Graphite necks

[jetbass79]

What ever happened to the graphite neck option?  If humans are willing to spend ungodly (this is not a bad thing mind you) amounts of money on purpleheart and ebony necks, why not graphite?  This becomes even more apparent to me with the advances in graphite neck technology and the continual discussion about dead spots that has been going on for more than 50 years.  I know Alembic used the technology in the late '70s so I guess why not in 21st century?

[bob]

For starters, you might try a search on graphite and neck, or perhaps graphite and Alembic to narrow things down a bit more. There has been much discussion here about this, and I believe somewhere in there is even a fairly detailed comment from Mica about why they stopped.
-Bob

[dwmark]

Thanks for starting the thread.  I have a non-Alembic (a Devon, from before my Alembic conversion) 5-string with a graphite neck and it's likely to be the only non-Alembic left standing when my conversion is complete.  My guess is that others know better, but I have a hard time seeing why they shouldn't be an option.

[dfung60]

There's a couple of us graphite Alembic owners here around the list.  Personally, I think it's the ultimate instrument, combining a thru-body graphite neck and Series electronics.  I had my Series II built in 1986, probably one of the last of about 50 or so graphite Alembics.
 
The Alembic graphite necks were fabricated by Modulus Graphite, whose roots were comingled with Alembic back in the days primordial.  The Alembic folks really like to have full control of the entire fabrication of the instrument, so I don't think they were too keen on farming out neck production.  For what it's worth, Geoff Gould who started Modulus was never too keen on Alembic doing the bonding and assembly either since they didn't have as much expertise as Modulus on this part.  This mutual discomfort is at least a part of the reason you don't see this option now.
 
The original Modulus necks don't have a truss rod, so you really need to know what you're doing to get a good assembly.  Over the years, Modulus has worked out a pattern of how the graphite pre-preg fabric was laid out in the mold so that the neck pulls into approximately the proper relief when under string tension.  That makes fret levelling a lot easier (otherwise, you need to hand cut the relief into the fret tops).  With small run stuff like the Alembic necks, there was less chance of coming up with the right formula each time.  Again, I think this just makes for mutual discomfort.  These days, Modulus uses a truss rod, so this is less of an issue, although the absence of the truss rod was quite intentional in Geoff's original design.
 
The bad part about a truss rod-less neck is that you can't easily tweak the action if you don't like the original setup as it all has to be done in the fingerboard and frets.  And back in those days, there were sometimes fabrication problems that lead to warps and buzzes that are very hard and very expensive to fix.  Alembic is very committed to getting things exactly as the owner likes, and I think this wasn't in the favor of graphite either.
 
When I picked up my bass, there was less relief that I generally like to play with. I  didn't address it with the factory then, and probably should have.  After many years of not playing it exactly as I would like to, I decided to have the action reworked.  A number of well known luthiers around here just plain wouldn't work on it as it was just too hard and risky to guarantee good results.  You've got a graphite neck, no truss rod, and a very expensive and fragile LED strip routed into the edge of the neck which might easily be upset in refretting.  I'm a long time friend of Geoff Gould and finally prevailed on the guy who was the master builder at Modulus to work on it for me.  He too refused to do it if it required new fret installation, but I convinced him that there was sufficient fret height that it could be done there.  He did a fabulous job and it's really awesome now.
 
David Fung

[David Houck]

Here is one of the threads that Bob was talking about.  Mica makes a few comments about graphite necks in a few of the posts.

[s_wood]

Another issue with graphite necks: they don't sound like wooden ones. Maple necks sound different than mahagony ones, which sound different than wenge ones, which sound different than graphite ones.  Whether or not a graphite necks sound good is up to each of us, but to me they don't.  

