Guitar Info

guitarz.blogspot.com:

According to the eBay seller, this is "Fender Jaguar inspired" and "a homemade 1 string bass guitar with Fender parts". Well, I can't see any Fender Jaguar influence, nor any genuine or even approximated Fender parts. The pickup looks like it came off an old Teisco or other contemporaneous Japanese 6-string guitar and the headstock shape looks as if its been modelled on a Peavey. Maybe the donor neck is from a Peavey bass? The fretless fingerboard (it's not a "fretboard", as the seller calls it, if it doesn't have any frets!) is made from a piece of aluminium.

Thanks to Jeremiah for bringing this auction to my attention. He comments that, with a starting bid of $9.99, at least the price is fair.

G L Wilson

© 2012, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Part of me really wants to like this "one-off R. Howells handmade metal bass guitar" currently being offered for sale on eBay UK, as someone has gone to a lot of trouble to engineer this piece completely out of metal (which metal, we aren't told).

But another part of me wants to scream, "No no, it's all wrong!" The neck looks exceedingly long, but perhaps that's because the body is small. It may be my imagination, or else the angle of the photograph, but in the full length picture it looks as if the neck is wider up at the nut than it is at the body end. I suspect that it is actually parallel along its length, which would be unusual but not unusable. Of course, playability would all depend on how it intonates. Are the frets positioned correctly for the scale length? They may be, but the cynic in me thinks that this is unlikely.

Look at the engineering of the tuners which are integral to the headstock. I have to wonder if this perhaps was a project by maybe an apprentice metalworker. A certain R. Howells, most likely!

Down at the other end of the bass we find a very solid piece of hardware with adjustable retainers for each string. Quite what purpose these are supposed to serve, I do not know, for they are behind the bridge - which itself does not seem to have saddles of any kind. Maybe the tailpiece blocks are intended as fine tuners, but this does seem a weird inclusion where adjustable saddles would be considerably more useful.

The angled jack on the face of the bass is a nice touch, as are the hand-turned contol knobs, but this bass has not been wired up nor has it been finished having only a dummy pickup mounted in its aluminium pickguard. (And considering the detailed metalwork elsewhere, why does the pickguard look so crudely cut out? Was it finished in a hurry, perhaps?)

This would probably make a better sculpture than a working bass guitar. A lot of hard work has obviously gone into it, so it's only a pity that it resembles a child's drawing of an electric guitar.

Currently listed on eBay with a starting price of £100.

G L Wilson

© 2012, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

guitarz.blogspot.com:

From the maker of the Union Flag guitar we looked at previously (and which is listed on eBay again) comes this guitar for lovers of retro video games, the Pacman guitar. Again, the maker/seller is claiming this is a "prototype" but I can't really imagine that these novelty designs could ever go on to become fully-fledged production guitars; I think he'd be better off continuing to build individual novelty guitars, perhaps offering a bespoke service for bands wanting crazy designs.

And - before someone comments - yes, I am aware of the other Pacman guitar that has appeared on just about every internet guitar forum devoted to "weird" guitars.

The above guitar is currently listed on eBay UK with an optimistic Buy It Now price of £330.

G L Wilson

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

guitarz.blogspot.com:

The fact that this Mickey Mouse guitar is a novelty instrument and that it features hardware identical to some other novelty guitars we've looked at recently (namely the M&Ms and iPod guitars) makes me think they may have been produced by the same manufacturer. It's a pity that the hardware couldn't have been disguised or somehow painted to match the design of Mickey's face. As it is, he looks like he's got some very bizarre facial piercings. As to whether this is officially licensed Disney product or effectively a bootleg guitar, I could not tell you.

Currently listed on eBay with a Buy It Now price of $399.99.

And don't forget to check out the original Mickey Mouse Club Mousegetar!

G L Wilson

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

guitarz.blogspot.com:

We've previously looked at that most desirable of all Teisco guitars - the Teisco Spectrum 5 with its split pickups and stereo outputs - here on Guitarz before, and I would have thought that was about as good as it gets, but look here, Henry Kaiser owns one of apparently only 100 built in plexiglass! Read more here.

G L Wilson

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Here is a early guitar from Chicago's Kay Musical Instrument Company; the seller claims it is from 1929 but this is unlikely seeing as the company wasn't formally established until 1931.

This Kay Wood Amplifying guitar (that's what it says on the headstock) would appear to be some little known species of resonator guitar. Of course, most resonator guitars use one or more spun metal cones to project the sound forward, but this Kay instead has a wooden resonating chamber with a trough that feeds the sound upwards to the dual grille holes. The chamber is covered by a wooden coverplate which helps give it the appearance of a resonator. How well it actually works in practice, I am afraid I cannot tell you.

