Harmony H82 electric tenor banjo

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Here's another electric banjo, this time it's a Harmony 4-string tenor and, unlike the previous ones we have looked at, it doesn't have a skin top to it - so that purists may argue that it's actually a tenor guitar. It has an electric guitar style magnetic pickup mounted onto a spruce top. The seller has copied out the marketing blurb from the 1955 Harmony catalogue that this appeared in, and which I in turn shall reproduce here:

A completely NEW instrument!

Harmony Electro Banjo (Pat. Apppl'd For).

A new instrument in which banjo tone is created electrically - an achievement of Harmony research and ingenuity.

Tuned and played as the traditional banjo. Though the magic of an ingenious bridge and electronic pickup assembly, mounted on a resonant spruce sounding board, it produces the familiar crisp banjo tone so popular today - through an amplifier.

Finished in Jubilee Red and white. Harmo-metal band with fluted red plastic insert at top edge. Pearlette inlaid fingerboard, with edge binding.

Individual tuning keys.

G L Wilson

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

Nechville Meteor Electric Banjo

guitarz.blogspot.com

OK, to be honest, I know nothing about banjos, and even less about electric banjos, so maybe I'm unduly amazed by this Meteor by Nechville, but I find the concept of the cutaway really brilliant and inspirational! It's so cool that it deserves to be a guitar (sorry banjo lovers!)

I won't pretend I can bring any more information about it - I would just copy-paste what you can find on Nechville's website, so if you're interested, just click on the link above. 

Bertram

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

Steve Puto's 5-neck

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Scott from RockGuitarLife.com brought this crazy instrument to my attention. It's a five-neck electric bass/guitar/banjo/mandolin/fiddle and with a harmomica attached at the top too just for good measure! The guitar belongs to Steve Puto and is on loan to the Cantos Music Foundation in Calgary

Read about it here.

Photo by Steve Puto.

G L Wilson

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

Bizarre electric tenor guitar... or is it an electric banjo?

guitarz.blogspot.com:
Guitarz reader Doug Barker brought this very strange 4-string electric to my attention.

It has a 27" scale, and so is much longer than a tenor guitar which tend to have a scale length between 21 and 23".

I wonder if the neck has come from a 5-string banjo because of its length and because of the headstock shape (although it looks like a piece has broken off). However, it doesn't have the fifth string or the "step" in the neck at the fifth fret where the extra machine head would be located. It's possible that the neck has been reworked to give it an even taper along its length.
The guitar is fitted with two pickups each of which has its own output lead. These would be the kind of magnetic pickups designed to be used on a flat-top acoustic. The rear pickup is quite a sought-after DeArmond unit (in fact, the same unit that John Martyn used to have on his Martin acoustic. I never did understand, by the way, the reason that there is a polepiece missing in the B-string position. Does anyone know?).

As this is a one-off instrument (apparently having belonged to the seller's grandfather), it's very likely that it was tuned to the player's own requirements and it doesn't necessarily have to adhere to the conventions of guitar, tenor guitar or banjo. Those are just labels that are convenient to help our own understanding.

G L Wilson

NB: Please make sure you are reading this Guitarz post at guitarz.blogspot.com and not on a Scraper blog that copies posts without permission (and steals bandwidth) so as to profit from advertising. Please support original bloggers!

My guitars...

The collection has changed a lot since I last featured an item on my own guitars on this blog. Here is the collection as it currently stands after having sold a few guitars recently (warning BIG pictures):

Fender Japan Blue Flower 70s style Strat circa 1988. Bought approx over one year ago - it had one lady owner previously who had played it once then put it away in its case for years, so it's in mint condition. Not to be confused with the more recent inferior re-issues.

Fender Japan candy apple red 12-string Strat

Feline Holy Panther - built by Feline guitars of Croydon using an original 1970s Fender body. Inspired by Russ Ballard's guitar.

DiMarzio one-off "Red Beauty" built for 1984 NAMM trade show. Read more here.

Sanox Sound Creator plexiglass bodied Strat-type guitar. Made in Japan in the 1970s.

Fernandes Pink Plexiglass Sustainer Guitar. Totally unique. One-off guitar made for the trade shows. VERY heavy. Has far more sustain than other Fernandes guitars I have played.

Ovation Celebrity acoustic. I can't remember the model number off the top of my head. Names are always much easier to remember. Nice sound and the built-in tuner is a god-send, but the action's a little high for my tastes.

