Guitar Info

Here's a beauty from the beat boom era of Italian guitar building. It's a rare Sano/Goya guitar, this particular model bearing the serial number 1000. The seller sings its praises endlessly, even saying that it's a better guitar than a Fender Jaguar or Jazzmaster. It's a great looking guitar, and if it sounds and plays as good as the seller says, then this may be one to getting bidding on now!

This Flying V bass is an oddity. The headstock bears the Gibson name but it has a bolt-on neck. You'd suspect that someone had applied a Gibson decal to a bass made by another manufacturer, but actually the logo tells no lies. It IS a Gibson. Sort of. But it wasn't always a Flying V.

The bass started life as a Gibson Grabber and was customised by KGB Musical Instruments for Noz Easterbrook of 60s psychedelic band The Klubs, using as many of the original Grabber parts as possible.

Whether the body was re-styled and re-used, I do not know, but I'd like to think so, otherwise it's just a Gibson neck and hardware on a new body.

The other thing that strikes me is that it's not as HUGE as genuine Gibson Flying V basses. Apparently it was styled on a Flying V guitar body which is, I believe, smaller than that of its bass counterpart.

I'm not sure what model Teisco this is. It's not covered in the ID Parade section of the Teisco Twangers website, which I realise is not an exhaustive list. But all the Teisco trademarks are there - the 4+2 headstock, the striped metal pickguards, the "rocker"-style pickup selector switches, the gold foil pickups... Nice to see that the trem is all present and correct too. The fact that it is left-handed must make it quite a rarity. how often do you see left-handed Teiscos?

This "Parts-o-Caster" Strat has been finished with the dreaded pinstripes.

C'mon, it's time to stand up and be counted. Who actually likes pinstripes?

I've heard many opinions about pinstripes over the years, all of them negative. I've never heard a good word said about them, so why does the design persist? Someone must like it.

Personally, I think it looks bloody atrocious. You may as well let a toddler loose on your guitar with a selections of Sharpies.

Originally designed as a travel guitar, the J-Walker from March Guitars of Montréal is a high-class compact guitar that can hold its own against the best guitars on the market in terms of sound and sustain. With a 24 3/4 inch scale, it has a headless design set-neck on a compact mahogany body with a choice of lacewood, curly or birds eye maple top. The guitar is equipped with two Seymour Duncan humbuckers with volume and tone controls, each with push/pull function to select single-coil mode and coil tap, making for a versatile instrument in a small package.

Meazzi Guitars were produced in Milan, Italy, in the 1960s by the Meazzi brothers. The Meteor Bass was produced between 1964 and 1969 and came in one and two-pickup versions, the Meteor Bass I and the Meteor Bass Extra respectively.

The bass appears to be very thin-bodied, and has some pretty heft hardware on it - check out that bridge cover - but controls-wise the bass is quite conventional, unlike some of Meazzi's other guitars with sliders for treble and bass and a quick silver kill switch activated when the instrument is put into a horizontal position.

However, is it just me, or does the action look a little too high on this bass? (And why was that model's head cropped off in the above pic?)

Apparently only a very limited number of these USA-made Renaissance guitars were built. Which might explain why I've never heard of them before (not that I'm a walking encyclopaedia of guitar builders and luthiers).

The body is made of a smoked effect transparent acrylic and has a neck of flamed maple with an ebody fingerboard. The pickups are a pair of DiMarzio humbuckers with a volume and tone control for each plus pickup selector. It would appear to have a pair of coil-tap switches also, allowing for a versatile range of sound options.

Note how the control cavity has a metal plate at the front and back of the guitar. It should be nicely screened, at least.

It's a classy-looking guitar, and with those DiMarzios in a perspex body, it should be able to scream and sustain along with the best of them.

First produced in 1980, the Riverhead Unicorn Bass was one of the first designs to jump on the small-bodied headless bass bandwagon following the introduction of the seminal Steinberger L-series bass.

Note also the body design, clearly borrowed from the Burns Flyte.

Notable players include Dave Pegg of Jethro Tull.

Harp guitar banjo - wouldn't the 5th string tuner on the banjo neck get in the way when playing the guitar neck?

The 18-string Thing - with 10-string nylon-strung neck, and inexplicably 8 additional steel treble strings on the body. The cutaway hardly looks very useful either.

The 15-string Electric Upright Harp Bass - I reckon they are making these things up as they go along. I don't think those treble strings would be very reachable when playing the bass in an upright position. I'm a little suspicious also of inlays in fretless fingerboards, which need to be as smooth as possible with no potential ridges or edges that the strings might catch on.

There are some particularly wacko guitars on eBay right now, which is good news for this blog. This 26-string harp guitar is an acoustic with two six-string necks - one steel-strung, the other nylon, a set of six sub-bass strings and a set of eight treble strings. I understand the concept of sub-bass strings, but I'm not sure what you're supposed to do with the eight treble strings on the lower part of the body. Tune them to a chord perhaps?

The guitar is being sold by the ebay seller tropicalmoonmusic who have in the past sold some crazily-designed guitars from the Tennessee brand which have turned out to be very shoddily built and virtually unplayable. This harp guitar is very likely from the same source, even if it doesn't carry the Tennessee brand name. If you click through on the link and look at some of the other photos, it does look rather cheaply built. Look at the back of the two six string necks. They are virtually square.

It looks like fun, but I'd approach this guitar with caution.

This one off "La Florita" Stratocaster was masterbuilt by Chris Fleming in the Fender Custom Shop and purchased by its original owner at the NAMM Show in January 2005. It is part of a combo with a Fender amp, both of which feature artwork by Kid Ramos.

Hey everyone, it GLW back here again. I'd like to thank Bertram for keeping this blog going for the past month whilst I've been otherwise engaged on a writing project. He's done a sterling job (even if he does have a worrying penchant for 8-string guitars) and I see that the number of Blog Watchers keeps going up and up.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to string a few words together for an introduction to this book I've been writing and need to springboard a few ideas off you guys.

What makes a guitar a guitar?

What makes it so universally appealing?

Describe the guitar in one brief sentence. (Not one particular guitar, just "guitar" in general).