an SF concert and noticed that he was struggling with neck dive the entire show. Being plugged in to graphite technology, he though that a graphite necked instrument would solve the neck dive problem. Phil's association with Alembic was well known as well as their reputation for being totally cutting edge, and he contacted Alembic to see if there was interest in making a graphite neck.
There was interest in building an instrument from Rick Turner who was at Alembic at that time. Modulus necks are built in a mold, so Alembic provided a form to Geoff from which a mold could be made to produce a through-body neck. A neck was produced which Alembic constructed into the first through-body graphite-necked Series bass (Geoff believes this went to John McVie), which were followed by a few more instruments, all of which were labelled Alembics and had necks made by Geoff.
Geoff had the ability to produce graphite necks but was not building whole guitars yet, and wanted to produce bolt-on replacement necks. These necks were the BassStar and Blacknife. These first necks are the ones marked Modulus/Alembic, but they were purely a product of Modulus. I think there had been some hope that the necks would be marketed through Alembics dealers, but I don't think that happened. The cost of one of these necks was around $750, about the cost of a new Stratocaster back then.
I don't think there was much involvement from Alembic as Modulus built bolt-on necks, then started producing complete instruments under their own name from Menlo Park, CA. Rick Turner must have provided some encouragement to Geoff, as the Modulus monocoque neck design received a US Patent in the names of Turner and Gould.
By 1980, Modulus had stopped labelling the bolt-on necks as Modulus/Alembic and was producing a number of full instruments mostly boutiquish with EMG actives, Stars Guitars brass hardware, and laminated exotic wood bodies. Modulus produced all the graphite necks for Alembic's graphite neck options through the late 80's, including the instruments for McVie, Greg Lake, and John Entwistle, but the rest of these instruments were all constructed by Alembic.
It's an interesting story, and the small number of graphite Alembics produced are really totally soemthing else (Geoff doesn't know the exact number but thinks there's around 70 of them). The sound is amazing, but they can be a bit problematic as well, since they can be subject to some of the manufacturing issues with Modulus at the time that had to do with warps and bonding. These instruments don't have a trussrod, so setup can be a real challenge.
I've got a lot of Modulus instruments, and one of my very old, plain BassStar-equipped instruments has been a constant favorite of mine, even though I have much fancier instruments.
David Fung
