Airline 7215 Stratotone by Harmony

guitarz.blogspot.com:

This Harmony-built hollow-bodied Airline 7215 is a rare model in the Stratotone family of guitars, as there is no Harmony own-branded equivalent. They were sold in 1963-64 via the Montgomery Wards catalogue. The pictured example, said to be in mint condition, is currently being offered for sale on eBay in the UK with a Buy It Now price of £975.

G L Wilson

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

Harmony H59 Rocket in Hotrod finish

guitarz.blogspot.com:

I think I've gone on record before as saying I am not a fan of pin-striping, hotrod finishes and all that kind of thing, but - cliché or not - on this Harmony H59 Rocket I simply cannot deny that it looks fantastic. I'm going to borrow from the eBay listing and allow the seller to tell you about it:

This is a unique opportunity to own an amazing completely redone Harmony Rocket. I purchased this from an avid collector who loved rockabilly music and hot rods. He took his favorite vintage rocket and had it “hot rodded”. He had his luthier overhaul everything. He redressed the frets, he replaced the floating wooden bridge with a modern roller bridge, he replaced the original tuners with a set of Grovers and readjusted everything to maximize playability. To complete his rockabilly/hot rod project he sent the guitar a custom bike shop in California to paint an amazing professional hot rod flame job paint on the body. The paint metallic paint just leaps out and in the light and looks incredible. The back of the neck is super smooth and plays like butter. Overall the guitar plays and sounds phenomenal! This is easily the best playing Harmony or Silvertone I’ve ever encountered.

The guitar’s neck is very comfortable and is shaped like a 59’ roundback, it isn’t super large like the old Silvertone archtops and it isn’t skinny either…just nice and meaty. There are no dead spots on the neck and no buzzing along the board. The frets are vintage and are shaped like the thin/wide vintage Gibson style. The famous Dearmond gold foil pickups sound big and bold clean and thick and juicy when overdriven. All the tone/volume knobs work and are not scratchy, however two of them don’t turn as easily as the others. They still turn just fine but just not as freely as the others. The pickup selector works and feels very solid. The guitar stays in tune like a dream. Overall an incredible instrument that is perfect for the studio or the stage.

To my knowledge everything is original except for the paint finish, the headstock decal, the replaced tuners, the replaced bridge, and the matching pick gold pickguard. The guitar is in very good condition, all the binding is very tight with no cracking. No major dings, scratches or blemishes...

It just screams "Rockabilly" at you, doesn't it? (I have to admit that I do hate that expression "plays like butter". That seems to be one of those eBay guitar listing clichés. For me, it just conjures up an image of a really digustingly greasy guitar.)

Thanks to Julian Woods for pointing this one out.

G L Wilson

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

1960s Klira with cool gear

guitarz.blogspot.com

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!

1953 Gretsch Clipper

guitarz.blogspot.com

Didn't know that Gretsch could produce a summary guitar? 

Here is the Gretsch Clipper, a budget guitar from the 50s - the name was prolonged later for more sophisticated models - with one DeArmond Dynasonic (or probably a Fidelatone as they were first called) pickup, no cutaway, no pickguard, no sunburst, no fancy inlays or stoptail...

Bertram

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

1997 Gibson ES 295 reissue with Bigsby, P90s, antique golden finish and little flowers (not to mention the florentine cutaway)

guitarz.blogspot.com

This Gibson ES 295 is supposed to be the guitar of many prestigious guitarists, including Scotty Moore who played for Elvis Presley, then in my head I see a fat pompadoured guy in white embroidered fringe suit singing Hawaiian ballads and I feel like running away.

Super cool guitar though!

Bertram

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

1953 Guild X-375 Stratford

guitarz.blogspot.com

The Guild X-375 looks like a classic but it is quite a strange guitar: did you ever see a hollow body guitar with 3 P90s?

It was actually discontinued in the early 1960s when the times shifted from jazz to rock and loudness brought feedback issues, and such guitars were replaced by thinline semi-hollows... But now it became a very exciting vintage guitar. 

With the 3 pickups come 6 switches on a control plate à la Höfner - usually they are white and it looks better - proposing many pickups combinations, though why 6 are necessary I cannot tell!

