Boutique semi-hollow guitars - you'll have to look to know more...

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For sure you won't see these guitars everyday! Only two of them were ever built, and handmade semi-hollow guitars with an experimental design are quite uncommon, because another level of skills is required than when you make up a solid body... 

And the result is - IMHO - quite stunning! The shape is brilliant, the thick contoured horns are quite a smart move (people busy with guitar design will understand what I mean) and I love the big German carve! I appreciate the fact that they look timeless and could have been made at any moment of the history of electric guitars (and they would have bizarre all along) - at least in Germany where there is a tradition of highly creative jazz guitars!

I imagine that people who will look at these strange instruments with the image of a ES-335 in the head will find hard to love them, so please forget everything and really look without any preconception - and enjoy!

Bertram

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

1970s Hoyer SG

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Yes I'm a little bit obsessed by these vintage German trems lately - that is ironical for someone who has very little use for one when playing guitar (but I still have so much to learn!)

Look at the big chrome trem and rolling saddles bridge of this superb 1970s Hoyer SG in burgundy finish, isn't it he sexiest thing in the world? 

Bertram

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

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Höfner HE179 Jazzmaster-esque evaluation model

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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!

Klira 'Lady' jazz guitar

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This is a 1965 Klira Lady (another Klira after this one) with a new view at this great vintage tremolo... Since the company collapsed a while ago, it shouldn't be too difficult to copy, upgrade (it would be too high for nowadays standard action) and release this nice piece of gear, why doesn't anybody do this?

Anyway, Klira was quite a good brand from West-Germany -  it's compared to Höfner with which it shared parts - that unfortunately disappeared without anybody gathered a proper database on the Internet about it. These guitars will probably be the next big collectible ones, they seem to be much better than their reputation used to tell.

Bertram

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

Res-O-Glas Nick Page Strich-2

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I regularly check what's going on at Berliner luthier Nick Page (I evoked here a couple of time his Baron model and mentioned his metal front or paisley ultra-cool telecasters), and I'm never disappointed. Today I want to show the res-o-glas body Strich-2, again a perfect combination of old school design and contemporary spirit. The shape is reminiscent of Rickenbacker Combo 600 or Gretsch Astro Jet, with its big upper horn and German carve, but more rounded, probably to increase the resonance of a bigger hollow body made of the res-o-glas you find in 60s original Airline guitars. 

This model has Filtertron pickups, but other ones are equipped with Nick Page custom ones, that is not so common amongst small luthiers. Gear and headstock are also original, and all this confirms that German guitars legacy is still alive, and that small companies keep the spirit high, where fat ones just manage to stay fat.

Bertram

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

1960s Klira with cool gear

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Usually I would not have posted about this 1960s Klira because I didn't find a photo of the whole guitar, but actually I mostly wanted to focus on the gear - particularly the tremelo!

I know I told this many times but I really love these old German trems - it seems that each company did create a new one for each model - this is quite different nowadays!

This very vintage hollow body guitar has other cool stuff - the mini-humbuckers, the rotating switch... It's a pity that the top is warped and sagging, I wonder if it's fixable...

Bertram

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

Unusual antique guitar

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Apologies, but here is yet another guitar about which I know nothing! It is being sold on eBay by a French seller who tells us:

Rare ancienne guitare, forme peu courante, usures et petits manques d'usage.

Longueur de la caisse 435 mm longueur totale 900 mm.

Usures d'usages et du temps.

...which doesn't tell us much more other than its supposed rarity and its length.

Still, it's an interesting piece and worth recording for posterity on this blog.

G L Wilson

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

Teuffel Tesla glow-in-the-dark 7-string

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Everything about the Teuffel Tesla guitar screams "modern" and "innovative" at you, yet despite its space-age design the Tesla is the antithesis of all those modern "perfect" guitars and is designed specifically to emulate some of those idiosyncracies exhibited by some of those older planks we have struggled with. As Ulrich Teuffel says on his website:

In the early days of electric guitar building, you had to struggle not only with the guitar itself, but also with the unwanted background noises that guitars produced in those days, for example, pickup feedback resulting from pickups not yet being wax-potted, or loud humming coming from a loose solder joint. Sometimes the guitar signal would be interrupted when you randomly touched a knob.