[kungfusheriff]

Only 50? Really!
To add another layer of drama, and please correct me if I'm wrong, from what I've read the patents were sold to Music Man, whose short-lived Cutlass line had graphite necks, so Alembic was unable to continue to offer basses built with Modulus methods.
I guess I'm lucky, as my Small Standard has lovely action with my preferred .045-.105 strings, but I've found the action has to be set within a very specific range to achieve optimum tone, and the graphite has some issues with dynamics (notes plucked hard go clang instead of kaBOOM if you follow my meaning) that I also experienced with a Steinberger XL-2 I used to own.
The brightness can be controlled with plucking-hand technique and, to a lesser extent, EQ. I currently have DR Hi-Beams on my bass, and I can make it sound as warm as you please.
I was a little kid during the graphite craze, and so speak from little experience, but my feeling is that while it has useful properties it's not an ideal material. As Mica alluded to in the 2003 thread, it's also a huge pain in the can to work with from a builder's perspective.

[dfung60]

Alembic keeps better records than any manufacturer I know, so they would have the best count on the actual number of graphite Alembics.  Geoff Gould is a good buddy of mine and he seems to remember around 50 through-body necks being made.  
 
It sounds to me that making the necks for Alembics was a fairly big deal.  Part of that was the bidirectional queasy factor that I mentioned before - it didn't sound like that anybody other than Alembic took delivery of partial neck assemblies and did assembly out of house (everybody else got fully assembled necks, often including finishing).
 
Each different neck configuration requires a special (and expensive) mold be made and there are a lot of permutations - scale length, width, headstock shape (that part is a little adjustable). So that's a lot of customization with some molds only making a couple of instruments.  
 
And I think another factor was that a lot of these graphite Alembics were going to well known players - John McVie, Stanley Clarke, Greg Lake, Jimmy Johnson, John Entwistle (did you know that the main road Spyders had graphite necks?).  
 
With regard to the patents, they were held by Modulus until they expired around 10 years ago.  You may hear different stories about how Modulus came about, but Geoff's story (e.g. the horse's mouth) is that he was a bassist and big Deadhead and went to a Grateful Dead concert where he saw Phil Lesh struggling with a neck-heavy Alembic.  In his working life, Geoff was building graphite satellite parts for Ford Aerospace.  These were serious-ass satellites in the 70's - the famous deep space probes which where the pioneering flights across the solar system.  Graphite composites were the new, magic stuff that made some of these satellites possible, so it was really on the cutting edge then, not something that you got in a tennis racket or golf club.
 
Geoff believed that he could make a lighter, stiffer neck using graphite which would make for a better bass.  That led him to get in touch with Alembic, and Rick Turner who was president back then was enthusiastic enough about the idea that he worked with Geoff to get the monocoque graphite neck patent.  There were some proto Modulus necks at the beginning, but the first one that was sold was in an Alembic bass, which Geoff believes went to John McVie.  
 
Making a Modulus neck is sort of like building something out of fiberglass - it's made of sheets of woven graphite fabric which is impregnated with epoxy resin.  You can control the strength, stiffness, and weight of the thing you're making by how you align and orient the graphite fabric.  The magic happens in a huge autoclave which cooks the neck under heat and pressure and forms a graphite matrix.  
 
In the early days, Modulus didn't have an autoclave, so they would use idle time at facilities that had this equipment.  When Modulus entered into the deal to produce Cutlass necks for Music Man, they used the proceeds to buy their own autoclave which they still use to this day.  There was never any transfer of patents, only of finished necks to Music Man.  
 
I'm definitely a big believer in graphite.  The tone is definitely different (a trained ear can hear the differences in tone between the various ages of Modulus necks) and I think that's in a really good way.  The stiffness of the neck moves the resonances out of the fundamental range so there's no dead spots, the low end speaks with unmatched authority, and nothing has better sustain either. It's nice not to care about environmental conditions much and having your instrument stay in tune all the time.  
 
The pain in the ass factor is definitely out of this world from a builder's and repair standpoint and that's not helped by the fact that the earlier neck construction was sometimes dicey.  Refrets on old Modulus necks are always expensive because of the lack of a truss rod and there are failure modes that are really, really bad.  A builder like Alembic has a lot of capability to customize all the critical dimension of the neck and they don't have this capability with the graphite necks, so that's a factor too.
 
OK, enough blathering!
 
