Rare unusual Tennessee see-thru acoustic electric guitar

guitarz.blogspot.com:

I came across this wee beastie on eBay this evening and of course, it caught my eye.

This is what the seller had to say

RARE UNUSUAL TENNESSEE SEE THRU ACOUSTIC ELECTRIC GUITAR
I've Exhausted Myself Trying To Find Information Online About This Guitar, And Can't Seem To Find Any! It's A Very Imaginative Style & Plays & Sounds Like It Should. The Neck Has A Very Slight Bow To It, But Doesn't Affect The Playing. I Tuned It To An Open D Tuning & Played Some Bottleneck With It & Was Surprised At Well It Did. It Has A Built In Pickup That Sounds Very Good, & It Takes A 9 Volt Battery. It's A Little Tricky To Close The Battery Access Cover. You Can Be The Only Kid On The Block, Or IN TheCity, Or Maybe The State, To Have One Of These Very Cool Tennessee Guitars.

Buy It Now For $149

For $150, it seemed worth checking out. There are some interesting features, quite apart from the skeletal form. The long - to my eyes country looking - headstock, the add-on comfy chair armrest/horns bearing more than a passing resemblance to the OpenSource inspired ZoyBar and the decidedly painted on finish adding a craftsman-like retro feel to it.

The bow in the neck and problems closing the battery compartment are a little off-putting though and, I thought I'd better check and see if we've posted about these before and found that Gavin had in fact posted a few rather damning articles on the Tennessee brand. Like this one in April 2008.

It's hard to see where the marketing strategy for these instruments is heading and that makes things all the more confusing. It seems they are, generally, pretty cheap (in both senses of the word) and pretty weird designs. To me, beginners are most like to go for a recognisable guitar (LP, Tele, Strat?), more experienced players for a better quality and experimentalists will be concocting their own. That only really leaves more experimentalists who would buy it on a whim just see if it could make sounds that other guitars can't or performers looking for something different on stage. This seems quite a narrow niche.

I applaud the fact that these instruments are pretty off the wall but considering the standards set by run of the mill brands (like Squier) these days, they must be a difficult sell, especially when they appear to be so shoddy.

David in Barcelona

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An incompetently-designed harp guitar (I think that's what it's supposed to be)

guitarz.blogspot.com:
Oh no, this is just dreadful. It's another one of those cheaply cobbled-together Chinese-made guitars that pay very little consideration to the playabilty or practicality of an instrument.

I'm not sure where to start... This appears to have extra strings just for the fun of it. Now, I know that some acoustics carrying additional strings will have "sub bass" strings that are positioned outside of the neck as they are intended to be played open, harp-style, but on this neck it looks like they couldn't decide if the bass strings should be over the fingerboard or not, so we've got a little bit of both on a very strangely shaped neck.

Speaking of neck shape, just look at the back of it. It must be square in cross-section. It doesn't look very playable.

I can't imagine how useful the other eight strings mounted on the body are. I guess you could have them tuned them to a chord. I'm also not convinced about the location of the tuners mounted in that little box on the front of the soundboard. Wouldn't it damp the vibrations of the top? Wouldn't it rattle?

But the thing that bugs me the most about this sorry effort of a guitar, is the cutaway on the body. The whole point of a cutaway on a guitar is to facilitate playing on the higher frets of the guitar at the body end of the fingerboard. But here, the cutaway is nowhere near the neck and therefore useless. What is the point? Not only is it without function, it also looks absolutely appalling.

I'm reminded of those dreadful Tennessee-brand guitars, and suspect that this guitar may originate from the same source.

G L Wilson

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Pointless triple-neck

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Uh-oh! You know you're in for trouble when you see a Tennessee-brand guitar. They are often very wacky instruments, but don't be fooled as the workmanship is shoddy and the instruments themselves are reported to be virtually unplayable.

But let's put aside the provenance for this discussion. Just look at this thing: it's a triple-neck comprising 8-string bass, 10-string bass, and 6-string lap steel.