Currently listed on eBay with a starting price of $995 and no bids at the time of writing. Bear in mind that similar instruments have been listed for over $3,000.

G L Wilson

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

guitarz.blogspot.com:

We first looked at Indian slide guitars here on Guitarz back in 2008. The Indian slide guitar is a hyrbid instrument, a musical chimera if you will, where quite literally East meets West and could be considered a cross between jazz guitar, slide guitar and sitar.

This Pro-grade Mohan Veena w Tumba Indian Acoustic Slide Lap Guitar claims to be the first such instrument to be offered for sale via eBay. It appears to have four main playing strings, four drones, and 13 sympathetic strings with machine heads along the length of the neck.



Hear it in the hands of Harry Manx:


Currently listed on eBay with a starting price of $799.99 (plus shipping).

G L Wilson

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

guitarz.blogspot.com:

OK, it's an iPod promotional guitar, what more is there to say? (Other than you'd feel a right prawn playing one of these). But It Now on eBay for $499.99 - listing ends later today.

G L Wilson

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Stefan Markebo





© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

guitarz.blogspot.com:

The seller of this one-off, supposedly "prototype" rectangular-shaped guitar tells us that the angled neck makes for quite an ergonomic instrument. I must confess that I remain unconvinced, although without trying it out for myself there's no way of knowing for sure.

It's a pity that the Union Flag has been inaccurately rendered - the red diagonal stripes should be set to one side within the diagonal white stripes with a counter-clockwise bias so as to give a pinwheel effect. Oh well, at least it's better than Gibson's sorry effort.

Currently listed on eBay UK (where else?) with a Buy It Now price of £270.

G L Wilson

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

guitarz.blogspot.com:

I have absolutely no idea as to the identity of this small-bodied fretless bass guitar currently listed on eBay UK. It's a weird one for sure with quite a space-age design incorporating a monkey grip in the body, three pickups, and unusual looking hardware. I'd guess that it might be Eastern European, but that really is a shot in the dark. If anyone can give us a more definite idenification, then please let us know via the comments!

Thanks to Alex for bringing this oddity of a bass to my attention.

G L Wilson

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Very much in the style of a cigar box guitar, this three-stringer is a Marks & Spencers Biscuit Tin guitar based on a novelty biscuit tin shaped like a Marks & Spencers delivery van.

This guitar is currently listed on eBay UK with a starting price of £0.99. The seller very honestly comments that: "As you would expect, it ain't a great sound, but it is great fun!"

G L Wilson

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Here's an email from JPM:

Longtime Guitarz reader, it's an amazing blog.

Anyways, I don't know if you're aware of this or not but I just saw on YouTube a snowboard company that build a snowboard out of a Duff McKagan Fender P-bass that is both playable and rideable - its pretty crazy. They even have footage of it being ridden accompanied with a sound from the pickups that they hooked up to a wireless rig.

Check it out, I figured you'd appreciate something like this.

Hey, thanks for that JPM. We've seen a few guitars already made out of pieces of sporting equipment (cricket bat guitar, tennis racquet guitar, even a guitar made from a boat oar) so I guess it figured sooner or later we were going to get a guitar convered into a piece of sporting equipment instead!

G L Wilson

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Steve writes:

Hi, I enjoy your Guitarz Blog and recently found this strange item advertised in a local Buy/Sell. I was tempted to buy it, but the $200 asking price and impracticality of such a guitar made me pass. There are probably more than $200 worth of vintage parts on it, though.

Impractical it may be, but it would be a real shame to break up a one-off instrument like this for parts. It looks to be hand-made, possibly by a luthier although no-one of great distinction. Note how the short-scale 5-string neck's fretboard position markers echo those on the 6-string neck from the 6th fret upwards. I briefly wondered if the necks may have come from donor instruments with the 5-string neck being shortened and with a headstock grafted on, but of course these are through-necks so that wouldn't really be possible. Perhaps the fingerboards themselves came off other guitars?

Also looking at the shape of the 5-string neck's headstock and comparing it to that of the 6-string, I wondered if it had also been a 6-string but part of the head had broken off and thus it was converted. However, the positioning of the rather cheap Japanese Teisco-like pickups on the 5-string side of the guitar so that the 5-strings align to 5-pole pieces with the one on the bass side left unused would imply otherwise - unless it was a later mod.

All in all, it's a very curious guitar and worthy of our attention here on Guitarz.

G L Wilson

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Hello,

My name is Daevid, I live in France and I really like your guitar blog. I have pictures of a friend's baritone left-handed guitar from Budapest that you will be insterested in, I think. It's a small guitar with a strange XLR output.

