Jack Casady

"In 1985 I was living in New York and happened to stop in a music store one day and saw a goldtop, full scale semi-hollow Les Paul bass. I loved the bass but found the pickup to be deficient. It had a tendency to bleed out when too many other instruments were playing. I did a little investigating and found out that only about 400 of the instruments were made in 1972 and because it was kind of an odd duck, it didn’t catch on."

Casady's official site states that he uses an Epiphone Jack Casady bass.

It is stated in this article that Casady used an Alembic 1 Bass in Jefferson Airplane.

The custom bass guitar is made by Glenn Quan from a Guild Jetstar bass, and used by Jack Casady in Hot Tuna around the mid 70's. Jack Casady talks about how the bass was built by Glenn, and the sound of the instrument.. "He was playing around with V guitars and he had down there a Guild bass solid body [a Guild Jetstar] and he took that neck off and he made what he thought would be the appropriate size for a V Bass. Then he got his paint and colours together to make it what would be in a typical Guild dark maroonish red. He put two Guild pickups on it and a Badass bridge and I played that for a while. Again it was a short scale neck. Nothing like the Guild, you know it was a solid body instrument a whole different sound. There was no custom electronics or anything, stock electronics. The only thing I did as I did in the other basses, I would increase the alnico magnets in the pickups. It's a high impedance bass and it's more of a narrower sound, it's a little buzzy. It's not my favourite sound"

In this (rather poor quality) image we can see Jack Casady slumped over an Ampeg SVT-410HLF cabinet (and another one that I'm not quite sure of) in the 'slain by Ampeg' campaign of the early 90's.

In this picture you can see Jack Casady, using what seems to be a normal non modified Fender Precision Bass. Performing with the band SVT at the time, at the Noth Beach Photo Fair in San Francisco 1981

It is mentioned in this article that Casady uses Guild Starfire Basses: "His earliest recordings, including his playing on Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile,” were on a Fender Jazz bass. But he’s better known for heavily modding his Guild Starfire basses and the experimental Alembic Number One."

It is mentioned in this article that Casady used a Fender Jazz Bass on "Voodoo Chile" by Jimi Hendrix.

In this (rather poor quality) image we can see Jack Casady slumped over an Ampeg SVT-II in the 'slain by Ampeg' campaign of the early 90's.

In late 2012, bass legend Jack Casady lost his wife Diana after a hard-fought battle with cancer. Casady pondered ways he could honor her memory before deciding to have a bass built in her honor, citing the fact that she always acted as his ears and musical confidant. The Hot Tuna bassist commissioned California-based luthier Tom Ribbecke to create it. They talked things over and decided to imagine a new take on the Halfling bass, which Ribbecke designed with Bobby Vega.