Well, I can take credit for only so much of it. Matt Bergdahl of Woodsong's Lutherie installed the pickup rings (and took forever making them, cursing me good naturedly the whole time for the amount of effort it took to match the curvature of the top of the bass. The bill for that was higher than the cost of the pickups. If I had it to over again, I'd probably go the swimming pool route (sorry for the pun) and install the humcanceller on the front as well.) He also installed the hardware for me. Interestingly, although he was familiar with Alembic and grew up in the Bay Area, he was completely unfamiliar with the Grateful Dead. I loaned him a few CDs and a month later he was relating minutiae from the different eras of recordings over at Archive.org.
However, I did do all the drilling and installation of the electronics as well as the assembly of the electronics, which were pretty much a random, not quite complete, bag of parts when I got them. It was a fun project, after I got the filter cap values right. Initially they were off by a couple orders of magnitude, which meant I was almost in the megahertz range, but that problem was easily rectified. I'm considering adding a master volume to the horn next to the pickup selector switch.
The pickups are with the wide section over the E string. I flipped the neck pickup around (the bridge pickup is not quite symmetrical as far as the mounting bars go, so it wouldn't fit in the ring in the other orientation) and noticed less of a difference than I would have expected. I switched it back. I would think that I'd want the wide side under the G string to make it more equal the E string because of the difference in string excursion, but it really doesn't seem to make much of a difference at all. I'm sure that Old #12 is similar: not a bad note on the instrument. I'm going to have to put hearing that bass in person in my bucket list. Be prepared for a visit sometime!
Of course, I feel like I'm waiting, biding my time, for the perfect Alembic to show up. It's possible that Jazzyvee might be playing it right now.
