Left-handed Kramer Ferrington acoustic bass from 1987

guitarz.blogspot.com:

I'm always on the lookout for interesting guitars and basses for our left-handed friends, and reckon that this 1987 Kramer Ferrington acoustic bass isn't something that you see every day, let alone find as a left-handed model. These "electric-shaped" double-cutaway acoustics were designed by Nashville luthier Danny Ferrington, who in the early 1980s had been creating similar one-off designs for himself and a whole bunch of celebrities, before his designs were snapped up and put into mass production by Kramer thus giving Ferrington his 15 minutes of fame.

Well, I say "mass production" but according to our eBay seller here, this left-handed example of a Kramer Ferrington Bass is one of only two known to have been made. It is currently being auctioned sale on eBay with a very low starting price - it'll be interesting to see what it fetches when the auction finishes on the 27th of this month.

G L Wilson

© 2013, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - the blog that goes all the way to 11!

Kramer Ferrnington RT-3 Richard Thompson signature acoustic from the late 1980s

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Apologies for the lack of a Guitarz post yesterday; I was simply too busy to get to use the computer (these days I'm trying to get out and about a little more and actually play the guitar rather than just writing about it).

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

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