David Fung

[jetbass79]

Sounds to me like a blend of politics and a desire to evaid a serious potential hassle.  I did not know these things about graphite necks, that they are not totally invincible.  That sounds a bit naiive, but I've only been playing two months short of 10 years.  The ones I have played have been great, though I have run into a modulus that just had waaaay too much relief...unplayable piece of crap...but I digress.  The lack of adjustable truss rods is a definite problem.  And then the technology being shared by a competitor presents another problem.  With Alembic, graphite necks just aren't practical to be made into an option.  I learn something new every day.  

[David Houck]

David; I always enjoy reading your posts, they are quite educational.  So, blathering is not the word I would use .  Thanks for a great post.

[jetbass79]

It's interesting that the discussion also includes graphite reinforcement bars on the insides of necks.  Fender has been doing this stuff for a decade now starting with the American Standard series basses and continuing with their current line.  I have never liked this practice.  I don't like the way it sounds and apparently they're not the greatest neck movement solution on the planet either.  I have seen many whose truss rods cannot be adjusted correctly anymore even with graphite reinforcement.  I would rather have steel reinforcement even if it weighs substantially more.  But most companies do not accompany their truss rods with steel reinforcement rods for whatever reason.

[mica]

We were Modulus' first customer, and very excited about the concept of composites. The farming out aspect was not something we were uncomfortable with - for the graphite basses and guitars to be made, it was a requirement.  
 
As Geoff's only customer, there wasn't anything to compare our relationship to since we were it. It would not have been possible to supply us finished necks - ours were all neck through construction. David is familiar with Modulus' business practices outside of Alembic, so much of what I read was news to me.  
 
There are many reasons why we stopped offering graphite necks. The necks {did} move, and the absence of a truss rod was a real disadvantage. Even if the necks were as stable as hoped, fine tuning was not as simple as truss rod adjustment.  
 
The earliest necks were of superior quality to ones we received toward the end of our graphite days. I've posted this before, but the ones with a woven fabric appearance are much more likely to be stable. Later necks had graphite chunks of various sizes and not uniformly aligned. Failure rates for necks we received were as high as 2 out of 3 for various manufacturing defects. These were primarily due to inconsistent wall thickness and voids in the decorative section of the peghead. Of course, rejected necks did not make it into finished work.  
 
Sure there's a pita aspect to a build with graphite, and not to be overlooked is health issues for the good people working with the material.  
 
The original molds were made with rather round necks that were not to everyone's liking. Getting new molds made for a custom job as David mentioned is very expensive. With the limitations of the material at the time, and the expense of making custom fabrications, graphite necks became impractical.  
 
The pultruded material we use for reinforcement is unlike the fabrication of the graphite necks. I don't have experience with the Fender basses you refer to, John, but in our experience there isn't an audible difference in our instruments with or without the pultruded rod. We made a matching set of basses for Jimmy Johnson several years ago, one with and one without the rods. Even he could not tell which was equipped with a rod.

[dfung60]

I'm glad that Mica commented on The Mothership's perspective on graphite.  I have a couple comments on her comments.
 
Modulus' neck construction is both it's strength and it's weakness.  It's a monocoque - pieces are assembled into a hollow structure which bears the stress in the structure itself.  
 
The engineers among us are already nodding - a hollow tube is the strongest structural unit you can make, so there's sort of a academic satisfaction from the fabrication of one of these necks.
 
Modulus makes a neck by putting layers of a special graphite fabric which is pre-impregnated with epoxy resin into a mold which is cooked under heat and pressure.  There's four pieces in a Modulus neck - the curved back part of the neck which comes out of a mold, a thick flat plate of graphite called the underlayment which completes the tubular structure (you can only see the edge of this piece under the fingerboard), the face of the headstock, and the phenolic fingerboard which isn't a structural part.  The main neck part comes out of the mold and is milled flat at the edges, then the underlayment is glued on.  The fingerboard is bonded on top of that and the neck is finished.  
 
