One Grateful Dead origin, two founding stories.

Alembic began in 1969 around the Grateful Dead, and there are two accounts of who started it. The company’s history, written by Susan Wickersham and on its website since at least 1998, says Alembic was founded in March 1969 by her and Ron Wickersham, a design engineer at Ampex. She writes that they met in 1968 at Pacific Recording in San Francisco, where Ron was working on a mixing console for a new 16-track tape machine while the Dead recorded Aoxomoxoa.

In September 1973 Rolling Stone quoted Rick Turner, then at the company: “Owsley started it.” Owsley Stanley, the Dead’s sound engineer, had “coaxed Ron Wickersham away from the Ampex labs,” Turner said, and at first “Alembic” was simply the name for the band’s base in Novato, in Marin County north of San Francisco. In 2014 the magazine gave a version that fits both: Stanley asked Ron and Susan to run Alembic, a project for which he had “already conceived a name, a font, and the logo that the company still bears today.” English Wikipedia names Stanley as the founder.

Susan Wickersham’s history says Alembic moved to San Francisco in 1970 and became a corporation that summer, when Ron gave Bob Matthews and Rick Turner equal shares; English Wikipedia, citing Tony Bacon and Barry Moorhouse’s The Bass Book, also describes three equal shareholders. In 1971 Alembic took over the former Pacific High Recording studio in San Francisco, where it ran a studio and a small shop.

Low-impedance pickups and an onboard preamp.

Alembic’s best-known idea was electronic. Inspired by the Hagström pickups in Phil Lesh’s and Jack Casady’s Guild Starfire basses, Ron Wickersham and Rick Turner designed low-impedance pickups with a wider frequency range, and Wickersham added an active preamp inside the instrument to boost their weak signal, English Wikipedia says, citing The Bass Book. Turner called the process “Alembicizing.” The company goes further and calls these “the first active electric guitar electronics ever,” a claim we give as its own.

The first complete Alembic was a bass for Jack Casady, made in 1972. The company says it was serial number 72-01 and cost more than $4,000. Its features became Alembic’s look: a laminated neck running the full length of the body, which Rolling Stone described in 1973, figured woods such as zebrawood, brass hardware and active electronics. Wikipedia says the 1973 Rolling Stone story brought in enough money to start a standard bass line; Susan Wickersham’s history adds that it led a distributor owned by Norlin, then the owner of Gibson, to order standardised instruments.

That year Stanley Clarke, then with Return to Forever, switched to an Alembic, and the basses became the company’s main business. Bacon and Moorhouse credit Alembic with starting the trend for expensive, high-quality basses, priced at up to three times a new Fender. Wikipedia, citing the same book, says Alembic built what is believed to be the first modern five-string bass, for Jimmy Johnson in 1976, and showed graphite-necked basses with necks by Geoff Gould, later the founder of Modulus, bought by Fleetwood Mac’s John McVie. Sources differ on the date: Wikipedia gives 1977, while the company says the first two were sold to Clarke and McVie in June 1976.

Turner left in 1978. Wikipedia says he went on to found Turner Guitars; the company says it ended his employment and bought back his shares. Alembic says it moved to Santa Rosa in 1979 and introduced the cheaper Distillate that year.

Boutique basses, and who owns them.

The basses in this guide come from small workshops, most started in the 1970s and 1980s by a luthier or a luthier-and-player partnership. Several are connected: English Wikipedia says Vinny Fodera was Spector’s first full-time employee, in 1977, and that he and Joey Lauricella started Fodera after working with Ken Smith Basses.

Three are in New York State. Fodera says it has been in Brooklyn since 1983 and is now a family business with Laura Fodera as partner and chief executive. Sadowsky, founded by Roger Sadowsky in 1979, gives an address in Long Island City, Queens; since 2019, under a licence with Germany’s Warwick, its MetroLine, MasterBuilt and Custom Shop basses have been made in Germany, Wikipedia and Warwick’s Sadowsky website say. Spector, founded by Stuart Spector in Brooklyn in 1976, was bought by Korg in 2019, Bass Magazine reported in 2021; it builds its US basses near Woodstock.

Lakland, founded in Chicago in 1994, was bought in 2010 by a group led by Hanson Musical Instruments, according to the announcement of the deal. It says its USA Series basses are built in Chicago.

Ken Smith Basses says every instrument is handmade at its shop in Perkasie, Pennsylvania. Dingwall, founded by Sheldon Dingwall in 1987, is based in Saskatoon, Canada; its own spec sheets list most models as made in Canada and a few lower-priced ones as built in China or Indonesia and finished in Canada. Alembic is run by the Wickersham family in Rohnert Park, California, the company says.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A cloud, a hand, a dragon and a still.

The name refers to the alembic, the alchemist’s still. In 1973 Rolling Stone described the trademark as an alembic surrounded by a serpent held by a hand reaching down from a cloud, and said it was the work of the artist behind the cover of the Dead’s Live/Dead. The company’s logo page credits the design to “Bear,” Owsley Stanley’s nickname, and the painting to Robert Thomas in 1969. It describes each part: the cloud as the universe, the hand as mankind, the rays as energy, the dragon in a circle as wisdom and infinity, the prism as focus and the alembic as purity. Susan Wickersham writes that buyers of the Spoiler, introduced in 1981, did not want a decal logo, so Alembic switched to cast logos: jeweller’s castings in bronze, sterling silver, vermeil or occasionally 14-carat gold, depending on the model.

We found no sale, merger or outside investor in the sources we checked. Wikipedia lists Alembic as privately held, and the company presents it as a family firm: its staff page names Susan Wickersham as co-founder, president, chief executive and the person responsible for instrument design and most custom inlays, Ron Wickersham as co-founder, and their daughter Mica Wickersham Thomas as general manager. Rolling Stone described the same roles after visiting in 2014.

Where Alembic is based has changed recently. Wikipedia still gives Santa Rosa, where Rolling Stone visited in 2014. The company now gives Rohnert Park, a neighbouring city in Sonoma County, and archived copies of its contact page show the address change between the end of 2019 and January 2020. The company says all woodwork, inlay, finishing, pickup winding and electronics are done at that one site. Its current price list starts basses at $11,975 and puts a four-string Series II at $41,300. A trap for researchers: alembic.com now belongs to an unrelated artificial-intelligence company, and the instrument maker uses alembicguitars.com.

For a design guide, Alembic shows how a brand built on sound engineering can carry a mystical emblem and jewellery-made logos. Compare Gibson, whose then owner, Norlin, also owned Alembic’s first distributor, the company says, and Fodera, another American custom bass maker. For this guide we use purpleheart, cocobolo and brass tones with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Alembic’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.