06/08/2026
The Rickenbacker 481/12 you’re looking at is the only one that exists. Not a limited run. Not a special edition. One guitar.
In 2011, Rickenbacker pulled a pair of figured maple 4002 wings from a warehouse pallet that had been sitting untouched since John Hall discontinued the model in 1984. To those wings, with their two-ply black and checkered binding, they added the wider neck from a 660, a black-bound maple fingerboard with triangle inlays, blacked-out hardware left over from the BHBT run of the ’80s and ’90s, and toaster pickups housed in Higain cases, a combination that, as far as anyone can tell, had never been done before. Then they gave it twelve strings.
The result was the first through-neck guitar ever built on a 4000-series body, and the first standalone 12-string in the 480 series. The controls are back-routed, master volume, master tone, three-way toggle, leaving the face completely clean, nothing between you and those figured wings.
Rickenbacker historian Andy White, who covers these instruments obsessively, called it out specifically as one of the rare Boutique one-offs worth getting excited about. It isn’t hard to see why.
Now it’s arrived at our shop. Link in bio.
