Guitar Info

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Harri writes:

This is my main guitar, Javier, who I modified heavily. He is an SX Liquid from rondomusic.com. I outfitted him with a Retrotron mini humbucker and a lipstick tail pickup from guitarfetish.com, painted him pistachio green, stuck a buncha stuff on him, and now he is as you see! I love this guitar. I keep him tuned to DGCGBB, and his third bridge effects come through really nice when the volume's rolled off. Hope you like'm!

Harri

Thanks for showing us that, Harri. I confess that I have been curious about pickups behind the bridge and the effects you can get with 3rd bridge guitars. I know that Sonic Youth have made much use of them. For anyone who is interested in 3rd bridge instruments, check out the fascinating website of Hans Reichel who made and played guitars not only with pickups behind the bridge but also with another fretboard beyond the bridge. (Sadly, Hans passed away last November, which alas I failed to report on the blog at the time.)

G L Wilson

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

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Just over a year ago we looked at another Rickenbacker 366 featuring this cunning mechanism to switch between 6-string and 12-string playing. I've seen similarly equipped Rickenbackers before, but never before have I seen the same mechanism on this model of guitar, the above-pictured Rickenbacker 456 6/12 Convertible. I don't think the mechanism looks quite as awful on this model as it does on the 366, but still I can't help being reminded of a very pretty girl who has to wear corrective braces to allow her teeth to grow straight.

Looks aside, you have to wonder why a contraption such as this wasn't more successful and why it didn't spawn much imitation. It must surely be a much more convenient way of switching between 12-string and 6-string guitar than using an unwieldy and back-breaking doubleneck guitar. Maybe I have just answered my own implied question, as the Rickenbacker Convertible lacks the visual impact and sheer stage presence of a doubleneck. I guess that rock'n'roll isn't all about the most sensible way of doing something.

This particular Rickenbacker 456 6/12 Convertible is from 1968, is finished in "Mapleglo", and is currently available for sale via Vintage and Rare with a price of €2800.

G L Wilson

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

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We were discussing ergonomic guitars recently, and of course the name Klein came up.

Steve Klein mainly builds high-end acoustic guitars these days, but he is probably best known for his ergonomically designed headless guitars. We at Guitarz have  previously featured a rare left-handed example of the Klein BF-96. These guitars are no longer in production, but have inspired numerous luthier-built instruments and ergonomic self-build projects.

I had heard that Klein produced a bass, but had never seen an example before I was browsing Vintage and Rare this weekend. You'll notice that the body is slightly more elongated than the guitar model, and it also has an upper body horn, which no doubt helps achieve the correct balance of the bass on a strap.

The specifications are as follows:

• 34" Scale
• Fretless Moses Graphite Neck
• Alder Body
• Active EMG J-Pickups
• Passive Electronics
• Steinberger D-Tuner Bridge
• Uses standard strings
• Refinished Body (Nitro)
• Volume - Volume - Tone

(I hope that it's equipped with proper round-wound strings and none of this "flatwounds on a fretless" nonsense. With a graphite neck there's absolutely no excuse for those tone killing strings.)

This very rare Klein fretless bass is currently available for sale via our good friends at Vintage & Rare and is priced at €6800.


G L Wilson

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

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

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Here's one of those odd little footnotes from the history of the guitar. This 1930s Paramount L-Style Tenor guitar, made by Martin, has borrowed several design elements from the banjo. Beside the obvious banjo-derived headstock with banjo tuners, the main body is set into larger rim and back with a series of 20 small soundholes arranged around the lip. The back and rim make for an exceptionally large body for a short-scaled instrument. Apparently only 35 of these were made so it's quite a rare piece, and this is reflected in the $3,500 Buy It Now price on eBay.

G L Wilson

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

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The most immediately obvious design element of this 1960s single pickup electric guitar from Mr. Peters Guitar Mfg. in Santa Ana, California is the Batwing shape on the treble side of the body. However that is not the feature that makes this guitar really interesting, for it is the prototype of Peter Sceusa's patented "Sceusa neck" (Patent 3,091,150) that later appeared on several Rickenbacker guitars.

In cross section, the Sceusa neck's profile is asymmetrical with the thickest section being behind the bass strings, so that the back of the neck tapers from the bass side to the treble side. The concept was developed to allow the player to fit the neck to the arch between the thumb and forefinger of their left hand. In practise it is said to have worked well enough for those players who like to hook their thumb over the fingerboard, but for playing barre chords with the thumb at the back of the neck it posed problems.

This guitar is currently being offered for sale on eBay with a Buy It Now price of $25,000.

