1969 owners manual for the Gibson Les Paul bass. Page 2-3 are a double page spread entitled 'features of the Les Paul Bass guitar'. This side labels all the parts of this bass, with descriptions appearing on page 3. Again an odd-looking (and slightly out of scale) image is used for this page - hardly a good advert for the instrument.
The controls of the Les Paul Bass were quite different from any Gibson instrument (including Les Paul guitars) that had gone before them. Pickups did not have individual volume and tone controls - rather there were a master volume, master treble and master bass. This idea would be expanded on later with the Q-system of the Gibson Ripper and later still the RD Artist bass, but at this point, the idea was all new.
One of the most innovative features of this bass was the tone selector circuitry. Tonal variation was not achieved by means of adding a capacitor to the circuit, as is the case with a standard tone control - in fact the tone switch 'activated' different coils within the pickups - ie each switch position selected a circuit with different numbers of windings, hence increasing or decreasing the pickups output.
$3590
$2995
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£5250