Nowadays all these effects have disappeared as a result of technical improvements, although they have become part of music history as archetypes of guitar sounds. They are comparable to sounds such as the scratching of records and skipping of CDs, which have also become musical archetypes and are often cited in today’s music.

With the Tesla I have designed a guitar that, along with modern guitars sounds, also has these primitive sounds at its disposal. Contact points and push-buttons are situated all over the body, which, when pressed, activate the respective sounds.

The above-pictured 7-string Tesla, currently for sale on eBay with bidding at over $4,000 as I type this, has a glow-in-the-dark finish and - as requested by the customer - is the only example to feature glow-in-the-dark side dots along the top of the fingerboard.

The short neck (or is it an extended body on the bass side) make the Tesla an ideal candidate for a 7-string guitar, the rigidity of the body providing excellent bass response.

But if you're one of those "hook the thumb over the top of the neck" players, forget it. This guitar is not for you!

G L Wilson

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

1964 Customized Framus Strato 5/155

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This Framus "Atlanta" isn't a regular Framus model, but a custom job on a 1964 Strato 5/155 (like the one you can see down there; early Framus naming can be a little bit tricky since both Strato and 5/155 have been used for different models, and this for Germany since in the US Strato was replaced by Apollo).

Pickups,electronics and pickguard have been replaced and the guitar (poorly) refinished in black, but they kept the coolest part, the big German 1960s vibrato! No idea where the Atlanta logo come from...

Bertram

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

Vintage Hofner archtop acoustic

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This vintage Hofner archtop acoustic caught my eye on eBay. Despite asking a Buy It Now price of $1,500, the seller offers no information about it other than it's "All Original, never modded." Hhhhhmmmm, for that kind of money I think I'd want a bridge. But anyway, I digress. Does anyone out there know the model? And is that a third soundhole or is it a diamond-shaped label?

G L Wilson

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

1974 Framus Electric Mandolin

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I'm tripping on electric mandolins lately, as I want to expand my music and really enjoy what Warren Ellis does with Grinderman (he doesn't play only his signature tenor guitar). 

This 1974 8-string Framus Electric Mandolin in Black Rose finish could fulfill my dreams and my birthday is soon (my anti-GAS no-more-guitar policy doesn't apply here, it's a mandolin)...

Bertram

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

Vintage Hoyer Telething

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Tried hard but couldn't find anything about this bizarro Hoyer Tele-like guitar - actually it's maybe a one-off or a Frankenstein but it looks quite real - the control plate at least I saw or other (later) Hoyers - they have been releasing Tele inspired guitars for ever - still do.

The pickups feel really Japanese 60s products, the 3/3 big headstock is so out of place that it's attractive, the Silvertone-esque pickguard is pretty cool - I'm quite intrigued by this guitar, anybody knows more?

Bertram

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

Framus Atlantik 5/113 52 T

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This 1960s Framus Atlantik 5/113 has all the cool characteristic features of the model - the slanted single-coil pickups, the batwing pickguard, the four knobs in line, the trem... - but also a nice custom psychedelic paint job... 

I wrote this here already about another guitar: the Germans were the best hippies! 

Bertram

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

Framus 5/51 acoustic single f-hole model from 1969

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Here's a sweet little guitar from Germany: a Framus 5/51 archtop with - unusually for an acoustic guitar - just a single f-hole on the bass side. As is commone with old Framus guitars, the neck is made from multiple laminates, and is also a bolt-on - proof that it wasn't just the Italians (Eko, etc) who used this construction technique on their acoustics.

G L Wilson

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

Duesenberg Starplayer TV in Ninja Turtle finish

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Who can deny that Duesenberg makes some of the most splendid guitars out there?

This is the emerald green pearltop Duesenberg Starplayer, a guitar you can't avoid noticing with its outrageous finish combined with the most elegant design and gear - something we already enjoyed on the Outlaw - with a more sober but still over the edge black crocodile style look...

The Duesenberg tremelos - here it's a Tremola -  have a very good reputation - they feel like a good alternative to Bigsbys.

