LeftyBassist.com

Don't see many of these....I think this belonged to the same guy that sold the lefty ampeg baby bass on eBay not long ago. If memory serves, I seem to remember seeing the same "Joe Long of the Supremes" comment in that posting too.

http://cgi.ebay.com/Ampeg-Devil-Bass-Gu ... dZViewItem

Wow, that is a rare bass.

What's going on with those strings?

It looks to me like the black silk cover windings are protruding way too far past the nut/zero fret almost all the way up to the first fret. Am I looking at it wrong?

IIRC those old Ampegs required extra long strings, those are probably normal length. See how much string is between the bridge and tailpiece.

Extremely rare bass! Something odd in those photos though. It shows red burst on the closeups but the full length photo looks like a solid black body. Even the worst of photos wouldn't conceal the red burst, so I'm thinking at least the full length shot was doctored or touched up for some reason. Maybe the original owner wanted to see what an all black bass would look like and touched it up, forgetting he was going to list it later? I don't know.

Too bad those Ampeg basses with only the single "mystery" pickup sound like crap. I had a righty AEB-1 years ago, and it was, hands down, THE worst sounding bass I've ever heard. Zero sustain with the unique sounding plastic-like "boink" tone when you plucked it. Ampeg wised up when they introduced a "real" pickup in the sweet spot later on (AMB-1), but I don't know if the Devil basses ever got that far.

Well Rick Danko played a fretless Ampeg. It wasn't the "Devil" model but I'm pretty sure it was single pup. May not have been the same type of pup either. When I was living in upstate New York there was another local blues player who played that same fretless model. Those basses sounded fantastic. Of course a fretless is a totally different animal anyway and maybe the pup was designed for that sound.

Danko played a fretless AMB-1. The AMB-1 is a much improved bass over the original AEB (and Devil bass) PUP configuration in that they did away with the sucky mystery bridge pickup by then and put a single coil PUP in the sweet spot and revised the bridge instead. Those basses are worth owning.

FYI, I e-mailed the seller about the black bass pic and also about a serial #. His response was that the picture was just bad. But regarding the serial #, he said, "It's in the ad, look again." I don't see it (does anyone else?), and the fact that he wouldn't simple tell me the serial # and gave me a snippy answer instead is offputting for me.

I'm pretty sure Rick Danko had a P-bass pickup installed on his scroll bass...from pics I've seen of it. Had the pleasure of meetin' him in Milwaukee once, nice guy...great player...too bad he's no longer with us.