As the mornings get darker and the air gets chillier, we find the guys engrossed in their work. Dave is putting the string nut blank on the twelve-string bass that we saw earlier.
We use a black material that we call Lubritrak. It's a tough, slippery material that allows the strings to glide smoothly through the slots. We pioneered the idea of a self-lubricating nut with the introduction of this material in the early 1980s. It works great for tremolo guitars too.
After he bonds it down, Dave will file the nut blank to the proper width, height and shape. The next step is to stamp the serial number into the back of the headstock with a press. Dave gets the next available number from the book and loads the press with the stamping dies.
As Dave pulls the lever down firmly, the dies press the number into the wood. In this case, it's a maple neck. The second line will be the letters U. S. A. because that's what we're all about.
The bass is now well on its way, but some of you are probably wondering what this twelve-string bass business is all about.
Thirty Two years ago, bassist Tom Peterson threw in the towel trying to get his Hagstrom 8-string bass to function properly. Cheaply made, with only four bridge saddle for eight strings and a thin, flexible neck, it just wasn't cutting it for Tom. When he approached us, first to improve the Hagstrom, then to build a replacement—we thought it was a fine idea. When things escalated to twelve strings, we had our doubts.
Tom's idea was to create an instrument based upon the ancient Tiple—a guitar-like instrument with four courses of three strings each. Each course, or group, would have a standard bass string as the root and two more strings tuned in unison one octave higher. Tom's band, Cheap Trick was basically a trio with a singer, and the big sound he anticipated would be perfect to fill things up and act as a de-facto rhythm guitar as well as a bass.
The Tiple made its way here from Spain by way of Columbia as early as the sixteenth century. Tiples were made by many builders in the US such as Martin (pictured above) and Regal, in the early part of the last century. To be honest, we thought that the force of twelve strings on a bass would compromise the neck. We negotiated Tom down to Ten strings for the first whack at it. The plan was to triple the top two courses and use the standard eight-string, double configuration for the lower two courses.
Thus, in 1977, the first Hamer multi-string bass was developed and built. It wasn't as easy as just going out and buying the parts—they had to be made. I designed a bridge and tailpiece based upon the Thunderbird hardware, but with eight individual saddles so that Tom could intonate the octave strings separately from the low ones. I found a guy with a small machine shop to help make it, and then drove it over to the chrome plater down the road. These are still the guys who make them today! The bridge was a major improvement over original eight string. Incidentally, we constructed an eight-string electric mandocello for Rick Nielsen at the same time, and here's a photo of the two instruments together at the time of completion.
Tom took that first ten-string on the road, and when it stood up to the rigors of touring, it was time to make the world's first twelve-string bass. But that wouldn't even be enough for Tom, but that's a story for another time.