OMG Xotica. A veritible plethora of awesome instruments. Yes, I see the custom look to your beautiful natural wood bass in the lower photo. I was immediately stunned. I'm strictly amateur myself. I got my first gig when I was 11. I was asked to bring my guitar and sing at a "small church picnic". It turned out to be some huge deal, with thousands in the crowd, up on a big stage maybe 10 feet high. It was all miked and everything, I just had to step up with guitar in hand and let it fly. A friend loaned me this big jumbo 12-string after the event manager asked me if I had an instrument that could make a lot of noise. So I had a few weeks to learn to wrap my little hands around this baby:
It's not a very good pic but it's a jumbo body, really deep, too, sized for a large adult. And you can see how wide the neck is. So it was like a crash course for me and by the time I was supposed to play I was all calloused up and had strength in my fingers to mash those strings down all the way without getting fret buzz. Of course I was surprised by the size of this stage and the crowd, but the manager came up to me and said "Don't even look at them. Look over them and just concentrate on staying close to the mic. Play as loud as you can, and scream if you have to, so your voice comes through." Something like that. Somehow that settled my mind and I don't remember having the heebeejeebees.
But when I was finished the crowd went wild which surprised the hell out me, since I hadn't put much effort into it, thinking it would be a small circle of folks. So I of course got the bug after that and figured, wow, if I actually tried I could maybe get somewhere. I started working Saturdays for a relative who got past the child labor thing, so I could gradually acquire stuff. By the time I was 14 I had a little band. We'd do home parties, dances, an occasional wedding, whatever. Over the next couple of years we changed a few band members an added a badass female vocalist. That same manager followed me during those years and he's the one who sponsored this studio demo we did. By that time I had this Silvertone. Somehow I'd managed to get it to sound like a Les Paul, especially by attacking the strings really sharp, even clawing them with the little bumps on the grip side of the picks I used, plus nailing it way up close to the butt of the fingerboard. I also like to play without a pick for a completely different sound, not to mention a little counterpoint.
I ditched the pick guard and the white knobs so it didn't look so much like a zoot suit. Plus the pick guard just got in the way. The other axe I bought when I was about 16 was a Guild Starfire XII. Here's one. It sounds just like the electric-12 that punches in on Stairway to Heaven
I also got rid of that pickguard. I went into it a separated the pickups into a stereo jack, and did the same in my amp, which happened to be stereo, bridged to mono. I didn't really know it at first, but just figured it out from the dual symmetry inside the head. I spent a couple of weeks tracing the circuit into a schematic, and that was when I discovered that I only had to clip one wire and Ouila! Channel separation. I tore the speakers out of the cabinet and made a pair of towers. That first day I had it all working, and I plugged in my stereo 12-string and hit a chord, I practically broke down in tears it sounded so good. I could hear the phases circulating in space, aggravated by the unison strings beating against each other. Of course I didn't really know what phase meant back then.
I like the moveable/adjustable bridges. Intonation is everything and I like to have control over it.
As you can see I'm kind of cruising down memory lane.
Ah... Evanescence and Spooky, both huge hits. And I remember that vid. They got down on that.
To follow Atlanta Rhythm Section, and in tribute to your awesome bass collection:
I'm a Man
And following Evanescence, how about
Crash Into Me