Höfner Telecaster

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In the 1960s Höfner made Telecaster one of its unescapable models.

But they didn't just copy the Fender original model, this is their own version, that has everything more or less different: as much as I can see with the angle even the body shape (bigger horn, isn't it?) is slightly modified, as is the headstock, also the rectangular control plate with the jack output, big knobs and flat head switch, the truncated pickguard and of course the pickups that look like nothing I've seen so far...

And on top of that it has one of these extra cool Höfner trems!

Bertram

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

1960s Decca Bass

guitarz.blogspot.com:

I don't always get around to blogging about guitars I'm watching on eBay before the auction ends. I try my best to feature guitars while the auction is still active just in case some of you guys want to place a bid or hit that Buy It Now, but I'm usually watching so many at any one time and it's not possible to feature everything at once.

Sorry, that's a long-winded way of me saying this auction has already finished. This Decca-branded bass had a starting price of 99c and sold for $261.79. It's a Japanese-made instrument, and the seller claims that:

It is clearly an early product of the Matsumoko (whose Guyatone bass guitars had these pickups as well) and the pre-Kawai owned Teisco guitar factories as it has recognizable parts from each of those plants.

Well, the neck definitely looks Teisco with those inlays along the bass side of the fingerboard. The metal control plate is an interesting shape and incorporates an angled outward output jack (NOT "input jack" - sorry, pet hate of mine) which calls to mind a Strat style output socket mounted upside down and inside out.

The seller believes that the brand ties in with the Decca records label and that this brand of instruments was primarily produced for sale to small record shops. All of which sound highly feasible, but is conjecture.

Does anyone out there remember the Decca brand or know any more about this?

G L Wilson

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

Got Wood?

guitarz.blogspot.com:

I just picked up a Fender Classic Player Baja Telecaster last week and posted on my Facebook page (My first "real" Fender apart from a couple of Squiers and a FR48 resonator). I mentioned that I'd like to see it with a rosewood fingerboard and that got me thinking...

Rosewood vs Maple... hmmmm? What other kinds of woods would be suitable for fingerboards? So I did a little Googling and came up with this interesting snippet from www.axehandle.net

"The most common fingerboard materials are Maple, Rosewood ,and Ebony.

Maple (Acer Saccharum) can be available in different flavors including flamed, quilted, birdseye, and hard maple. A maple fingerboard will brighten the sound of any instrument. It is a very strong and stable wood that can be found on most fender necks.

Brazilian Rosewood (Dalbergia Nigra) is the wood of choice for fingerboards of high-end guitar manufactures. Right now, this beautiful dense wood is the trend but because of CITES making it illegal to harvest living rosewood trees, it is getting harder to find. Brazilian Rosewood will add a warm clear rock + roll like tone to your guitar as well as $$$.

Ebony (Dispyrus Melanoxylon) is by far our favorite choice for fingerboard material. Its sexy black color is perfect for popping the white mother of pearl inlay that will really show off your custom guitar features. This fast feeling fingerboard offers a bright tone with uncompromising sustain!

Some other wood suitable for fingerboards include Bocoto (Cordia Elaeagnoiders), Bubinga (Guibourtia Demeusei), Canary (Centrolobium Ochroxylon), Cocobolo (Dalbergia Retusa), Indian Rosewood (Dalbergia Latifolia), Macassar Ebony (Dispyrus Macassar), and Bloodwood (Brosimum Paraense).

Some of these different species are more pleasant to work with then others. A word of caution: Different people react differently while milling exotic woods. Several of the types of wood mention above are considered somewhat poisonous. They are very oily and during sanding can create vapor-like fumes that will irritate skin and respiratory systems. Please educate yourself and take the proper precautions".

Of all these the only uncommon wood I recognise is Bubinga. I have seen a couple of guitars with eye boggling figured curly (or birdseye) maple fingerboards and I have a Maccaferri with its plastic fingerboard as featured here in 2009.

Are these the only suitable materials or we just a very conservative bunch?

I wonder if any of our readers have come across bizarre or unusual fingerboard materials.

David in Barcelona - A bit snowed under at the moment so aplogies for lack of recent posts.

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

Watkins Rapier 33 from 1961

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Further to the previous post, here is one of the latter, more commonly-known, Strat-inspired design of Watkins Rapier, although this one from 1961 is still quite an early model. If you compare and contrast with the Rapier in the previous post you'll notice that they are not really the same guitar at all, they just share a common name. This one is a Watkins Rapier 33 - the 33 denoting three pickups.

G L Wilson

Edit: Sold for £210.

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

Watkins Rapier from 1958 - the original model

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Compare this early 1958 Watkins Rapier to the later models and it should become apparent how revolutionary the Stratocaster design must have been at the time, for manufacturers such as Watkins to borrow from its curves in their later designs. This early slab-bodied model Rapier was only made from 1958-1959. Some later examples borrowed the Strat-style headstock shape before the redesign to make the whole guitar's outline more Stratty.

For more about Watkins and associated brands WEM and Wilson, I must direct you to the fantastic Watkins Guitar World website, essential reading for anyone interested in the history of British guitars.

G L Wilson

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

Orfeus thinline

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The only thing you can be sure about Bulgarian communist-era Orfeus guitars is that they often look like no other guitars... That's the case with this one, about which I unfortunately know nothing... 

