"I was always hung up on the name "Burns Orbit 4" for some reason, I guess someone said they thought it was a Burns once upon a time. The gap under the neck-plate has always bugged me - either I have the wrong plate or it is an awful design gaffe, but whatever - it still does the job. The neck is too good to ever have been touched - the dudes who made this got that just about perfect. The whammy bar went because the system is NOT good and tended to slip if used too heavily, but the plate and springs are all in place.įull back. The wood is beautiful, honey-gold blonde helped by rubbing gold sparkle nail varnish into the grain before 15 coats of clear satin laquer wet-and-dry'ed between coats. The lower panel is just enough to cover the channel cut in the body from pick-ups to socket. All the bulky chrome panelling replaced by black perspex, one precision log-pot volume control and one miniature in/off/out phase switch per pickup. The Orbit4 in all it's glory - not elegant proportions, and I envy the models with the stunning 4 against 2 head-stock, but hey - it works for me.īody, looking up neck. Strange name - bottle neck - never used one in my life, always used either steel bars, steel tubes or, my favourite, a chandalier crystal from the Marriot in Amman, Jordan. The bridge is still set for fingered intonation because I finger-pick fretted as well as bottle-neck. This is what it is all about - I lost count at 33 permutations of on, off and phase, and that is before the volume controls come in - put two pick-ups on but out of phase and play with the pots and the palette of tones grows exponentially. It WAS a weird shape, but sits on the knee, carries by the horn, blances on the strap and, in my case, sits flat on the lapįour pickups and controls. Never got round to painting them black :o)īody square on. I figured the Marshall valve top gave me all the distortion I needed without crap speakers adding to it, and the HH allowed me to get clean volume when needed.
#Red teisco guitar full#
Orbit4 (Teisco SS-4L) into Schaller Rotosound, HH amp and 4x12 stack - each speaker was sealed into it's own labrynthine damped enclosure which was very carefully designed to minimise resonances and distortion and sounded fantastic at full tilt. Many axes have come and gone since, but she has stayed with me, my first electric, and the last one I'll get rid of, if she aint buried with me."Įarly seventies. then again not :o) Still slides out the blues and the nashville pedal steel, never gone quiet, never warped, never let me down. Sometimes I regret taking the old chrome slabs and rocker switches off. Hell, work it out, 4 pickups, each either in phase, out of phase or off, how many combinations is that, then each has its own level control. Also removed most of the trimmings, just left the pots and miniature phasing switches on black perspex plates. Never touched the neck - it was/is too good to mess with - and ended up stripping the body back to the wood and polishing it up, looks good too, a natural blonde (with a red neck). Over the years it underwent a number of changes, both colour scheme (rainbow mettalic, crackle-glaze silver/bronze, blah, blah, blah) and electronic (decent log pots, miniature 3-way in-phase/off/out-phase switches per pick-up, stereo split switching, active pre-amps etc). I bought the darned thang in 1970 for a couple of quid in a junk shop, slapped some tape-wound strings on it and used it as a kind of lap-steel for bottleneck. "Hot damn - for years now I thought I was going crazy - but it really WAS called the Orbit 4. Missing the Tone knob, whammy bar, and bridge cover. It's another pawnshop prize, setting me back $60. I was extremely surprised to find that it still had the bridge cover in place! After shimming the neck and removing, cleaning, and repairing the electronics it plays and sounds great! " I picked it up in a pawn shop a few months back for $100. "Here's a few pics of my Teisco bass, model EP-200B. A collection of your Teisco tales and snapshots.