The most obvious new feature is what appears to be four pickups. It's actually only two pickups; each of the four black bars has one half (one coil covering two strings) of a Seymour Duncan Quarter Pounder P-Bass pickup. I cast them into individual full-width epoxy housings so they are independently adjustable. Also, because they are all the same size and dimensions, you can swap them around if you want to experiment with the positions of the bass and treble coils. I'll normally install them in the standard P-Bass orientation, with the treble coil of each pair closer to the bridge. That is, from the neck, the 1st and 3rd of the black bars have the bass coils, and the 2nd and 4th have the treble coils.The large rectangular cavity also allows for future experimentation. I plan to eventually wind some special coils and make up other configurations of pickups tailored for my instruments. When I do, they will be a bolt-in retrofit into these instruments.
The pickup coils are cast into black epoxy, with a thin slice of real ebony making up the curved top surface. It isn't clear in these pictures, but the ebony is polished and oiled to match the fingerboard.
Between the pickups and the bridge cover is an engraved brass nameplate with the instrument's model, serial number, completion date, etc. I left a gap between the outline of the nameplate and the opening in the pickguard to allow a ring of red on the body to show through. But, looking at these pictures, I may have made it a little too dramatic. I'll probably change the design slightly to make the nameplate a bit more subtle.
You can see the new tailpiece arrangement, all polished and chromed. There is more detail on them on the following pages. AUB-2 #039 is fitted with my standard Ampeg-length D'Addario Chromes flatwounds, which hook into the very back end of the tailpieces. Keeping with the Ampeg tradition, I've put two strap buttons on the back end.
I've changed the neck/body joint to match the design I developed on the SSB. Those two crome bars aren't thin decorative stampings! They're 1/4" thick solid brass, recessed in flush with the body. In addition to the four 10-32 machine screws that thread into steel T-nuts in the neck, there are two 1/8" steel dowel pins under the bars that keep the neck and body positively aligned.
This new model has three output jacks, located back by the tailpieces. The two right next to the tailpieces are the "hotwire" outputs, wired directly to each of the two pickups. The third jack is the normal output, which gets the signal through the volume, tone, and pickup blend controls. All three output jacks can be used at the same time.
It's not a great picture of the headstock, but you can see how I've made it more dramatic than earlier instruments with deeper scalloping around the perimeter of the head and along the back.
