Electrical Guitar Company 12-String Basses

Electrical Guitar Company 12-String Basses

The Electrical Guitar Company of Pensacola, Florida has built a variety of all-aluminum custom 12-string basses. Their first 12 was built in 2009.

Regarding Tom Petersson’s acquisition of an Electrical Guitar Company 12-string bass in 2011, Chris Hall told us: “Here’s how that happened: A bass played named Bob Weston ordered an 8-string bass from EGC. Bob's in a band called Shellac (with recording engineer Steve Albini). Cheap Trick have recorded with Albini, have played a festival that Shellac organized, etc. So, at some point, Bob let Tom play his 8-string. Tom liked it so much he ordered a custom 12-string bass from EGC.”

This bass has Mike Lull Firebird pickups in it and a reverse body with gold pickguard. The body is similar to EGC's “standard” bass body but with a shorter horn on the bottom, which would be longer if it were a true reverse body. The neck incorporates a Zero fret.

Kevin Burkett at The Electrical Guitar Company told us, "I'm building Petersson four more 12-string basses just like that. I build guitars, baritones and all. So far about 600 instruments.”

This left-handed 12 is the first 12-string bass completed by Electrical Guitar Company. It was built for bassist Chris Hall in 2009. It is a neck through body design with the front and back body halves being hollow and surrounding the neck. The fretboard is screwed and epoxied to the neck, with the screws being hidden under the fret marker dots. The bass is 34" scale with 20 frets plus a Zero fret. It has a 48 mm aluminum nut and a Schaller bridge.

At the time it was built Chris Hall told us, "As far as I know, this is the only all-aluminum 12-string bass on the planet. It's been a dream of mine to own one ever since purchasing my Travis Bean basses back in early 1999, and Kevin Burkett was the only person I could find willing to make it for me. Even though he considers this a custom, he is willing to make more if anyone is interested.”

Chris continued, “Kevin was very receptive to the idea of building a 12-string bass. He always seems to have some crazy project like this on the back burner, which he gets to work on when he's not making his standard line of guitars and basses. He's made somewhere between 200-250 instruments over the last 5 or so years, and more people find out about them every day. I can think of two or three bands who have used his instruments on the Tonight Show, etc.”

As far as the electronics, this bass has four passive pickups: Two humbuckers with coil taps for the octave strings and two single coil bass pickups. The pickups were made by Electrical Guitar Company with the covers being made of aluminum as well. There are two outputs, one for the guitar pickups and one for the bass pickups. As for the toggle switches, four are on / off switches, one routes the pickups to a single output for use with one amp, and two are for the coil taps on the humbuckers.