Just WHY?

Why would anyone need that combination of necks on a single instrument? To start with, how many bass players double on "lap steel"? Not that this could ever be a real lap steel. Is the player supposed to un-strap it mid-song, sit down and lay the instrument on his lap for a lap steel solo?

Perhaps the "lap steel" neck was added because it was lying around at the factory at the time this ridiculous instrument was assembled.

Let's forget the lap steel neck. What about the two bass necks? Why would any bassist ever need a 8-string and a 10-string on one instrument? (That is to say, a 4-string and a 5-string with doubled courses, rather than 8 and 10 individual non-paired strings). Surely if you needed to play a song that required both 8-string and 10-string bass, all you'd need would be the 10-string neck and you could ignore the low B course in the sections that "require" the 8-string. In the same way, I can't see why anyone would ever need a 4-string and 5-string bass combination on the same instrument. I could understand a 4-string and 8-string, or a fretted and fretless, but this instrument shown above offers nothing of advantageous use.

It's utter nonsense, and as I've commented on previous occasions, Tennessee guitars seem to be put together by people who know nothing about guitars.

G L Wilson

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26-string Harp Guitar

There are some particularly wacko guitars on eBay right now, which is good news for this blog. This 26-string harp guitar is an acoustic with two six-string necks - one steel-strung, the other nylon, a set of six sub-bass strings and a set of eight treble strings. I understand the concept of sub-bass strings, but I'm not sure what you're supposed to do with the eight treble strings on the lower part of the body. Tune them to a chord perhaps?

The guitar is being sold by the ebay seller tropicalmoonmusic who have in the past sold some crazily-designed guitars from the Tennessee brand which have turned out to be very shoddily built and virtually unplayable. This harp guitar is very likely from the same source, even if it doesn't carry the Tennessee brand name. If you click through on the link and look at some of the other photos, it does look rather cheaply built. Look at the back of the two six string necks. They are virtually square.

It looks like fun, but I'd approach this guitar with caution.

Tennessee Guitars: Buyer Beware!!!

I was rather alarmed to see that the hideous Tennessee 6-string bass / 12-string guitar combo that I featured in yesterday's blog entry received a whopping 19 bids before selling on eBay for $275.

I have previously posted on this blog about these suspicious looking instruments, but this time I decided to do a little homework and it didn't take very long to dig out the dirt. Checking through the seller's feedback reveals numerous stories of unplayable instruments, instruments damaged in transit, instruments not set up, etc etc. Feedback such as this would have put me off, so it amazes me that people still bid.

Over at Harmony Central there are three user reviews for the Tennessee brand of instuments, none of which are favourable.

• Tennessee 10 String Bass
  
  "The electronics though are horrible. Described as having two volumes and three tone controls, it actually has one volume and four tone controls. After removing the control cover plate and studying the wiring, both pickups are wired in parallel to the main volume control and the other four controls are wired as tone controls with the exact same spec capacitor. As you turn up each tone control you roll off more and more highs, until you are left with mud. [...]
  
  When I received this bass it was unplayable. [...] The nut looked liked it was slotted by an 8 year old Chinese sweatshop employee...which it probably was. The "fully" adjustable rosewood bridge only has height adjustments at each end and when adjusted all the way down the action is still a mile high, and of course the intonation is way off with no way to adjust it. Had 4 low frets and several sharp fret edges. [...] If it couldn't get any worse...to ground the strings/bridge, a wire soldered to one of the tone pots is fed through the ball ends of all the strings!"
  
  
• Tennessee 6 string electric/8 string lap steel double neck
  
  "...it was delivered with a broken nut on the lap steel, and in severe need of a proper set-up on the 6 string. [...] This guitar ... is in desperate need of a luthier. [...] It arrived un-playable on either neck.
  