G L Wilson

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

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Acoustic don't get much curvier than this. It's a Jon Kammerer Glitter Rose series 6-25G electro-acoustic guitar, and despite its black finish is not made from carbon fibre or some high density plastic, but is of maple construction with an ebony fingerboard. The guitar is fitted with an L.R. Baggs Element pickup. The innovative, patented parabolic design is said to increase structural strength and durability, yet maintain tonal projection while reducing the size/weight of traditional acoustic guitars.

Currently being auctioned on eBay with bidding at $267 at the time of writing this blog post and just over 18 hours to go.

G L Wilson

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

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This Staccato MG bass from 1986 is one of approx 200 guitars/basses built in the UK by Pat Townshend. I recall these guitars well from when they were first introduced, and remember seeing them at a music show in London, I'm guessing, in 1986. As I remember Chris Jagger (Mick's brother) was also involved in the company, and no doubt it was through his connections that these guitars were used by Mick Jagger and Bill Wyman in the Rolling Stones. Other endorsees included Gene Simmons of Kiss, and Motorhead's Lemmy (and if memory serves me correct, I saw Lemmy's bass exhibited at the above-mentioned music show).

The neck and centre body section is cast in one piece from magnesium alloy. Perhaps some more knowledgable readers can confirm this, but I seem to recall reading something to the effect that all the magnesium used in these guitars was filtered from sea water (magnesium being an element dissolved in sea water) and as such provides a material that made these guitars very environmentally friendly. Depending on the process employed to extract magnesium from water, that is.

The outer part of the body is made from fibreglass and seems to have been sculpted to provide for an ergonomic and body-fitting shape. Note that the strings are anchored at the headstock whilst the tuners are situated at the other end of the instrument behind the bridge. Pickups are double-bladed sealed units which are concealed within the magnesium centre body block with only the blades themselves protruding through to the front.

The fingerboard is made from an industrial plastic material and is fitted with 22 very low flat frets, which almost brings to mind the strange fretboard of the Lane Poor bass.

Unless my memory is playing more tricks on me, I believe Staccato offered basses and guitars with exchangable bodies / necks where the centre neck section could be swapped out for another guitar or bass (or converserly the body could be changed for say one in a different colour).

This eBay auction for this bass is finishing in 11 hours as I write; the starting price is $1,999 and Buy It Now price is $2,499.

G L Wilson

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

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It's funny, these Alvarez Dana Scoop guitars with the most extreme cutaway imaginable were everywhere for a brief period in the mid 1990s and then vanished almost without a trace. I can only assume that the styling dated very quickly and players didn't want to be seen with such guitars. I'll wager there's a lot of these cased up under beds and in attics.

Despite their prolonged absence, a couple of these guitars have turned up on eBay recently. This white example is, to give it its full name, rank and number, an Alvarez Dana Scoop AE650TRW featuring a licensed Floyd Rose trem and TriForce pickups. According to the seller, the "Tri-Force/single coil system [...] produce[s] humbucking, single coil and 2 single coil tones". I guess that means there some series/parallel options in there, as well as coil tapping which is implicit. Of course with no physical space in which to mount a neck pickup, a system such as this is desireable so as to squeeze as many tones as possible out of this guitar.

This guitar is currently being offered for sale on eBay for a not unreasonable $549 (so long as this guitar isn't too mid-1990s for you).

See also this post which generated quite a few readers' comments when we looked at a similar guitar.

G L Wilson

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

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The eBay seller calls this a Farnell UltraLite (and manages to spell it three different ways throughout the listing) but from what I can make out on the Farnell website, it's actually a Farnell Electra-lite (unless they changed the name), designed by Al Farnell, although it looks to me as if he's taken a Strat template as a starting point and made various edits to it. However, the appearance of the guitar isn't the clever part - it's what's inside that makes it innovative. To quote from the badly written Farnell website:

The New Farnell Electra-lite Series Guitar features a unique patent-applied for guitar that consists of a molded body made of High Impact Polystyrene which enables unbelievable sustain, attack, major tone enhancement and extremely strong!!

The Wooden insert and the other design features of the Farnell patented process provides for low-end bass tones. The durable Polystyrene/composite casing provides for incredible high-end to overall tone and strength.

However, the proof would be in the playing, I guess. But it's an interesting concept.

Currently being offered for sale on eBay with a Buy It Now price of £499.

