The Alembic Years and
Fleetwood Mac
Thus began Turner’s critical,
tumultuous Alembic period.
Turner co-founded Alembic with
Wickersham, and the company’s
initial aim was to push the envelope
of live sound through the medium
of Grateful Dead shows.
A corner of Turner’s factory with the original Model 1 blueprint on the wall.
Turner worked on practically
everything Alembic touched, including
designing speaker cabinets to
eliminate standing waves in the
Dead’s Wall of Sound PA system—
which had McIntosh power amps
pushing 125,000 watts through 450
drivers. Once Turner, Wickersham,
and the other folks at Alembic had
tackled the acoustic and electronic
considerations of large PA systems,
they focused on the instruments—
primarily Lesh’s basses and Garcia’s
guitars. Soon things started to snowball:
A carving job Turner did for
an early Alembic bass made for Jack
Casady helped put Alembic on the
map as an instrument maker, as did
their work for Stanley Clarke.
Before Turner’s time with
Alembic was up, he found himself
involved with another milestone in
the history of rock and roll—the
studio sessions for Fleetwood Mac’s
Rumours album, which the band
was recording at the Record Plant
just across the Golden Gate Bridge
from San Francisco. Turner was sent
over to do a setup on John McVie’s
Alembic #33 bass, and he ended
up staying for much of the sessions
to work as a guitar tech because
Lindsey Buckingham’s Strat had an
Alembic Strat-o-Blaster preamp that
kept blowing his Hiwatt amps.
“The preamp was turned up
all the way—that’s 12 dB of gain
coming out of the Strat-o-Blaster!”
Turner relates. “Evidently, the
Hiwatts were set up so that the gain
structure expected a normal electric
guitar output from the guitar.
When you jacked it up by 12 dB,
the amp tried to suck more current
through the power transformer
and it just fried. But it sounded
great for about 15 or 20 minutes!
[
Laughs.] At about that same time,
I did a Strat-o-Blaster in Lowell
George’s Strat. So that whole
Waiting for Columbus live album by
Little Feat—that’s all Lowell with
his Strat cranked way past 11.”
Turner left Alembic in 1978
with many lessons learned. “Alembic
electric guitars were noted for being
too clean and sterile sounding,” he
notes. “And it was often attributed
to the electronics. I came to the
conclusion that it was not the electronics—
it was the way the guitars
were made. The very stiff neckthrough-
body construction, with
a primarily maple and purpleheart
neck, didn’t allow enough warmth
and body to come in.”
Given his involvement with the
legendary acid-trip rock band of
the flower power era (and of all
time), as well as the freewheeling,
“free love” reputation of the scene
it dominated, one could easily
assume Turner sort of stumbled
onto the recipes that his highcaliber
instruments and electronics
are known for. Nothing could be
further from the truth. He studied
acoustics and the science of sound
extensively, and even took Don
Davis’s famed Synergetic Audio
Concepts (aka “SynAudCon”)
class. He also learned invaluable
lessons from his association with
Wickersham (whom he calls “a
genius”), John Curl—who remains
on the cutting age of audio
design—and Dead live sound
mixer Owsley “Bear” Stanley. In
fact, the lessons garnered from
this time with Alembic and the
Rumours sessions with Buckingham
were crucial to Turner’s development
of the Model 1.
“Based on talks with Lindsey,
and also the general criticism of
Alembic guitars, I started thinking
very deliberately,” says Turner. “I
said, ‘Okay, what I’ve got to do is
climb down off this branch of the
tree and get down on the ground
and look around for another
tree to go up, in terms of guitar
design.’ I went to a set-neck guitar
with a mahogany body to try
to get the best of both worlds. I
wanted more of that clarity from
the body, because I had played that
hybrid SG and didn’t like its whippy
neck. I also thought the SG was
fabulous within about a one-octave
range, so I wanted to extend that
range. The choice of an arched
top and back was very deliberate.
I really thought about every aspect
of the instrument. And then I
showed Lindsey the blueprints and
he said, ‘Oh, you know, I’d get one
of these. I’d like the first one.’ And
then Alembic blew up on me. Part
of the settlement was that I left
with the design.”
Few get to see the beauty of the Model 1’s backside