Rick Turner

Rick Turner (1943–2022) co-founded Alembic in 1969, spent a decade building instruments for the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, then left in 1978 to start his own company. The Model 1 followed almost immediately — a guitar whose body shape was adapted from Turner's 1820s Stauffer guitar, with a single-cutaway added. Buckingham tried the third prototype in late 1979, bought it, took it on the Tusk tour, and used Turner guitars for the rest of his career. Many consider Turner the father of boutique guitar building for what that instrument represented: an advanced custom electronics platform — 18-volt preamp, rotating humbucker, parametric EQ, piezo blending — at a time when nothing like it existed commercially.

Turner's work with Rickenbacker-influenced horseshoe pickups (his "Rick" double-horseshoe design, used on the Model T) is what initially brought him onto this collection's radar — a natural crossover for anyone deep in Rickenbacker history.

Model 1 The Model 1 is a semi-hollow instrument built more like an acoustic guitar than an electric — bent sides, a cedar center block for feedback control — with a rotating humbucker mounted in a circular cavity that can be repositioned and locked with an Allen key. The electronics options are where the real complexity lives:

• A — passive humbucker
• B — active humbucker (the John Mayer configuration)
• C — active humbucker + parametric EQ (the Lindsey Buckingham configuration — though he reportedly never uses the EQ)
• BP — active humbucker + piezo
• CP — active humbucker + EQ + piezo

Within the Classic series (mahogany-based, typically 7–8 lbs), the Special has no binding and an open-pore satin finish; the Standard adds top binding and a bound headstock in gloss; the Deluxe adds back binding and typically features the five-piece maple/purpleheart neck. The Featherweight series uses different body construction to bring weight to 5–6 lbs, with Special and Deluxe variants following similar logic. Many Featherweights are full customs, so no two are exactly alike. Some have Turner's signature on the headstock — occasionally a label, occasionally a real signature.

Model T The Model T applies Turner's horseshoe pickup design — delivering accurate vintage lead tones — to a solid-body, set-neck format with an all-controls-bypass switch for a direct, load-free signal. The Deluxe ran two pickups; the Standard one. Current production status is unclear.