I feel like one day I should try to earn money if I ever want to have such a guitar - I should compose a hit song...

Bertram

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

Marma hollow body guitar, from GDR with love

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Due to popular demand, here is another East-German beauty, a Marma hollow-body guitar about which - like usually with Marma - I have no information... But look at it, Marma had the sweetest electric guitars designs in the Eastern-European communist countries, combining elegance, simplicity and creativity.

This one doesn't have the massive aspect that jazz guitars had in West-Germany at the time - though their often extraordinary design, they were so huge! - but a sexy thin waist line, and combines classic F-holes with white binding - beautiful with the subtle sunburst finish - with an art-deco pickguard. You can also recognize the typical stop-tail shared buy all the hollow-body guitars in GDR!

Bertram

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 9th year!

Vintage 1960s Klira German hollowbody bass guitar

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A similar shape to the 60s Kent violin bass shown back in 2009. One of the oddities of this Klira bass guitar is its "I'm a violin shape - no I'm not" lower cutaway. Can you call it a cutaway if it's more than the rest of the guitar? More of an add-on really. More than that, it's as if someone took a violin shape and regular guitar shape, cut them in half down the centre and glued two of the halves together (I wonder what happened to the other two halves). The other weird thing is the three plates screwed to front of the body. At least one has "custom" on it so justifying its existence. What the other two plates are for is up for debate. I think we'd all agree - nice sofa!

David in Barcelona
Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 9th year!

A story from Jim Hevesy

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Jim Hevesy writes:

I was at the petrol station yesterday after my son’s basketball game and this guy starts talking to me. Here is the conversation:

Guy: Hey man….are you a musician?
Me: (I’ve got music stickers on my truck) Yes I am
Guy: Awww Cool! What do you play?
Me: I play Bass, Guitar and a little Banjo
Guy: Aww man are you into bluegrass?
Me: I’ve played some bluegrass, I played in a symphony, I’ve played everything but rap
Guy: Aww that is cool. Hey I betcha don’t see one of these every day...

He then proceeds to open the back of his work truck and get out an old small guitar case. He opens it and here’s what he pulls out:

That’s right! A 1960s Hofner 459 6-string with wammy bar. He said he only paid $500 (375 euro) for it! It was strung up with round wounds and sounded great playing even with no amp and the -2C weather. I finished pumping my gas and we both got in our trucks and left. After I got in my car is when I realized I should have taken a picture with my phone because it was a beauty. My son said “Dad, did that guy used to be a hippy?” I said “no son, he still is a hippy!”

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 9th year!

Pink Shocking Hohner ST Lead

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Can we show a guitar just because of its colour? Well I guess we can - to be honest I wouldn't have looked at this Hohner ST Lead if not for its pink shocking so 1980s (the guitar is actually from the late 80s, early 90s). 

When you google this guitar, you mostly find questions of people who want to know more about it - and sometimes that it's a good professional instrument with a graphite neck, and how difficult it is to find replacement parts for it, since Hohner almost completely backed off from the guitar field...

This one is a lefty, and we never show enough!

Bertram

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 9th year!

Taranaki P-style

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I'm always attracted by guitars trying to escape usual designs, even if the result is not completely satisfactory - as it is the case with this Taranaki P-style. I understand that the big horns are meant to regain the material lost with the very deep curves, or even increase some very localized vibrations (I couldn't find any technical description for this body but I've found some luthiers documentation describing extensively how the vibrations travel in the body and how horns can have a strong influence).

Actualy there is almost nothing about the Taranaki guitars, there is no proper website but a distribution company one where Taranaki is actually not mentioned - it seems that the guitar being unsuccessful provoked the fall of the company, because they were released in 2008 and announced to be widely distributed and in 2010 there are no traces of them... Anyway, I gathered that the Taranakis were conceived in Germany and made in Korea, that there are two models - this P-style with three P-90 pickups, and another one with humbuckers, that they use high end gear, and I saw different finishes - a couple transparent colours on flamed maple tops and plain white...

So yes aesthetically it's a kind of failure, but this demo reveals a pretty nice sound...

If anybody has more information about this guitar, it's welcome, I'm quite curious about it... 

Bertram

Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 9th year!