Guild has been releasing a whole series of X models since the 1950s, and the X-375 (also called the Stratford for some reason) is the same as the X-350 but with a natural blonde finish (instead of sunburst), reserved to the best tops. And as usually, the Guild stoptail is a perfect piece of design! 

Bertram

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

Marma hollow body guitar, from GDR with love

guitarz.blogspot.com

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!

Marcel Dadi's Princess

guitarz.blogspot.com

After posting about the Ibanez Marcel Dadi, I figured that most people probably don't know who Marcel Dadi is - I can understand that, he was supposedly a genius picking player (the picking is a finger technic used mostly for country music and acoustic ballads) so I thought that I should propose a video of Dadi playing his Princess. I've never been interested in him or his music, but when I started guitar is the early 80s, his name was everywhere in France, he had his signature strings that were extremely popular, as were his teaching method books. Anyway, he was also associated with Chet Atkins (and several other country musicians whose name trigger nothing in me), so American readers probably know him better than people from the rest of the world...

Dadi plays here this one-off guitar made by French Luthier Franck Cheval: the Princess. I'm not a fan of heavy abalone inlays but the rolled upper horn à la Gibson Mandolin is quite impressive. Some people call it the best guitar in the world... Ah, ces Français !

Bertram

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

So, Musima, Migma or Marma?

guitarz.blogspot.com

Dear readers,

that will be the question that all true guitar lovers will ask themselves henceforth: is this unbranded vintage East-german guitar a Musima, a Migma or a Marma (the three leading electric guitar brands in GDR, that - according to a comment about the previous Marma post - used to subcontract parts making to each others since they didn't have to compete, thus making some models almost impossible to differen-tiate)?

bertram (thanx to David B and Karl)

Marma hollow body guitar

guitarz.blogspot.com

Another brand about which I have very little to tell (in these times of vintage worship, I wish someone would seriously write the ultimate book about unknown electric guitars), this time from East-germany. This Marma is not as exuberant as the guitars from West-Germany of the time, but it's very elegant with its classic shape, curved pickguard, sound holes, control plate and tail, and its long tremolo arm.

Marma produced also solid bodies, banjos and some guitar devices that I will present soon here (and all information about Marma is welcome).

bertram

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

Gretsch Historic G3156 Streamliner

guitarz.blogspot.com

The Gretsch Historic G3156 Streamliner is not Gretsch's most famous hollow body but its discretion is part of its elegance - and the cat's eye sound-holes are beautiful. It's a guitar that doesn't to belong to any musical style, neither with the look or the sound (based on the reviews I read), with its typically Gretsch fat single coils that sound like nothing else.

bertram

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

Hofner Club 60

guitarz.blogspot.com

The Hofner Club was the best affordable electric guitar you could find in Europe in the late 50s, early 60s - that made it the guitar on which started Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, Gilmour or Blackmore... 

The Hofner Club 60 was the top of the series - it has the typical Club archtop hollow body (with flat back) and short scale neck, the oblique control plate - familiar since you saw it on countless violin basses - plus the ebony fretboard with 3-piece inlays specific of the 60 model. 

bertram

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

1968 Zen-On Morales ESP-290 Black Bison

guitarz.blogspot.com

An hollow-body guitar with Bison Style horns, who could dream of a cooler guitar? This Zen-On Morales ESP-290 Black Bison is a beauty (the pickguard is not original) and I wonder why pointy horns are so rare on this kind of guitars (there is an other example with the Barney Kessel models - a.o. this one by Gibson).

Like many 60s Japanese guitar companies, Zen-On is a blur entity. It is spelled either Zen-On or Zenon - that is very different - before shifting to Morales (why this one is a Zen-On Morales I don't know), but has been labeled also Futurama, while producing a few Jaguaresque original models (remarkable for their contoured pickguards) , but also Mosrite or Teisco clones... And it seems that in the 70s they shifted to acoustic guitars but without a FetishGuitars.com website for Japanese vintage guitars, it's hard to tell.

bertram


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

Hoyer Special jazz guitar

guitarz.blogspot.com:
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!