Daevid

Hi Daevid, thanks for sending those pictures. It's certainly an oddity. I wonder if any of our readers might recognize this guitar and perhaps be able to tell us some more about it.

G L Wilson

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Hi, thanks again for maintaining such a great blog. Here is something you might like from a swedish auction site:

http://www.vend.se/ad.php?83223

Below is a translation, some info is repeated and the first line is a classic, but you get the idea:

This is a unique instrument! It is also the only one of its kind!

It is constructed as a guitar with all the possibilities of an electric organ. The instrument contains the circuit board of an electric organ, which is controlled from the strings and fretboard. Basically the organs "lower/under manual" (not sure what he means here) is replaced with a fretboard and strings.

When a chord is played on the fretboard and strings, a preset rhythm, background and bass line starts. The strings work as they would on a conventional guitar.

An organ keyboard is built into the instrument, with different harmonies.

The construction is a easy to handle electric guitar, with all the possibilities for rhythm, backgrounds and bass lines of an electric organ.

The builder was a musician and telephone electrician, who for years had been thinking about how to build a guitar with backgrounds, just like an electric organ. In the end he built this prototype. Technical drawing is available.

Price: £142 / €165

Kalle Mattssonwww.hijackyourlife.com

Thank you, Kalle. That is, indeed, a classic. Love it. - G L Wilson

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

guitarz.blogspot.com:

I got quite excited just now when I saw that this Maltese Cross guitar had just been listed on eBay UK with a starting price of £300. Then when I looked closer at the listing I saw that it was a copy built by a Spanish luthier and was not an original by eccentric American luthier Harvey Thomas. The Thomas Maltese Cross guitar was, of course, famously played by Ian Hunter of Mott the Hoople (see this blog post for more).

This guitar features maple body and neck with a relic nitro finish, two handwound Strat-type single coil pick-ups with Alnico V magnets, metal dot markers (the orignal Thomas Maltese Cross had cross-shaped markers), a light German carve to the body, and headstock binding.

Alas the guitar needs some work doing to it as the tremolo is said to be "not working" (who knows what that means, it might just need an arm, or it might need more attention), and control knobs are missing.

G L Wilson

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Here's another instrument that looks to be a handmade one-off, although a lot more craftsmanship has gone into creating this than on the boat oar guitar we saw in the previous blog post here on Guitarz.

I'm not sure what instrument the maker thought they were building here, but for our purposes I think it's safe to call it a cross between a tenor guitar, a tenor banjo and a baritone ukulele. The headstock style is very banjo-like, as is the general shape, but the all-wooden construction and soundhole are more guitar- and/or ukulele-like. The scale length is 21 1/2" which is more akin to a tenor guitar or banjo than it is to a baritone uke, but I guess it's up to the player to decide how to tune it and play it. I do like the hexangonal shape at the back of the body. If you've ever tried playing a banjo you'll know that a round body is not the best shape for playing when seated; I'm sure a hexagon-shaped instrument isn't going to slip as easily.

It does need some minor repair work doing to it, but with a starting price of $0.99 on eBay it could provide a nice little project for someone which is unlikely to break the bank.

G L Wilson

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Do you really need me to write an in-depth blog post about this boat oar guitar? It's a boat oar, strung up with three strings and with a pickup mounted on it, and would be used for sldie playing in cigar box star style.

Currently listed on eBay with a starting price of $100 for those who don't want to be bothered with building something similar themselves.

See also the Tennis Racquet Guitar.

G L Wilson

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Apologies for the sub-standard photo, but this was the only one that showed the entire length of the guitar in question face on.

The eBay seller claims that this 1960s Burke electric guitar in metallic burgundy finish was the very first electric guitar to feature an aluminium neck and was thus the forerunner to Wandre, Veleno, Travis Bean, et al. Apparently Glen F. Burke patented the design in 1961. Whether the patent was for the concept of an aluminium neck or if it was for the entire design of the guitar, we are not told; I suspect the latter.

The aluminium neck runs all the way through the body to the end strap button, so it's actually an aluminium neck and centre block with pickups and bridge sitting upon it. The fingerboard is rosewood and the body itself is maple and is hollow, no doubt contributing to the instruments allged "acoustic tone". The body shape is most peculiar, looking as if a symmertical design had been sawn down the middle and one half flipped over. (In fact, I am reminded of this).

The pickguard is odd in that it has no screws mounting it to the body, but instead is kept in place by the pots for the controls, which are comprised of a volume and tone for each pickup, and a 3-way pickup selector.

This guitar is currently listed on eBay with a Buy It Now price of $10,000.

Thanks to Jeffrey Jones and to Dirk Lubbe who both emailed me about this guitar.

G L Wilson

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!