Archtop Soprano Guitar

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Ever heard of a soprano guitar before? Neither did I until today, but it's exciting - like a tenor or a baritone! Guitars never stop surprising me! 

This one is a one-off made by a Swedish luthier, with Stradivarius F-holes, and has a scale lentgh of 400 mm... It's so rare that I might never see one in real, but I'm very curious about this instrument!

Bertram

© 2011, 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!

1947 Gretsch Electromatic Spanish Electric Guitar

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This surprisingly well preserved Gretsch Electromatic currently gracing eBay is quite a beauty. It has some remarkable features but the most unusual, for me, are the machine heads. We showed a Modulus Genesis G3 a while back that had compensated tuners to keep the strings in a straight line and this appears to be an earlier attempt at the same idea. I think this is what's known as an "engineering solution".

I'll let the sellers describe the rest:

This is for a 1947 Gretsch Electromatic Hollow-body Spanish Electric Guitar. This terrific guitar looks great! The top and back of the body do not have any cracks or chips in them. The right side of the body has two screws driven into, one right next to the neck and the other right next to the top binding between the upper and lower bouts; the screw between the bouts appears to have a couple of very small cracks extending about 1/8" away from it kinda parallel to the binding, but the other screw does not have any cracks involved with it. The top, back, and sides all show a few dings and indentions in them as well as a few very light surface scratches - none of which is through the lacquer to the bare wood. The inside of the body appears to be a bit dirty and some of the wiring is not original. However, the pickup and potentiometers do appear to be original.

The output jack is loose and needs to be re-attached and the knobs are missing on the front. The neck and headstock both show similar surface scratches and indentions as those found on the body, but are also free of cracks and chips. The tuners on the headstock are also original. The fretboard has a some noticeable spots of what appears to be dried glue on it, plus the frets show some fairly heavy wear, but are still playable. The action on this guitar is about medium-high and it plays well and sounds wonderful. This amazing guitar features a scale of 25-1/2", a 1-11/16" nut width, a 19-fret (14-fret accessibility) rosewood fretboard, and a Gretsch tailpiece.

I'm not 100% convinced that the tailpiece is original, personally.

David - Slacking in Barcelona

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!

Airline archtop acoustic guitar

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Further evidence that you can't always believe what you read on eBay. The seller of this gloriously Art Deco-looking Airline archtop obviously hasn't done his/her homework when listing this guitar on eBay, claiming it is from the 1940s. Although now revived by Eastwood Guitars, originally Airline was a brandname of the Valco Manufacturing Company for guitars sold through Montgomery Ward mail order between 1958-1968.

By the way, although this guitar looks fine in the above images, photos on the eBay listing showing the rear of the guitar tell a sadder story. The neck/body join needs some serious repair work.

G L Wilson

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

Martin F50 archtop

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Here's a reminder that C.F. Martin & Co were not all about flat-top acoustic guitars. This vintage Martin F50 archtop dates back to 1962; this example has been modified by its previous owner having a Kent Armstong Jazz humbucker and replacement machine heads and bridge.

G L Wilson

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

Woven bamboo archtop from Taiwan

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I can't tell you much about this guitar, but you can see for yourselves photos from the construction process here.

Thanks to Frogleg Che who posted this on the Guitarz Facebook page. Please feel free to post pictures of your own interesting or unusual guitars on our Facebook page - they may even make it onto the main blog.

G L Wilson

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

Hofner E1 archtop electric hollowbody

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Recently, when we were looking at a Gibson ES 125, I was speaking of my fondness for the non-cutaway design on electric hollowbody guitars. Well here's another similarly designed vintage beauty, the Hofner E1. For a guitar made in the early 1960s this one appears to be in fantastic condition, and the Buy It Now price is a very attractive £475. In this modern age, a two pickup electric guitar of this design looks really incongruous, but I can't help liking it. Interestingly, there's no pickup selector switch - I guess you select pickups by using the volume controls.

G L Wilson

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

1959 Gibson ES 125 with Bigsby

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For me there is something very appealing about a hollowbody electric with a non-cutaway body design. Yes, I know access to the top of the fingerboard is restricted - perhaps it's the anti-shredder in me that finds this desireable.

Most people associate such non-cutaway body designs with fully acoustic guitars but the Gibson ES 125 was clearly designed to be electrically amplified - just check out the depth of the body in the image above right. This particular example, currently for sale on eBay, comes complete with its original Bigsby vibrato.

G L Wilson

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

1971 Crucianelli élite stéréo

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Here we see a Crucianelli élite stéréo archtop guitar from 1971, currently being offered for sale on a French website. Made in Italy, Crucianelli had strong ties with Eko (as discussed here) and this same body was also used for the Vox Super-Linx which was also produced in the Eko factory.

The most interesting feature of this guitar, however, must be its four pickups - two for the treble and two for the bass strings - and the independent pickup selectors for treble and bass. No doubt this allows for some interesting pickup combinations, which would be made all the more interesting by the stereo output.

Thanks to Dirk Lubbe for bringing this beauty to my attention.

G L Wilson

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

A Flying V for jazzers?

