Alembic Inc - History

History

The company was founded by Augustus Stanley Owsley as a workshop in the rehearsal room of the Grateful Dead in Novato, California, near San Francisco, to help improve the entire sound chain for the band's live recordings, from instruments to PA. Soon the group was active in sound recording, modifying and repairing guitars and basses, and PA systems. By 1970 Alembic was incorporated with three equal shareholders: Ron Wickersham, an electronics expert who came in from Ampeg; Rick Turner, a guitarist turned luthier; and Bob Matthews, a recording engineer.

Ron Wickersham and Rick Turner designed low-impedance pickups and electronics with greater bandwidth than the high-impedance pickups typical in electric guitars and basses of the time. To boost the low output of these pickups, Wickersham designed an active onboard preamp. Turner referred to this process as "Alembicizing".

The company's first instrument was a bass guitar, made in 1971 for Jack Casady. This bass incorporated a massive electronics suite, with super-filtering capability, and had pickups mounted on brass tubing so that their position could be adjusted. Financial problems (in the recording studio section) were alleviated after a 1973 story on the company in Rolling Stone, which generated enough cashflow for a standardized bass guitar line based on the Guild Starfire. At that time, the company had two locations--guitars and electronics were built in Cotati, and the main office was in Sebastopol. 1973 was also the year that Stanley Clarke, then with Return to Forever, replaced his Gibson EB-2 with an Alembic, increasing Alembic's profile. Their bass guitars were expensive, costing up to three times as much as a new Fender bass. According to Tony Bacon and Barry Moorhouse, it was Alembic that started the trend of high-quality, high-price bass guitars. In 1974, Matthews left the company. The recording studio had been sold, as was a retail store in San Francisco where they had sold high-end audio equipment besides their own electronics and instruments.

The first production Alembic instruments were less ornate, and incorporated the PF-5 electronics circuit, later replaced by the PF-6. The pickups were single-coil, with an active hum-cancelling coil mounted between the pickups. This configuration gave the player the fidelity of single-coil pickups without their inherent noise, and is used to this day. The basses and guitars built using this configuration would later become known as the Series I and II, and were available in a variety of scale lengths and body shapes.

In 1977, Alembic presented the world's first graphite neck basses with necks supplied by Geoff Gould (later founder of Modulus Guitars) at a trade show; it was bought by John McVie of Fleetwood Mac. During this period, Alembic also delivered one of the first 5-string basses equipped with a low B string to Jimmy Johnson. Production of graphite-necked instruments ceased in 1985.

In 1978, Rick Turner left the company to found Turner Guitars.

In 1979, the Distillate, a more affordable model, was introduced in bass and guitar versions.

Through the 1980s, Alembic introduced several new models. These included the Spoiler, Elan, and Europa basses, and the Electrum and California Special guitars. Alembic's model line has continued to expand to the present day, with models such as the Epic, Orion, Excel, and Darling being introduced.