Every part of these Modulus necks was done by hand - placing the fabric in the mold, machining the pieces, bonding, etc.  There's definitely variability in the process that comes from who did it, the materials, etc.  And the design is a factor as well.  The most infamous problem with Modulus necks is that the neck shell thickness varies which means that the width of the bonding surface between the back and the underlayment is variable.  The graphite pieces are pretty impervious to damage, but the glued bonding surface isn't.  If the glue line splits (technically a delamination), you're in a world of hurt, since repair requires the entire neck to be split apart and reglued, fingerboard and frets replaced, etc.  If you're talking about a thru body instrument, then it's approaching hopeless (and certainly expensive).  If the fabric isn't laid up right or cooked right, then the piece might have a warp that might not surface for years.  Of course, these sorts of problems (and their painful solutions) crop up with wood as well.  
 
The earliest graphite necks were built up and cooked by Geoff himself.  He had a lot of experience working with this stuff when nobody had much experience.  In the later years, Geoff was busy running his company and fabrication was done by others - not necessarily worse but probably different.  That might be reflective of why the earlier necks were better.
 
What you see on the surface of a Modulus neck is a real graphite pattern although it's mostly cosmetic.  The earliest necks have a pattern of random pin-like crystals.  That was followed by a curvy woven material, then a very distinct checkerboard weave fabric.  For many years now, there's been the random polygonal chunk finish that Mica mentions.  The polygons are just cosmetic - Modulus was using a linear pattern pre-preg which looked sort of boring compared to the older finishes, so they cut up the linear fabric into polygons and laid those randomly into the outside layer of the mold.  Underneath that finish, it's long sheets of graphite fabric, just like in earlier days.  As you can imagine, trying to align a checkerboard patterned sheet of fabric in the complex shape of a neck mold and having it look good was a major pain in the ass.  
 
Cosmetics aside, these necks were all laid up by hand, and the problems that Mica mentions sounds like the sort of problems that did come up from errors in fabrication.  
 
I've got Modulus basses made from each of these materials.  Geoff doesn't like it when I tell him that the old stuff really does sound better, but I do believe that that's true.  The reliability of the newer polygonal necks is better, but I do think the feel and tone of the old crystal necks is unbeatable.  My Series II is a polygon neck.
 
Even with the high stiffness of graphite, it defnitely flexes under string tension.  With no truss rod this can make action adjustments hellish since you don't know how much relief you will get until the instrument is completed.  For Modulus' own production, they actually tweaked how they fabricated the neck so that they could usally plane the fingerboard flat and level the frets to a straightege and have it pull up into reasonably proper relief so the follow-up fretwork wasn't onerous.  For low-production custom built stuff like the Alembic necks, they wouldn't have a magic formula for construction, but they did make these necks stiffer with more material and sometimes used a different more expensive graphite fiber for these OEM necks. The fact that these necks were different than regular Modulus production was probably why Geoff was uncomfortable about not doing the milling and bonding, but that's just conjecture on my part.
 
Finally, I'll also attest to the odd shapes of the Alembic neck molds.  My Series II graphite is a long scale 4-string.  It's got a very odd neck shape - extremely narrow (like a Jazz Bass that hardly gets wider toward the bridge) and very thick.  I've felt some wood ones from the 70's that were also narrow like this.  It's weird at first, but turns out to be really great to play (you can forget about slapping though, which I can't do anyway).  Geoff's personal Alembic had a fabulous neck and I wish that I had known that he had his 4-string built on the 5-string neck mold when I ordered mine.

[terryc]

Have just read all the threads with interest and and once used(although not mine) a Steinberger now apart from the odd shape I just couldn't get away that it was a synthetic neck, it reminded me of those cheap guitars you bought from Woolworths or other dept stores. I can understand the technology of it all, stiffness, less prone to humidity etc but wood has a sound  all of it's own and the beauty is that all those fabulous woods that alembic use contribute to the tone..put ebony laminates in a neck and the fundemental growls forever!
I think wood HAS got to be the material of choice for any stringed instrument. Remember aluminium necks..horrible!!!
I know that graphite can eliminate dead spots but would the average listener(not musician or bassist)in the crowd know what a dead spot is!
I suppose it is a personal choice but wood comes  first in my book anytime..keep the graphite for Formula 1 cars and aircrafts
 
terry c

[mgirouard3]

On that last post, I can agree with you but I doubt most average listeners could distinguish between a bass played with a wood or graphite neck either.  It really all boils down to personal tastes.