here's another post for the dorks out there. i was playing my friend mike's rickenbacker bass and i've always noticed the two inputs. and every time i play the thing i try both inputs and i am constantly confused by them. so i decided to investigate. 

seems like the the standard plug is for a regular cord and the one labeled rick-o-sound is designed to work with a stereo cord. and essentially what it does is split the the two pick-ups into two separate signals that you send to two different amps creating the "rick-o-sound". 

but there's one problem, you need a decoder to split the signals and rickenbacker hasn't made the decoder in like 15 years. what the hell? they still have the rick-o-sound feature on the new basses but no way to use it? so i looked on ebay and this is what i found. 

way cool right? no. the starting price for this pile of crap is $200. so i went investigating and found out that you can use a splitter to do the same work. but is there dignity in that? rickenbacker would be rolling in his grave. i mean, they came up with the gimmick to basically sell these boxes and it failed. but let's think about this in a different way. 

when you hear the sweet bass line that geddy lee busts out in the beginning of red barchetta, is that a failure? no, it is not. and what you're hearing is the rick-o-sound. so i went investigating even more and found out that it's easy to make reproductions. so i'm back at radio shack listening to some kid talk to me about the xbox 794 or something like that, get the crap i need and start building. it was kinda hard because that cat kept trying to jump on the table while i was soldering. but i persevered. 

i found a schematic online and here are the results. i made two different models. not too shabby. but now after all that i'm not sure i can even find a way of justifying using this. i mean, it's a bass. it does what it does. what's wrong with me?