During Jack Casady's tenure with such legendary bands as the Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna, he has experimented with all kinds of techniques and sounds, constantly reinventing what can be done with the bass guitar. When it came time to design the Jack Casady signature bass, Jack wanted an instrument that would be versatile enough to work well in Hot Tuna's electric and acoustic incarnations. More importantly, he wanted an instrument that can capture the many nuances of his playing. In typical Jack Casady form, he took a hands-on approach to the creation of the bass, working directly with Gibson R&D guru J.T. Riboloff. The Amplifier caught up with Casady to discuss the bass just before its unveiling at the 1997 Winter NAMM convention in Anaheim, California. "I've been playing semi-hollow acoustic and electric basses for years," Casady said. "Starting out like most bass players do, with a Fender bass when I was about 16 in Washington DC. When I came out to California and joined the Jefferson Airplane in 1965, I was still playing a Fender Jazz Bass. I discovered in a store a semi-hollow body, f-hole style bass and fell in love with the tonal characteristic of that kind of instrument." Casady's been fickle about his instrument selection over the years, but a pawn shop discovery made him a semi-hollow fan for good. "I used a number of solidbodies throughout the '70s, and I started to go back in the mid '80s to acoustic properties," he said. "From there, I drifted back to using acoustic instruments more, until I found a 1972 Gibson semi-hollowbody goldtop bass." Casady's find was a Les Paul Signature, an unusual asymmetrical double-cutaway guitar with a single low-impedance pickup. "What I found nice about that bass was that it had a full-sized neck, 34" scale," Casady said. "The other thing I liked about it was that it had one pickup, positioned in the 'sweet spot' in the center, of the low impedance variety. It had the kind of tone where I could manipulate the sound using left and right hand dynamics. I could do this to the extent that I found I could use it in an acoustic format and full electric format as well. I kind of went back to basics with that." Since the Les Paul Signature bass was last produced in 1979, he figured it was time the instrument was made available to the public again. "I've been trying to talk various people into getting a semi-hollowbodied acoustic bass back out on the market," he said. "Epiphone put the faith in me and the concept to put a single pickup, low impedance, full scale semi-acoustic bass out on the market which there is none now." Thus the idea behind the Jack Casady Signature. The new Epiphone model has a set neck made of mahogany. The rosewood fingerboard has a full 34" scale with trapezoid inlays. The top and body is constructed of laminated maple. It has chrome hardware, a nut width of 1.625," and a special gold sparkle paint job. The Epi Jack Casady bass offers bass players the opportunity to play just like Casady--at least in terms of tone. "For my style of playing which I've represented for numbers of years, I figured it's a good instrument to put out on the market for those people who want that kind of tone," Casady said. "Also for the younger musician who encounters the active electronics. This is nothing against active electronics because I was probably one of the first people to use active electronics. I believe that this setup with passive electronics and low impedance pickup allows the musician to learn and develop his left and right hand technique. Some basses have such a tonal characteristic of the electronics that the subtleties of your playing are buried." So what does this bass sound like? "It has a nice natural tone to it," Casady said. "When you plug this instrument into an amp, it just sounds normally wonderful. The semi-acoustic has really a lovely, deep tone. and when you go high up on the neck, that which tends to be a bit 'plinky' and short on overtones on many basses has a round, nice violin-like sound on the top end." A lot of the positive tonal characteristics of this guitar stem from its unique interpretation of the semi-hollow guitar. The bass has a block of solid wood running the length of the body, to maximize sustain. But unlike most semi-hollow instruments, there is space between the block and the top of the guitar. This maximizes its acoustic properties as well. Another major factor to the tone, according to Casady, is the low impedance pickup. "The low impedance is a factor which is more noticeable in the low end, the bass range," he said. "One thing that you lose with high impedance is when you start using a longer cord, you start losing your low end and you get kind of a 'plinky' sound. With a low impedance, you can use any length of cord you want. The other thing that I like is that the tone of a low impedance pickup is a smoother, rounder sound than high impedance." Casady credits Riboloff for the superior design. "This particular pickup that we've developed--with J.T. Riboloff, the master pickup man--I got a prototype to take on the road, and [after the tour] we sat down and woodshedded every day," Casady said. "We experimented with different types of magnets and different gauges of wire wrapping." A typical drawback of low-impedance pickups is low output. Riboloff sidestepped this with a unique transformer that boosts power to that of a normal pickup. The amazing part is that it does so without any active circuitry. Casady hopes that players will catch on to the benefits of the semi-hollow electric bass. "I have many basses in my collection," he said. "But when I pick a bass up and I want to hit nice chords and good melodies and enjoy the tone of the bass for its own sake, I find myself picking up a semi-acoustic." Best part of all, according to Casady, is that it simply looks cool. "There's nothing like a classic-looking guitar shape," he said. "It's really nice to have an instrument that feels good against your body. To feel it resonate like a good acoustic guitar."