Like many of these east-european guitars, it looks like it was designed by someone who heard a description of an American model (here could be a Rickenbacker) and tried to recreate it in his own way - like when in the Middle-Age people having heard of a rhinoceros envisioned it as an unicorn... For example Orfeus had a model called Джипсон - Djipson - a Bulgarian interpretation of Gibson...

BTW, a Jazzmaster trem looks good on thinline, isn't it?

Bertram

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

Höfner HE179 Jazzmaster-esque evaluation model

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Now here's a Höfner guitar that I've not seen before. And no wonder, it's what they call an "evaluation model". I think that means "prototype" to you and me.

Here's what the seller has to say about it:

Höfner HE179, Jazzmaster style evaluation model, mint condition, in original carton very rare. In 2003 Höfner designers came up with a jazzmaster styled model in very limited number (apprx 50) which were sent out to specific dealers for evaluation across the World. Perhaps not wishing to go up head to head with Fender on the similarities of the jazzmaster, Höfner decided not to proceed. [...] Maple body, with rich sunburst finish, Grover tuners, stop tailpiece and adjustable tuneomatic bridge, 3 way pickup switch, volume and 2 tone controls, fully bound neck and headstock. Pickups are a pair of stonking Gibson-style humbuckers (which look suspiciously like a set of Lindy Fralin Nickels), fully pole-adjustable, these produce a mighty punch. One of these guitars found its way to Oz last year and fetched over £1000 on Oz Ebay.

So, there you have it. Personally I wouldn't have thought that the body shape would put Höfner "head to head with Fender", as plenty of other manufacturers have borrowed this same body style. I'm also not too keen on the 3+3 headstock design with this body shape; it looks a tad incongruous.

Whatever, it would seem to be quite an individual guitar for the player who doesn't want to have the same axe as everyone else, and the Buy It Now price of £340 seems very reasonable.

G L Wilson

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

Racy Gibson SG GT

guitarz.blogspot.com

So we have to get used to it, Gibson will never create a new guitar any more, the best they can do is to release endless variations of their classics - once brilliant innovations ahead of their time and setting the standards for those who followed.

Unfortunately they are not even good at their current trend and get easily lost in these high-tech gadgets they're busy with lately - the worst being the Firebird X (the non-reverse body is everything but cool, you have to remember that it has been issued first  in 1965 when Gibson was in its worst phase and didn't have the guts to stand for the radical reverse body design of the original Firebird).

OK, enough ranting now, maybe I should have started my post with a more positive tone, like: 'waow, look at this cool and racy SG!' The 2006 limited edition Gibson SG GT is one of the good Gibsons of the last years (for some reason, the SG has been inspirational, I also find the Zoot extremely interesting  (I finally saw one at my local guitar shop but guys were queuing in front to try it). 

Its design (racing stripes and lots of chromes) is inspired by some sport car (I'm French, the only car I can identify is the Citroën 2CV) - this kind of idea had worked too when the Firebird was conceived by car designer Ray Dietrich. I love the big shiny stoptail aerodynamic cover and fitting pickup rings, and amongst the technical improvements, you'll find super hot splitable humbuckers (activated by push-pull knobs), high pass tone filter, locking jack output and dual truss rod.

Bertram

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

Have Fender got something right at last with the Pawn Shop Series?

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Now I'm not normally one for doing a piece on every new guitar released by one of the Big Boys in the Guitar World. I usually let the other guitar blogs cover that kind of thing whilst I continue ploughing through eBay and elsewhere for the weird and wonderful.

But, Wow! Here are some new issue Fender guitars that I'd actually want to buy. These are the Fender Pawn Shop Series dubbed in the marketing blurb as "Guitars that never were, but should have been", instruments with the "look and vibe of a modified vintage guitar and hybrid models that have never existed before".

OK, so these could be considered to be variants on existing models - indeed we on this blog have been very critical of Fender in re-issuing variants of the same guitars, mainly Stratocasters and Telecasters, over and over - but now Fender are being a little bolder with these designs, I believe.

One model which should already look familiar to us is the Fender '51, which is essentially a higher spec'd, bona fide Fender version of the Squier '51. The '51 was so-named because of its looks based on the '51 Precision Bass. I guess that the Fender '72 is likewise named after the 70s version of the same bass reissued and renamed the Telecaster Bass. The Fender '72 takes the '51 template but adds a chambered f-hole body and a neck humbucker. The other model in the series is the Mustang Special which features two Fender humbuckers and a hardtail Strat bridge.

Personally I'd love to get my mitts on a Fender '72 in surf green, which I think looks absolutely fantastic.

Thanks to Bill Cesavice on Facebook for the heads up.

G L Wilson

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

April Fool?

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Here's a Gibson SG that has been painted in a psychedelic fashion to resemble Eric Clapton's "The Fool" SG that he played back in his Cream days. The original is now in the hands of Todd Rundgren, but along with George Harrison's "Rocky" and Jimi Hendrix's Monterey sacrificial Strat, hand painted replicas of varying levels of artistic competence regularly turn up for sale on eBay.

The example pictured here has a Buy It Now price of $1,199.99. For the Clapton fan who desires such a replica, a cheaper option would be to seek out the John Hornby Skewes Vintage-branded replica which we already looked at in my London Guitar Show 2008 review.

G L Wilson

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!