Moving swiftly on, the above-pictured guitar is a Kramer-made Ferrington RT-3, a signature acoustic guitar for the No.1 English fingerstyle and folk/rock guitarist Richard Thompson.
By the mid-1980s Nashville-based luthier Danny Ferrington had been building one-off guitars for himself and various celebrities. He was one of the first guys to seriously challenge the strict design templates in the Gibson and Martin mould for acoustic guitar that seemed to be adhered to by almost every guitar manufacturer. Obviously Ferrington wasn't the first to make an acoustic guitar with a cutaway, but his designs were exciting and had outlines that you would have expected to be the sole reserve of the electric guitar.
In 1985, Ferrington began working with Kramer who produced his designs mainly in Korea for the mass market. Suddenly Strat and Tele-shaped electro-acoustics became very popular; for me personally, some of those models looked a little tacky and were no doubt the reason that Fender jumped on the "electric-shaped acoustic" bandwagon issuing the (to my mind very cheap and nasty looking) Stratacoustic and Telecoustic models.
I can't say that I've ever been a fan of "electric-shaped" acoustics, but this Richard Thompson guitar is a glorious design. It has an offset-waist and a double cutaway design yet it still conveys visually that it is resolutely an acoustic guitar, and not an acoustic guitar masquerading as an electric. I particularly like the ovoid fretboard position markers which echo the the soundhole and offset waist. The "mandolin point" on the upper rear bout is also a very nice design touch.
It's interesting to see the Ferrington name on the guitar's headstock; later models had the Kramer logo instead.
This guitar is currently being auctioned on eBay with just over a day left before the finish of the auction and with bidding currently at $406 at the time of writing.
G L Wilson
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Hello, I just purchased an RT-2, and can't find any information. I believe it is a fake, paid 10 dollars for it, but want to make sure it isn't real first before I resell it. Can you point me in the direction of someone who can help my authenticate it, or deauthenticate for that matter.
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