Wednesday 13 November 2013

1960s Yamaha SB5A Bass made in Japan

guitarz.blogspot.com:
Here we see a very nice example of one of Yamaha's very earliest solidbody bass guitars, namely the Yamaha SG5A bass. Of course, it wasn't the very first Yamaha bass guitar - that distinction goes to the Yamaha SB2 - however the SB5A is the one that most people remember mainly because of its very distinctive design (often dubbed the "Samurai"). Most people think that Yamaha were just being wacky with these body shapes, but actually they are very ergonomic and way ahead of their time for this design dates back to the days when no-one applied words like "ergonomic" to guitars.

Currently listed on eBay with a Buy It Now price of $845.

G L Wilson

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2 comments:

  1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bh9aWmkWFDM

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hello ! I'm here just to ask a couple of questions about it, I'm needing help to restore one that came to me from a friend. I'm currently starting to learn luthier skills and well here I am..

    Could you please tell me what does each pot do? The one I have handy only has the cover of one of the knobs "volume", so I assume the other ones have to be volume and tone respectively. The confusion I have is that when I take off the pickguard, the pots configuration are: dual, regular and regular (3 posts each, except the dual = 6). I cannot try it myself since the pickups are disconnected.

    Hopefully you can throw me some good information about it. It's a beautiful bass and I'm hoping to get it to work neatly.

    Thank you!

    ReplyDelete

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