  The 6 string neck seems "ok", but I've not been able to play it at all, due to such a horrible "initial set-up". The action, as delivered, is on par with a properly set-up lap steel guitar. The intonation isn't as well set as my first service merchandise "toy" guitar. The humbucker's trim ring was clearly designed to fit an arch-top guitar in the neck position, but is mounted on a flat top in the bridge position.
  
  The bridge for the lap steel is wooden and NOT mounted to the guitar; it was held down by string pressure, alone. It is not wide enough for the standard 3/8" string spacing and will be replaced with a good hunk of metal. The strings run through the body via PLASTIC ferrels, and were secured by nothing but the wood of the body, and a grounding wire from the electronics run through the ball ends of the strings. The nut was broken between the two lowest tuned bass strings at delivery, and will also need to be replaced. That's just fine, as this will give me time to properly finish the "fretboard", which appeard as if it came straight off of a belt sander wrapped in 80 grit.
  
  Currently, I wouldn't rely on this guitar to hold a door open. [...]
  
  This could not be considered an instrument; merely a representation of one. It is advertised as a "pro" guitar; I wouldn't even consider it a beginner or student level guitar. I wouldn't foist it upon anyone for anything other than shooting practice..."
  
  
• Tennessee Mandolin/Guitar Doubleneck
  
  "Believe it or not, the guitar has no bridge* - the strings come straight off the bigsby, so there is no way to adjust height or intonation. I found that if I threaded the guitar strings under the retainer bar on the Bigsby (which is proper) the strings hit the fretboard. If I allowed the string to be above the retainer, then the 12th fret is no longer halfway between the nut and bridge, and intonation is off by a mile. This is a serious design flaw - the bigsby should have been placed further back towards the endpin so that there would be room for an adjustable bridge, which is the proper set up for a bigsby. (I'm not kidding - if you look at a photograph of one of these, you will plainly see that the guitar has no bridge).
  
  On the mandolin side, putting 2 strings in each of 4 string ferrules is not a good system because the strings do not stay separate as they cross the bridge, and the bridge itself was not grooved to hold the strings in place. The bridge on the particular instrument I received was much too large to function as a mandolin bridge - it was over 3" wide (closer in size to a bass bridge!). [...]
  
  It also smelled like paint. [...]
  
  The instrument I received was not a playable or professional quality instrument."
  
  * - note that the guitar pictured by way of illustration, DOES have a bridge.

These reviews seem to confirm what I've suspected. That is, that these guitars are just thrown together in an attempt to make a quick buck and that the manufacturer really has no idea what they are doing.

Remember the old saying: "If it looks too good to be true - it probably is!"

6-string bass and 12-string guitar all on one neck!

More and more often on eBay these days I'm seeing guitars bearing the Tennessee brand. These guys don't play it safe with tried and trusted popular models. They seem to make up the most outlandish designs possible such as crazy multi-necked instruments (I've featured some of these before) and they always seem to be very cheap so as to appeal to the buyer who thinks "That guitar might well look crazy, but at that price I'll give it a whirl." It's an interesting marketing strategy.

But are these cheap 'n' cheerful (and very probably nasty) instruments actually playable? I'm not just talking quality and set-up, I also wonder if some of them are actually physically possible to play.

A case in point is this ridiculous six string bass and twelve-string guitar on one neck combo. I can't imagine why anyone would want such a thing in preference to a doubleneck. How difficult must that be to play? The difficulty would be further compounded by the two parts of the instrument having separate fingerboards and scale-lengths. I'd love to hear from someone who's played a guitar like this? Just what are the advantages, because I can't see any.

Just because it is possible to build something, it doesn't mean it's a good idea to go ahead and do it. (Even if the headstock does look kind of impressive!)

BTW, for this model, it looks like "Tennessee" copied this guy's design and added the extra strings themselves. From his comments on a previous thread on this blog, the guy who designed the original didn't seem to know how he was going to approach playing it. Then more recently I saw that he had adveristed it for sale! I wonder why?