When I first saw this semi-hollow Lunacharki Maria Leader (Луначарки Мария Лидер), I was stricken by how much its body looks like plastic - and in a pretty good shape for a 40-year old instrument... Well, it is made of plastic, in a typical modernist attempt in Soviet guitar making to shatter any tradition and create all new instruments like the famous and excellent Tonika (and contrarily to East-German or Czechoslovakian electric guitars that relaid on centuries old luthiery craft).
When it comes to East-Europen guitars, cheesyguitars.com is an inevitable starting point, but they make a terrible reputation for this guitar as being the ultimate crap - and I found other sources that are a little bit more positive about it - though my Russian is quite rusted (I gave up studying Russian at the fall of Soviet Union when I realised that there was no future in becoming a KGB spy).
There was a 12-string version of this model, and also a bass one, that have been showed on Guitarz a couple of years ago...
Bertram D
© 2012, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - 10 years and counting!
It looks good but how does it sound? I have nothing against "plastic" as long as you use the right one. After all, fiberglass is plastic ,Ovation's "bowls" are plastic,many luthiers use various compounds of woods and plastic so why not? The only questions are ; How does it sound? How does it feel? How does it look?
ReplyDeleteLike I wrote, the Cheesyguitars.com article about it says it's a total crap that nobody ever wanted to buy, but on sovietguitars.com it has a better reputation and some pictures show that people even replaced the pickups - so the body was not so bad after all. and plastic Maccaferri guitars were far from having a bad sound!
DeletePlastic guitars?! Wonder how it sounds though! Btw check out my guitar effects pedals blog thanks!
ReplyDeletePlease don't stop this blog.
ReplyDelete