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Here's a Flying V-styled guitar with a difference - it's an archtop! This guitar was handcrafted by Personal Guitars of Washington, USA, and was recenrly offered for sale on eBay Australia. Thanks to Liam, who spotted this one.

G L Wilson

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

Prototype Eastman El Rey ER-F

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This Eastman El Rey is exactly the kind of guitar I love: an ultra-classic archtop jazz guitar design smartly distorted to personalize and update its line in an extremely elegant way, and a few killing details, like the round cutaway and the ebony tailpiece and pickguard on a white finish...

For some reason Eastman never released this F-holes version of their El Rey series designed by Otto d'Ambosio, so this prototype is a one-off so far...

bertram

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

Groucho plays guitar

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Here's Groucho Marx singing and playing guitar in the 1932 Marx Brothers movie Horse Feathers. Note how he does the old switcheroo with the guitar towards the end of the sequence.

G L Wilson

Additional: Dave Brown points out that the guitar is a Gibson L5 and you can read all about it and Groucho the guitarist here.

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

Gretsch G6196T Country Club reissue

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And another classy one with a venetian cutaway: this is the ultra-classic Gretsch Country Club G6196T, a hollow-body electric archtop guitar with two pickups and the longest lasting model from Gretsch, this one in Cadillac Green finish, with a Bigsby trem and DeArmond singlecoils.

It's supposed to be noticeable for being played my Mister Bono but if there is a band of which I couldn't ever listen to a single note, it's U2 (except a few bars from an intro of one song used in Pillow Book of Peter Greenaway in the catwalk scene - but Greenaway is a man of good taste who cut the song after 10 seconds).

bertram

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

1958 Höfner 4550/S

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Another splendid vintage archtop electro-acoustic guitar is this Höfner 4550/S aka Senator (according to continental or UK nomenclature). Here again this is the venetian cutaway version of the previous spanish model, upgraded with a pickup. I love the strangely shaped perloid scratchplate!

bertram

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

1952 Gibson L-7C

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A queen amongst the acoustic archtop guitars I love so much, the Gibson L-7C is a version of the classic L-7 with a round venetian cutaway, and is still in production since its released in 1949 - claiming for some reason to be one of the few non electrified acoustic archtop guitar built nowadays, like it's the best idea they ever had.

Anyway, that's why this 1952 one has been upgraded, probably in the 60s, with a DeArmond pickup. The honey-blonde finish fits particularly to this model, much better than the usual sunburst, as it allows to perceive at the first glance its elegant and structural simplicity.

Look at it people, this one is supposed to be one of the best guitars in history!

bertram

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

Hoyer Special jazz guitar

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This Hoyer Special dating from 1957 immediately struck me as being very odd, as essentially it appears to be an acoustic jazz guitar with a tremolo.

However, of course, this guitar would have originally had a pickup. I guess the volume and tone controls would have been mounted on the pickguard (also missing here) because from what I can make out from the poor photos, there are no appropriate holes in the body for them.

It's an attractive guitar from the highly-arched front and back, the over-large catseye soundholes and deep single cutaway, through to the large inlaid headstock with its fancy tuner buttons.

I'd thought that Hoyer were a name from the past, but it seems they are still a going concern and have a brand new range of models for 2010. See www.hoyerguitars.com.

G L Wilson

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

Gibson ES165 Herb Ellis model from 1991

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This is a Gibson ES165 Herb Ellis model from 1991, and is the kind of guitar I reckon that our very own Bertram might well lust after with its big Jazzer body, Florentine cutaway and black finish.

Guitarz reader Shubert Silva saw this guitar being offered for sale on Mercado Libre, Uruguay's equivalent of eBay, and was amused at the sheer audacity of one person offering their amp (unspecified) plus a Korean-made Ovation Celebrity Deluxe in exhange.

Kudos to the seller for responding politely and with good grace!

G L Wilson

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

1965 Framus Missouri

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I've always loved archtop acoustic guitars, and I wonder why they are not more common... They feel more suitable for steel-strings when flat-tops and round holes belong to nylon strings. This 60s Framus Missouri is way cool, with a deep cutaway perfect for jazz players (it's not a model to play folk songs around a bonfire). 

bertram

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

Selmer archtop guitar with the weirdest-looking pickup

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Here we see a vintage Selmer archtop guitar with a very strange-looking pickup unit attached. At first I thought it might be an aftermarket pickup for electrifying acoustic guitars, but the unit and the guitar itself both bear the Selmer name and as the pickup seems to be firmly bolted into place perhaps the guitar actually came like this new.

It's certainly the ugliest looking thing I've seen clamped to the front of a guitar since Godley & Creme's Gizmo sustaining device (and never mind that came later).

Selmer were a musical instrument manufacturer established in the early 1900s and based in Paris, although by 1928 they had aquired a semi-independent UK branch. From the 1950s and through to the 1970s they imported German-made Höfner guitars. Some of Selmer UK's own-brand guitars were actually produced by Höfner especially for the UK market, and that is most likely what we are seeing in the example pictured here.

Thanks to David Brown for bringing this guitar to my attention.

G L Wilson

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