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?

Lumpy, green, unpleasant looking thing

Currently for sale on eBay, this cheap 'n' nasty guitar looks like it's just been sneezed out of something's nose. It's that particular insipid shade of light green that suggests that it might be luminous. Surely, it'd be bad enough having such a vile-looking thing assaulting the optic nerves in daylight, without the bloody thing glowing in the dark too. Blimey, I mean, if I was to stick this thing away in some dark corner I'd want it to stay hidden.

Does anyone actually buy this crap, I wonder?

Premier Guitars Magzine reviews Guitarz

I'd like to say a big Thank You to Joe Coffey and Premier Guitar magazine for the half page review of this very blog that appears in their May 2008 issue. However, I have to add that I'm not always able to post daily. In an ideal world I would do, but it doesn't always work out that way.

The whole magazine is available to view online at the website, but I'm going to want to get my hands on a physical copy of this as a keepsake. Also, it looks like there's plenty of other interesting stuff to read in there (and it's just not the same squinting to read it on the screen). I'm not sure Premier Guitar is readily available in the UK; my local WHSmiths doesn't stock it anyway. If anyone could help me track down a copy I'd be grateful.

I always appreciate hearing that people out there enjoy the blog. I originally started it solely for myself and as a way of keeping track of my guitar-based web browsings. It's great that other people appreciate it too!

By the way, in case you've ever wondered why it's spelt Guitarz with a "z", it's because Guitars with an "s" was already taken on Blogspot. However that blog was just your common or garden Teen blog and wasn't guitar-specific despite its name. The only other guitar blog I could find at that time (2002) was Guitar Bizarre which was in Portuguese. Unfortunately that one seems to have bitten the dust now, which is a shame because whilst I was unable to read the text, it always had nice pictures to drool over.

Objects of Desire. #1: Paul Weller's Ricky 330

This is the first in an occasional series of blog items, basically for when I'm experiencing a slow news day in the guitar world and for when I haven't found anything particularly alarming on eBay to show you.

Here's a guitar that Paul Weller used in The Jam. It's a Rickenbacker 330 finished in a pop-art design borrowed from Roy Lichenstein. Allegedly this guitar was actually quite unplayable, and was mainly used for promotional purposes such as TV appearances (i.e. when the band were miming). Nevertheless, it's a fantastic looking piece. If it were mine I'd take it to a luthier and see about making it fully playable again.

Apparently there's no truth in the rumour that Andrew Ridgely of Wham! offered to buy the guitar from Weller, although perhaps having that other band's name plastered over the front of it was what prevented Weller using the guitar with the Style Council.

Holy bass on eBay

The owner of this Precision bass copy has done a really interesting custom job on it. The quality of the finish looks most professional. I don't care much for the way he's trimmed the body and the headstock, but I do very much like the holes. It could be a companion for my own Feline "Holy Panther" Strat.

And before someone else says it, I'm so glad that he didn't finish it in yellow so it ended up looking like a piece of swiss cheese.

UPDATE: Sold for £156.30.

Vintage Lucite-bodied Fender Musicmaster Bass

Here's a rare Fender - in fact it's so rare that it's one of those models that doesn't officially exist!

Currently for sale on eBay, this lucite-bodied Fender Musicmaster Bass dates from the 1970s. Be quick if you want to bid as the auction ends very soon.

The seller doesn't seem too sure of its provenance but I'm almost certain that it's one of those one-off instruments built for display at trade shows.

Fender also famously built a lucite-bodied Stratocaster for this very purpose - a guitar that was reputedly so heavy that it was totally impractical for playing purposes.

UPDATE: Sold for US$1,185.50 (approximately £600.07).

Could this be the Rarest of all Mosrites?

There's a listing on eBay right now for a 1976 Mosrite Brass Rail which the seller claims is "the rarest of all Mosrites" and which has a hefty starting price to justify this at $2,999.

Aesthetically it's a very conservative looking guitar for a Mosrite. It's puts me in mind of the shape now used by the Washburn Idol series. It seems that Semie Moseley developed these guitars for the Japanese market. Here are his comments about the guitar:

"I was convinced I had to change my design, and I built this guitar called the Brass Rail. If I'd stuck with my original design and not spent so much money trying to come up with a new one, I could have made it. See, I put a 1/4" brass right into the neck 3/4" deep and I drove the frets right into it. Sustain like you never heard! I did necks both ways [bolt-on and set]. I mean, it was the ultimate in sustain. You could tune all the strings to zero and the first string would stay to pitch. So, I took a couple of these and let [a salesman] show them, and that's now I got into a deal in Japan."

The example shown here is one of the set necks - the neck continues down inside the guitar underneath the pickups and right up to the bridge.

Apparently there were only about 100 of these built (as you can see in the photo, this is #74) but does that make this "the rarest of all Mosrites"? Well, for a production model, this is very likely true, but there were numerous custom one-off Mosrites including double- and triple-necks and these surely must be considered rarer. I'm also reminded of the trio of surfboard-inspired guitars that Semie built for Strawberry Alarm Clock.

Why don't girls play guitar? asks the BBC News Magazine. Which is a strange generalization, I reckon, because the trend over the last few years seems to be that more girls than ever have been taking up the guitar. Haven't they? They must be building all those Daisy Rock, Luna, Fender Hello Kitty, and Kramer "Jewel" guitars for someone, surely? However, it's a pity that the marketing departments of some of these companies seem to think that in order to appeal to the female market a guitar needs to be pink or hideously cutesy in some way.

Bad Hair Decade

This guitar instructional VHS video was purchased for 20p in a charity shop. Blimey! The 80s were certainly a scary decade. Just look at that hair!

But never fear! I'm glad to report that not only is Wolf Marshall still going strong but also that his hair is looking so much better these days.