Godin 5th Avenue Kingpin

guitarz.blogspot.com

Another archtop/F-holes acoustic guitar, the Godin 5th Avenue Kingpin is one of the coolest recent guitars - the Kingpin being the electrified version, with a P90 in neck position. 

It's just perfect, and Godin rules!

On the top of my GAS list!

bertram


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

Harmony H82G REBEL Hollowbody

guitarz.blogspot.com:
This American-made Harmony hollowbody guitar from 1972 features an interesting alternative to the usual volume and tone potentiometers, or even the Italian-style pushbutton switches and rollers, with these mixer-like faders. However, they might not be the best design if you sweat a lot on stage.

G L Wilson

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

50s flat-top hollow-body brand-less guitar

guitarz.blogspot.com

The old floor again, with a matching vintage hollow-body jazz guitar in natural finish.

I can't identify this guitar, it is quite simple compared to the German jazz guitars of the time but the headstock doesn't remind me of any famous American brands... This is much probably a vintage custom - the natural finish looks to me like the original paint finish has been sanded off but the flat top can also mean it's an handmade one-off. Anyway the added P90 pickup says that it's originally an acoustic guitar and then I'm quite out of my field...

Any ideas?

bertram

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

Höfner Jazzica Custom

guitarz.blogspot.com

I've posted about several incredible vintage German jazz guitars here, but the German touch is not lost, and Höfner for example still releases similar guitars, such as this Jazzica Custom.

This beauty is handmade in Germany and combines a great tradition with contemporary technology and ergonomics... But since I'm not paid to make advertisement for Höfner, I let you check their website if you want to know more...

And even my girlfriend who is completely hermetic to guitars unless they make a lot of noise finds it gorgeous, this tells a lot!

bertram

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

Steel-bodied thinline "Teletubby" guitar

guitarz.blogspot.com:
Chris writes:

Hello-

I really like your blog and I check it very often. I love how you showcase the really different stuff out there. I thought you might want to showcase a guitar I built myself. It's a telecaster style guitar- I call it the "Teletubby" because of the bigger bottom end that I added to the Telecaster design. It's a steel hollowbody with an f-hole. I built it with a aluminum neck block and bridge block that is tied together via a welded aluminum bar. It aslo has a Merle Haggard Thinline style pickguard in aluminum. Its a string through body (the strings pass throught the aluminum bridge block) - Vintage Fender bridge and bridge pickup and a Seymour Duncan Jazz humbucker in the neck. Standard Tele wiring.

-Chris Hamilton

Thanks Chris! I've got to say I'm really envious of anyone that can build impressive stuff like that. I'm so impractical, I could never achieve even a fraction of a build like this. Great photos too - thanks for sharing!

I like the design. To my eyes, it's like a Thinline Tele crossed with a 335-style hollowbody. Would love to know how it sounds!

Keep your unusual and one-off guitars coming in, everyone! We love to feature them here on Guitarz.

G L Wilson

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

"Rhino" headless guitar by Jeffrey Schreckengost

guitarz.blogspot.com:
The guitar pictured above is a headless hollow instrument which uses a knot in the wood to form the soundhole. Called the Rhino, it is one of a number of guitars built by artist Jeffrey Schreckengost. You'll see if you click through on that link that he's built some other weird and wonderfully eccentric guitars including a shortscale 2-string fretless bass and a five-string baritone guitar.

The Rhino was built for David Kuzy, guitarist of noise rock ensemble Microwaves, who says about the guitar:

"I think the dark wood is walnut. The lighter wood looks like mahogany, but I am not sure. The neck came from a Squier Tele that I bought at a flea market.

"The fit and finish isn't as nice as some fancier guitars I own (Teuffel/Scott French) but it is definitely playable and a lot of fun. There is no volume control, just a momentary on/off switch.

"I didn't know this guitar was being built for me, I went to an art opening Jeff has with his wife, featuring his guitars and her photos, and he told me he was giving it to him in return for a bunch of random parts I had given him over the years."

Thanks for sharing that with us, David. It's just the sort of oddball instrument that we enjoy looking at here at Guitarz.

G L Wilson

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