Ovation Breadwinner - circa 1976. A true classic - the first truly ergonomically designed guitar - first production guitar with active electronics and 24-fret neck. Note glossy black finish and small scratchplate.

Gibson Flying V Faded Cherry, circa 2004.

Mania Fretless Bass. Bought to replace my Mexican-made Fender Jazz Bass fretless which I never got on with. Thru-neck, lovely woods, lovely sounds... (with roundwound strings, btw. I know a lot of people put flatwounds on a fretless because they are scared of marking the fingerboard but they sound like crap. Use roundwounds and the bass literally sings.)

Short-scale EB0-bass, probably Japanese, early 70s. No, it wasn't me who painted and decorated it. Cheesy-looking but nice sound - particularly from neck pickup.

Kay K45 Travel Guitar. Thru-neck construction, DiMarzio designed pickups, brass hardware. Circa 1980s.

Traveler Pro Series travel guitar. Features magnetic single-coil pickup, piezo pickup under bridge for acoustic sound, plus "stethophones" which pick up sound from internal diaphram under bridge which lets you privately practice totally acoustically. Made in USA.

Yup! It's only got 4 strings. (No - it's NOT a bass). It's a tenor guitar. Very limited edition in Telecaster styling from Soares'y Guitars.

Guitbass. Three-stringed guitar as used by The Presidents of the United States of America. I built this from parts from an old Japanese Strat copy, Epiphone humbucker, plus various other bits and pieces that I had in my box of bits. The three strings are tuned C#, G# and C# (octave higher than the low C#). Looks like sh*t but sounds great.

Yamaha EZ-EG. Not really a guitar at all, but a guitar-shaped synth-controller. Has on-board sounds and can connect to other synths via MIDI. The right-hand has picking "strings" and the left hand has buttons laid out for each of the strings at 12 fret positions, so you can indeed play it like a guitar.

Countryman 6-string banjo. Banjo players would call it a guitar and guitar players would call it a banjo! It's a banjo, but with six strings so that a guitarist can use regular guitar tuning and get a banjo sound. Very loud.

My ukuleles. Greg Bennett baritone ukulele on the left and Mahalo soprano on the right. The soprano is a bit small for my large fingers, but I love playing the baritone.

Yamaha Pacifica. Bought in pieces, refinished and re-assembled my me. The striped "deckchair" look was an experiment with three different colour oil finishes and some tape! It's far from perfect but I quite like it. There is no tone control because I prefer it that way. (OK, truth be told, it fell off when I was removing the electrics from one broken pickguard to a second pickguard, and I couldn't be arsed re-soldering it on, but as I never use passive tone controls anyway this was no big deal). This guitar is actually a really nice player. It intones well and has a nice action. Perhaps it would benefit from some hotter pickups but they would cost me way more than the rest of the guitar. This is the guitar that I keep at my parents' house in Wales and which largely makes the travel guitars redundant. I also have the body and neck of another Pacifica which needs re-building. (An unfinished project - or perhaps that should say an unstarted project?)

Other guitars that I have owned and sold on include:

Vox Standard 25
Vox Clubman II guitar (later converted to fretless)
Westone Thunder I-A fretless bass
Eko Ranger XII 12-string acoustic
Eko mando-guitar
Aria Elecord FET-DLX electro-acoustic
Aria Legend Plexiglass Jazzmaster
Fender Japan Stratocaster pink paisley (circa 1988)
Fender Japan Telecaster pink paisley (early 1980s)
Fender Japan Stratocaster Antigua re-issue
Squier Stagemaster 7-string
Fernandes Revolver Pro with Sustainer
Fernandes Native Pro with Sustainer
Bass built with parts from Brandoni guitars
Sakai EB0-style shortscale bass
Avon EB0-style shortscale bass
Fender Jazz Bass Fretless (Made in Mexico)
Two or three Strat-a-likes self-built from spare parts
Top 20 (Woolworths) guitar complete with vibrato arm
Cheap but nice Telecaster copy
Tele-style guitar self-built from spare parts
Silvertone (Harmony?) Archtop acoustic
Unidentifiable Archtop acoustic
Washburn Idol WI64
Epiphone Les Paul Junior
Teisco MJ2
Danelectro Convertible
Danelectro 56'U2
Danelectro 12+6 doubleneck

...plus a couple of other cheapies that I didn't keep for very long.