G L Wilson

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

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I always think that solidbody electric guitars and basses without any visible pickups look really weird. This is a Zeta Prism bass featuring in the bridge a BP-410 quad piezo pickup system created by Richard McClish (founder of RMC) consisting of four transducers per string, so you could say this bass has 16 pickups! The pickup system is accurately voiced to give three distinct, individually selectable sounds settings, allowing the player to choose between P-Bass, Steinberger-type, or the acoustic-like Zeta settings. These options used in conjunction with Volume, Active Bass (Cut & Boost) and Active Presence (Resonant Peak Sweep) controls increase the sound pallet exponentially.

In a way, it could be considered the Variax bass of its day.

Currently being auctioned on eBay UK with a starting price of £450.

G L Wilson

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

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I'm always happy to feature classic Guild guitars on this blog. The company having been consumed by the mighty Fender corporation survives merely as a brandname of that company alongside Squier. I worry that the original American-made Guild guitars, particularly the solidbodies, are in danger of being forgotten.
As I said in the title of this piece, this vintage 1963 Guild Polara is a real beauty. The relationship to its sibling guitar, the Jetstar, is clearly seen in the design, although the Polara is not so outlandish and is much more pleasing to the eye, with a similar vibe to Epiphone models Coronet and Wiltshire. Body and neck made of fine mahogany, with a fingerboard of Brazilian rosewood. One really interesting feature is the Patent Pending stand and supporting feet on the bottom of the body. I'm not sure how well this actually worked - you'll notice in these photos the guitar is being displayed on a regular stand.

This guitar is currently being offered for sale on eBay with a Buy It Now price of $1,899. Whether it'll sell remains to be seen. In the current economic climate, it seems that in the vintage guitar market big money only seems to change hands where the names Fender and Gibson are involved.

G L Wilson

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

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Babicz guitars bring the acoustic right up-to-date with their patented innovations. The first is the "lateral compression soundboard"; as you can see from the photo, the strings are not anchored at the bridge but instead pass beneath a bar behind the bridge and radiate out in an arc to individual posts. This has the effect of energizing the soundboard and dispenses with the stress which would on a normal acoustic guitar be centred at the bridge. This, Babicz say, provides "a sonic enhancement — one might even say a revelation."

Furthermore the reduced stress on the top of the guitar means that it does not require the heavy X-bracing of other acoustics and instead has a delicate bracing pattern that further allows the top of resonate more freely.

Babicz's other secret weapon is a revolutionary adjustable neck joint that can be quickly adjusted for height without affecting intonation. some other guitars have a a moveable heel design that simply tilts the neck but this affects the intonation; the Babicz system, however, moves vertically on a rail and intonation remains true allowing the player to quickly switch from a set-up allowing fingerpicking to one for slide playing.

The Babicz Spider pictured here is currently being auctioned on eBay UK with a starting price of £400. That does seem very reasonable for such an innovative instrument, if it sounds as good and performs as well as they say it does.

G L Wilson

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

Bertram

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

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Here's a rarity from Guild from back in their pre-Fender ownership days. Designed by George Gruhn, it's a Guild Studio 24 circa 1986 and is a full size acoustic guitar with double cutaways and a 24-fret neck. According to the seller on eBay less than 150 of this particular model were produced. Unlike most other cutaway acoustics, full support under the fingerboard is given right up to the 23rd fret providing "clean, ringing notes that sustain in the upper register". The Studio 24 is built with top grade spruce, highly flamed maple backs and sides, inlaid headstock, inlaid ebony fingerboard and complete grained pearloid binding.

This guitar is currently being auctioned on eBay UK with a starting price of £2,750.

G L Wilson

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

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Micro-Frets Inc was founded in the 1960s by Ralph Jones, a man of a keen engineering persuasion given to innovation and invention. One such Micro-Frets' innovation was the Micro-Nut, as seen clearly in the photo above, which was essentially a fully adjustable compensating nut allowing for perfect intonation and the ability to have the guitar play in tune all the way up the neck. Remember, this was decades before Earvana or Buzz Feiten.

The above-pictured guitar is a Micro-Frets Golden Comet (Micro-Frets often had space-age names). This is quite a basic model without the Micro-Frets Calibrato (a vibrato which allowed the strings to stay in tune relatively while the pitch was being altered) but nevertheless is still a much desirable model. It is of semi-hollow body construction with distinctively shaped f-hole and features pickups desgined by Bill Lawrence and which look decidedly P90-like.

This Golden Comet is currently being auctioned on eBay with the starting price set at a quite reasonable $500.

For more about Micro-Frets guitars see their official website at: www.microfrets.com

G L Wilson

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

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Here's a rare Fleishman bass from the mid/late 1970s. It is very minimalistic and appears to be all neck. It has a 3-octave fretboard - that's 36 frets! This bass was one of Fleishman's own brand instruments, and pre-dates the similar basses he designed for Hondo which differed in having 28 frets.

