guitarz.blogspot.com: This Bunker Bass is an interesting one. It has the appearance of a Gibson Grabber/Ripper with some serious body surgery. It's interesting to note that the tuners are on the body beyond the bridge, predating headless designs such as the Steinberger by several years. Unlike the Steinberger, the Bunker Bass does have a headstock, although this would seem to be purely for aesthetical purposes.
Additional (4 Nov 2009): I found some more information in an article in the My Rare Guitars newsletter, as follows:
...Dave Bunker of Puyallup, Washington, began to turn his thoughts to a better guitar idea. Bunker, born in 1935, began playing guitar in around 1949 and in around 1951 started teaching in Puyallup. Then in 1955 he saw the traveling demonstration show put on by the great tapping guitarist Jimmie Webster and Dave adopted that technique. Conventional guitar design is not optimized for tapping, so naturally Bunker began to experiment and in around 1961 started making his own guitar designs. One of his ‘60s inventions was the idea of the “tension-free” neck. Basically this consisted of a heavy brass nut fixed to a thick brass bar that was attached to another block of metal in the body. A wooden neck was routed out and slipped over this brass core. Strings were anchored into the nut and stretched down to tuners on the butt end of the guitar. The brass neck core took all the tension of the strings, keeping the wooden neck free of any tension whatsoever. Like Les Paul’s “log,” Bunkers guitars often had variously shaped wings that could be bolted on to give more of an illusion of “guitar,” but he was getting down to the bare minimum!
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Here's a great clip showcasing the now legendary VOX guitar organ on the I've Got A Secret TV show back in 1967. Thanks to Andy Stone for finding this one!
G L Wilson
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OK the Dead Weather play some cool instruments, but this is where they come from!
This is Bo Diddley in the mid-60s playing - together with Norma-Jean Wofford aka the Duchess, one of the first female guitarist in a rock band - his famous and beautiful Jupiter Thunderbird. This was not a Gretsch model like most people think, but a custom model recycling Gretsch parts, designed in 1959 by Bo Diddley himself who wanted 1. a smaller body to avoid hitting his groin when dancing, 2. a flashy guitar to shine on stage!
The guitar was named after some American car of the time...
It's only in 2005 that Billy Gibbons - who was given a Jupiter Thunderbird by Bo Diddley - proposed to Gretsch to issue what is known since as the Billybo.
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I didn't like Gretsch's Bo Diddley rectangular guitar so much, until I saw it in snow white in the hands of graceful Alison Mosshart fronting the Dead Weather. I know that this all white Gretsch's guitars band is some kind of marketing hype, combined with Jack White's well applied obsession with colour, and that Mr White himself is evil since he made some fancy duo for a Hollywoodian movie, but they are still quite beautiful guitars (including of course the white Jupiter Thunderbird that White uses on other songs, and that stands ostentatiously next to the drums), and I do enjoy the music (though I prefer the rawer music of The Kills).
And it's so cool to have such a guitar to play just one note, uh!
There is a nice live video of the Dead Weather to watch on From the Basement.
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guitarz.blogspot.com: If you really really really have to cackhandedly carve up a guitar body, then it may as well be a cheap Strat copy. You wouldn't want to ruin anything decent. Guitarz reader Biliby Iwai suggests that perhaps the desired effect was to make something resembling a Fender Musiclander (aka Swinger). Whatever the intention, it looks bloody awful.
How can anyone imagine such incompetent "customisation" can actually be an improvement? How do they have the nerve to use the word "customised"?
Basically for the Buy It Now price of £18.99 you get some cheap Strat pickups and other hardware. You may as well chuck the body.
G L Wilson
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A last stunning German guitar from the Schlaggitarren website - then I let you explore this site by yourself. But you probably never saw such an incredible guitar, one that is not just meant to look bizarre, but obviously an experimentation on sound.
So this is the Hoyer Fantastik, a guitar that really owns its name and appears in Hoyer's early 60scatalogue (picture above) though only six of them were ever built. Its body is made of six wooden tubes with their own sound holes - hence its nickname the 'organ guitar'. Due to its rarity and originality, it's considered the ultimate collector vintage German guitar.
If you click on the link up there you will find also an article in English about the brit guitarist Carl Goldie (right picture) who has been playing a HoyerFantastik his whole career (with an anecdote with Goldie refusing to sell the guitar to George Harrison in 1962 when sharing the stage with the Beatles). You will also find something about this guitar on Jazzgitarren(in English).
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A few days ago, I mentioned again Teuffel's Birdfish - one of my favorite guitars - in the comments about the Epiphone Triumph IIpost, and that gave me the idea of having a look at their website. I had then the surprise to see in their artists section these new pictures (I don't know how new, I didn't go there for ages!) of Kirk Hammet playing two models of the small but sharp German company.
These people at Teuffel made an obviously good communication move, though I doubt that the average metalhead will appreciate the avant-gardist technology and look of these brilliant guitars (no offense to metalheads, they are just as conservative as other rock musicians, even if their shredding god is able to acknowledge the genius behind Teuffel's products).
I do love the Birdfish (left picture), with the undeniably revolutionary concept that led to its birth, but I love even better the Tesla (right picture) that looks less precious, and particularly the 8-string / 29-fret 'super-size' model that I think is a one-off, but has better proportions (well, since I'm a big guy, big guitars suit me better).
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This Bunker Bass is an interesting one. It has the appearance of a Gibson Grabber/Ripper with some serious body surgery. It's interesting to note that the tuners are on the body beyond the bridge, predating headless designs such as the Steinberger by several years. Unlike the Steinberger, the Bunker Bass does have a headstock, although this would seem to be purely for aesthetical purposes.