Quick Quiz Answer: It's a BANJO!!!

Oh yes indeed! That Fender-esque 6-in-a-line headstock belongs to a six-string banjo. Who would have thought it?

To be precise, it's a Conard six-string banjo otherwise known as a guitar banjo as it's a banjo in guitar format - six strings, guitar tuning. It's an ususual headstock for a banjo, and looks like it would be more at home on the end of a solid bodied electric guitar. I'd bet that not many of you would even have guessed this headstock was on an acoustic instrument let alone a banjo!

This looks like rather a nice neck actually. I have a six-string banjo and the neck is awful - the strings are parallel along its entire length which doesn't help playing higher up the neck.

Cross a Telecaster with a Banjo and what do you get?

...The Gold Tone Banjitar, that's what!

I like this idea, although it's not very often I want that banjo sound. But if I ever did on a more frequent basis then I can see the attraction of getting one of these.

Confession: I do actually already own a six-string banjo. I don't play it very often, because it is very loud and I get paranoid about the whole neighbourhood hearing me. Also, it hasn't got the most guitar-player friendly neck. The strings seem to be parallel to one another throughout their whole length. Is that normal for a banjo? Feels damn weird to me.

[See also, the Scissor Sisters' Flying V Banjo!]

The Five-Necked Flamingo Guitar

Here's one from the Archives. I originally linked to this one back in the early days of this blog (the first English-language guitar blog and longest-running guitar blog ever, I hasten to add). I'm featuring this wonderful Flamingo Guitar again, because it's a favourite of mine and you may have missed it first time around.

In case you think I can't count, this guitar does indeed have five necks - mandolin, nylon string guitar, banjo, electric guitar and a Flamingo neck (of course!) and apparently it is fully playable. (That's a Bird of Paradise capo clamped to the banjo neck's 5th string machine head, by the way.)

It was built by luthier Bernard Lehmann, maker of fine acoustic and jazz guitars, as well as one or two oddities like this, two dreadnought guitars joined by one neck, a water-powered electric guitar, and a guitar that is part telephone. Wish I had photos of those!

More Flying V Madness!

This Flying V shaped banjo was built by Moon Guitars for Babydaddy from the Scissor Sisters. (Via GuitarNoize)

Eccentric but cheap guitars on eBay

This seller on eBay has a distinctly odd selection of guitars up for grabs. Novelty-factor aside, can there really be that many people wanting a quintuple-necked guitar outside of Cheap Trick tributes bands? Some of the other instruments are just as weird. I mean, a double necked fretless bass/electric banjo... I can't imagine there's exactly a big market for instruments such as this. Other instruments are just unfathomable. For instance, a stand-up 10-string lap steel guitar? How can you have a stand-up lap steel? Isn't that an oxymoron? How are you supposed to play that? Another odd one is the double neck with one regular 6-string neck and one lap steel neck. I'd understand it more if the "lap steel" neck was at the top and was angled upwards towards the player (as on a Melobar) but I can't see this being terribly playable as it is. Actually, I'd wager that the "designer" of the instruments isn't even a musician - they look fun but they are so weird that I'd question their practicality and even playability.

CigTone.com - Cigar Box Guitars and a hub-cap banjo too!

Here are a couple of new additions to my personal guitar collection:

The first is this clear acrylic Strat copy by Sanox Sound Creator (try as I might, I can't find out anything about them on the web). It's actually quite a good quality Japanese copy from the 1970s; Nile Rodgers from Chic used to play something similar, I believe. This particular example has been well-used and shows a fair few battle scars - the perspex is chipped beneath the bridge, and it has worn frets in places, etc. However, it does have that certain 'mojo' and it sounds and feels great - it's perfect for those Hendrix impressions! I have to confess that I actually prefer this beaten up old copy guitar to my real Fender Strat (a Japanese 'Antigua' reissue from 2004).

My other new addition is this Countryman guitar banjo. It's basically a banjo with a 6-string guitar neck on it, so it allows guitarists to play a 'second instrument' simply by using their current knowledge of the guitar. Sneaky, huh? A friend of mine commented that it's not a 'real banjo', but it sounds like one to me, and I can't be bothered with all that 4 and a half strings business! Anyway, it's a relative cheapy, I suppose, made in China but with an American-made Remo head, but it's very nicely built and as I say it has that authentic banjo sound.