We looked at such a Hondo "Flash" bass on Guitarz in March 2010, when I rather unfairly commented on Hondo and Fleishman "jumping on the headless bass bandwagon". I've since edited that comment, but think it's only fair to let Harry Fleishman put the record straight:

A quick note to the "bandwagon" comment. International Musician Magazine and other bass magazines have credited me as the pioneer of headless basses. In fact, I suspect they were around long before me, but in the modern era mine were the first, dating to 1975. Again, I've since then seen "headless" instruments from the 19th century. I moved the tuners to take the weight off the neck; that simple. It does help backaches.

My personal favorite "headless" basses are Claudio and Claudia Pagelli's beautiful gold-leaf bass, and my own RED ROCKET EUB. Someone wrote that a headless bass is like a headless woman. That's why I named my headless with a body "Jayne."

www.fleishmaninstruments.com

Thanks for getting in touch, Harry. I think maybe I'd rather naively assumed that Steinberger started that whole headless bass craze that took off in the 1980s (the first Steinberger L-series bass was produced in New York in 1979). There were certainly enough copies around that were obviously directly imitating the Steinberger, not just in headlessness but also in body shape. But yeah, I know, "Never assume..."

(Thanks also to Vince Gotera who posted the Fleishman bass auction on our Facebook page).

G L Wilson

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

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Now here's an idea that I like a lot. On the surface this Chord T-type would appear to be yet another cheap Telecaster copy. It has a solid alder body, which is nice in such a cheapy, and given that the basic Telecaster design is nearly as simple as you can get, well, how bad can this guitar be? Hardware such as pickups and machine heads can always be upgraded.

What makes this Tele different is the ability to swap and change the graphics. The top of the guitar is covered in a clear plastic plate, all you have to do is slip in one of the 4 supplied graphic sheets under the plate... or else - and this is more interesting - cut out and use your own graphics or artwork. I can really see this appealing to younger players (before they get too conservative and nothing other than a vintage butterscotch or sunburst finish will do... Yawn... Zzzzzz...), and it's a cheap and easy way of having your own unique looking guitar.

Before any of you comment, I realise that this is not an original idea. (Is there such a thing as an original idea any more?) Yes, I believe it was Yamaha that marketed a similar idea several years back. I was always surprised that guitar wasn't more successful.

The only drawback I can see to this system is that you'd need to remove the strings so as to take the plate off and change the graphic, and so if, for example, you play a lot of gigs and wanted a different graphic for each night, that could end up being quite a chore. (And not everyone can afford to put fresh strings on for each and every gig.)

Of course if you already have a Tele, Strat or even Yamaha Pacifica, the other alternative to quick change graphics would be the FaceLift system as developed by Status Quo's Rick Parfitt - that has the advantage of being applied to your existing guitar, but the disadvantage is that you can't make up your own custom design.

The Chord Tele-style guitar with variable graphics is currently on eBay UK with a Buy It Now of £107.

G L Wilson

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

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RKS Guitars were a modern forward-thinking innovative guitar company, and embodied everything we here at Guitarz applaud. They didn't look to the past and unquestioningly re-hash designs and concepts simply because that was the traditional way of doing things. They sought to find a new way, which can be seen clearly in the open architecture of their 21st Century semi-hollowbody guitars.

The only time I personally ever saw one, was at a Bauhaus gig several years ago when Daniel Ash was playing a Chrome Molly model (fitted, I believe, with a Fernandes Sustainer). It sounded - and looked - fantastic.

It's such a shame that the company seemed to cease activity in 2007, a mere four years after they went into production. These were boutique instruments with prices to match, so weren't affordable to your average player. Still, it's a pity that more of those with the cash to flash couldn't have been more imaginative instead of running to the likes of the Fender Custom Shop, who - let's face it - build high-end versions of guitars designed to be cheaply produced on a production line. That's an oxymoron if I ever heard one.

Anyway, the above-pictured beautiful RKS in ruby red acrylic is currently being offered for sale on eBay with a Buy It Now price of $2,499. No, it's not in my price bracket either; I wish it was, although if I ever come into the big bucks in a lottery win or whatever, I have an XOX Audio Tools "The Handle" on my wish list first.

Thanks to Vince for bringing the RKS Ruby Red auction to my attention.

G L Wilson

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

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One of these of this extreme offset body prototypes by Oren Clark Guitars is up for grabs on eBay with a Buy It Now price of $3000. These guitars, built for Clark by Zion, are designed with ergonomics uppermost in mind.

For more, see the Oren Clark Guitars YouTube channel.

G L Wilson

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