K. Yairi tenor guitar

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Here's an intriguing 4-string, possibly tenor, guitar from K. Yairi.

K. Yairi, a company overseen by Mr. Kazuo Yairi in Kani, a small community in the mountainside area of Honshu, Japan, are renowned for their high quality acoustic guitars. However, their guitars usually are more conservative in appearance than this one. This particular instrument's scale length of 24.8" puts it into regular guitar scale territory, rather than the usual 23" scale of a tenor guitar. It's an odd one, for sure. Alas, the eBay listing tells us very little about it.

G L Wilson

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

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!

Warren Ellis Signature Tenor from Eastwood Guitars

guitarz.blogspot.com:

I was watching Later with Jools Holland the other night, and was intrigued by the session from Grinderman whose Warren Ellis was making an incredible sound with what appeared to be Fender Musicmaster or Mustang but with just four strings (see YouTube clip below - OK, so he's obviously using a lot of loops there too).

So, a quick search shows that it's actually the new Warren Ellis signature model tenor guitar from Eastwood Guitars. The alder body is offset like a Mustang rather than an even-waisted Musicmaster, although like the latter it has just a single pickup in the neck position, in this instance it's a blade style pickup. As is common with tenor guitars it has a shorter than usual scale-length of 23", for which the Fender student-model stylings seem all too appropriate.

G L Wilson

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

Early Rickenbacker electric tenor guitar with vibrola

guitarz.blogspot.com:
The Rickenbacker Model B lapsteel from the 1930s is one of the guitars I listed in the "500 Guitars" book; alas there was no accompanying photo published. The guitar was typified by its bakelite body inset with five chrome plates. In 1935 a "Spanish" version was introduced with a regular round-backed detachable neck.

The example pictured above is even more of a rarity, for this is the 4-string tenor guitar version. This well-played example is currently for sale on eBay with a starting price of $2,000.

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

1959 Framus Tenor Thinline 'Peter Kraus'

guitarz.blogspot.com

Tenor guitars are in the air... Just found another one, a coolissima Framus Peter Kraus Thinline (actually it's nowhere called a tenor guitar, it has 4 strings and a small body but the scale is not mentioned)...

Peter Kraus was (apparently) the first German rockstar from back in the 50s, and this is one of his early signature models, you can learn more about him (like I just did) here and here.

bertram



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Vintage Gretsch tenor guitar from 1963

guitarz.blogspot.com:
There was a time when big name manufacturers such as Martin, Gibson, Epihone and Gretsch would produce tenor versions of their popular six-string guitars. Pictured above is a Gretsch George Gobel Model tenor guitar from 1963. By the 1970s most manufacturers had more or less abandoned production of niche instruments such as this.

I have to confess that I didn't know who George Gobel was, so I had to look him up. It seems bizarre to think that a large manufacturer such a Gretsch had a signature model for a comedian and TV presenter! These days that would be so uncool. Gibson also had a George Grobel model, the L-5CT archtop.

Thanks again to Doug Barker for drawing my attention to this eBay find.

G L Wilson

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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

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Jacobacci Tenor Guitar

guitarz.blogspot.com

Here at the Guitar Blog we love tenor guitars, because they only have 4 strings so they are easy to play, but you don't look silly like with a ukulele (OK uke fans, you can start the bashing!)

Look at this beautiful Jacobacci tenor guitar and its very special headstock. I don't have any details about it, but it looks pretty old, so it's probably Jacobacci's pre-electric era, also it's not a catalogue model but probably a one-off. These are only computations, anybody's information is welcome.

I found it on djazic.com, a French e-shop with some nice vintage stuff that's worth looking at. And if you want to know more about famous French luthier Jacobacci, you can check here.

bertram

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Mickey Mouse Club Tenor "Mousegetar"

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Hello GL, from snowy and cold Washington DC, where we're about to break our all-time record for snowfall amounts by Wednesday morning.

A guitar that's quite a curiosity is this nearly 60-year-old relic from American television's "Mickey Mouse Club" -- the original tenor "Mousegetar", played by host Jimmie Dodd. This particular instrument is in the Disney Museum in California, and the photo is credited to Megan Duffy, posting on Flickr.

The curiosity is that no one seems to know who built this guitar; whether it was a private luthier, the props department from the Disney organization, or a commercial maker preferring to remain anonymous. This is a perfectly playable instrument and can be seen in web videos from the old Mickey Mouse Club.

Disney manufactured plastic toy copies of this tenor guitar, but this one remains the "cool one". If your followers can contribute any info on this guitar, have at it.

Regards,
Alan Peterson
Broadcast Engineer & Proud Gretsch Owner
Washington DC

Thanks for that, Alan. When I first saw the photo, I thought that the mouse ears were the soundholes (similar to the "modern" idea of positioning a large soundhole to the left and/or right of the neck on acoustic guitars) but on viewing the YouTube video below I see this is not the case.

G L Wilson

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Guild archtop tenor guitar

guitarz.blogspot.com:

For the 'less-strings' lovers, this is a tenor guitar - here a 1974 Guild archtop one. It's a beauty, well balanced with its florentine cutaway, big headstock and elegant black finish - but not just a small guitar, it has its proper proportions.

It's not been very long since I've been aware that tenor guitars exist. I guess it's because it is a quite specifically American instrument - though I found a Portuguese company making some - for specific music. The neo-folk current hype on continental Europe brings this kind of instruments back in the light.

I can see why guitar players want to play other similar instruments - myself I'm a hidden mountain dulcimer player for almost 30 years!

Bertram

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Soares'y electric tenor guitar

Here's an eBay purchase from earlier in the year.

As older readers will know I am quite interested in guitars with reduced numbers of strings, and am a fan of the baritone ukulele which is tuned the same as the first four strings on the guitar.

I was intrigued to try out a similar electric instrument, and I got a good deal on this Soares'y tenor guitar. However, I found the sound to be too bright for the usual DGBE tuning, so have been experimenting with open tunings on it and also trying to teach myself a little slide.

Soares'y Guitars website

Breedlove Guitars teams up with Joe Craven for a tenor guitar