I wanted one of these back in 1980 when I was 16. I remember that they were $1,200, but they might as well have been $1,200,000 as far as I was concerned.
Many years later I had the $$$ to buy one, and this one is a beauty. Koa, with Bill Lawrence pickups.
Look at all the knobs and switches!!!
That thing is ridiculous, and I love it. What do all of the knobs and switches do?
The big three knobs near the bridge are volume, boost and tone. The big switch between them is the pickup selector. The three little switches in a row are coil taps and phase reversal. The other toggle switch is the boost on/off. The chicken-head switch is a notch filter.
The boost is a little custom circuit-board inside the body with a 9V battery running it. It’s not bad, but really of limited use…and still cool as hell. The notch filter is actually very cool and very useful.
All told, the amount of tones you can get out of this thing is really astounding. As a live gigging instrument, the control setup is probably a bit unwieldy, as you often don’t have time to fiddle with multiple knobs and switches. But who’s gonna take this beast to gig, anyways?
The Bill Lawrence pickups are original and the body still has factory markings inside the pickup cavities that say something like, “BL”. These pickups were custom, but not all that unusual in Mockingbirds from that era.
“what kind of sound can you get out of it?” “Yes.”