Pleased as heck to have another Healer bass wrapped up. This one is for my friend and bandmate in @slantoflightsounds, Mr. Josh Owsley. We planned some things from the start, like the JBE Rickenbacker dual blade pickups and stereo outputs, and some things fell into place because of those choices. Rickenbacker’s are famous for being maple, so I re-sawed some bookmatched maple top and back sets and cut some straight, stable maple for the neck.
The interior is mostly hollow with Catalpa for the core wood which has a nice open grain like Swamp Ash, that you can still see on the edge through the paint. The side and headstock color are a slightly redder version of the Oxblood we did on a recent Growler. The idea was to match the paint to the tortoise pickguard material, which also ended up being used for the fretboard dots.
The stereo Ric-O-Sound outputs allow you to send the Neck and Bridge pickups to their own amps, one to a DI and one to an amp, or just have their own effects loops. Geddy Lee and Chris Squire used those methods to create their own unique bass sounds in Rush and Yes. I wired the A/B splitter box and sprayed it with the same paint as the sides, and added our logo for kicks. Came out pretty sweet!
The hardware is Hipshot, the A style bridge and HB1 tuners, all aged here in a tumbler. We also made 2 aluminum nuts, one for EADG and one to be swapped out for BEAD tuning and slotted for the heavier gauges required for the low tuning. The bridge can be strung up as a string through or top mount.
If you don’t know Josh’s playing yet I hope you’ll check out his projects below and I can’t wait for band practice this week so we can expand the Slant of Light to *2* Healers. @geoglyphs @landowner @firstchildren
