Rusty the Scoob wrote:tigerstrat wrote:Rusty the Scoob wrote:I haven't sat down with this yet, but on the studio version it sounds like he's using either a short-scale bass with very light strings (likely the Godfather, although I've never sucessfully learned the scale of Mission Control) or something fretless. He's smearing notes all over the place.... very hard to tab out.
In Barncard's Weir home studio photos, Phil is shown playing the Osage-Orange Alembic (I've always understood "Mission Control" to be the name of Jack Casady's Alembicized Guild, but ymmv)
Hmmm... Mission Control to me always meant the Osage-Orange. Casady's Guild was something like Ygdrassil... some sort of Lord of The Rings reference or something. But I could easily be wrong on both.
The Guild is nicknamed Godfather (or Big Brown by some).
The Alembic Osage Orange is the Mission Control Bass as featured in the Grateful Dead movie. It is a 32 inch scale bass.
Here's a link to a string on the Godfather:
http://alembic.com/club/messages/411/19 ... 1283131832
Here is a string on the Alembic Osage Orange - Mission Control bass:
http://alembic.com/club/messages/411/19 ... 1274546055
If you poke around on Alembic's official forum you'll find it is generally believed to be a 32 inch medium scale bass. A lot of Alembics of that era were medium scale, Phil was coming off a short scale Guild, so that at least is logical. No Alembic employee has corrected the assumption on their website.