Gretsch G6120S Nashville Jolly Roger

guitarz.blogspot.com:

We've looked at pirate-themed guitars before on Guitarz - see here and here - and here, pictured above, we see a Gretsch G6120S Nashville with Jolly Roger graphics courtesy of the Custom Shop. I'm not usually one for intricately decorated guitars, but this one I quite like. Somehow the graphics seem to be sympathetic to the design of the guitar. Still, with a Buy It Now price of $9,500 I think I'll leave this one to someone else to add to their collection.

Via Vince Gotera on our FaceBook page.

G L Wilson

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

1969 Gibson SG with striped refinish

guitarz.blogspot.com:

We seem to have been having a bit of a SG fixation on this blog recently, don't we?

Do you think this refinished striped 1969 Gibson SG outdoes the silver glitter SG that Bertam posted about earlier? This one, again, would probably be best suited to a glam rock band. I have to confess I secretly quite like it. Hey, it's even complete with the Gibson Lyre vibrola.

Via Vince Gotera on our Facebook page.

G L Wilson

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

Custom glam SG

guitarz.blogspot.com

SG time! Sparkling SG! Glam for the people!

One out of 18 SGs by Gibson custom shop in silver sparkling finish, with 3 humbuckers and everything needed to fight the Emperor Ming on planet Mongo!

Bertram

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

April Fool?

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Here's a Gibson SG that has been painted in a psychedelic fashion to resemble Eric Clapton's "The Fool" SG that he played back in his Cream days. The original is now in the hands of Todd Rundgren, but along with George Harrison's "Rocky" and Jimi Hendrix's Monterey sacrificial Strat, hand painted replicas of varying levels of artistic competence regularly turn up for sale on eBay.

The example pictured here has a Buy It Now price of $1,199.99. For the Clapton fan who desires such a replica, a cheaper option would be to seek out the John Hornby Skewes Vintage-branded replica which we already looked at in my London Guitar Show 2008 review.

G L Wilson

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

1950s very vintage Hagström

guitarz.blogspot.com

The perfect example of the early electric guitar built by an accordion company in reconversion phase, this sparkling Hagström is not unknown to our readers, since we saw almost the same model one year ago, bearing the Goya logo - Hagtröm's brand in the US.

This one also has one of these special vintage tremelo I like so much, and you can notice that it has no knobs at all, just switches and rolls.

Bertram

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

Electric harp guitar, handmade in Hastings, UK

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Now here's something a little bit different, an electric harp guitar with a six-string guitar neck plus five sub-bass strings. I'll copy the specs from the listing:

Hand carved from a single piece of Obeche with Bubinga fingerboard and headstock veneer.

Guitar scale length-25.5". Zero radius(flat)fingerboard. Medium frets.

Grover guitar tuners.

Kent Armstrong PAF and PAF+ guitar pickups.

Humbucking Bass pickup.

Stacked volume and tone controls with Sprague orange drop capacitors.

Separate jack outputs. Seperate bass and guitar amps are recommended for the best sound.

Handpainted Hummingbird scene by american artist Cynthia McGinnis.

Gold hardware.

Custom pickup wiring with 5way rotary switch for humbucking/single coil selection.

G L Wilson

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

Michael Spalt Totem

guitarz.blogspot.com

Here is the Maccaferri's Hole, an unique issue of the Michael Spalt Totem series. Included in the resin top are various bit of recycled materials, including a part of a broken plastic Maccaferri toy guitar with a F-hole filled with beads and rhinestones... Spalt's website claims that the resin used for these guitars has been conceived to have the same thermal expansion and contraction quality as the wood used for the body, and that its rigidity provides sustain the way a maple top glued on mahogany does on more classic guitars...

More than the ornate bodies, I like what Spalt does with pickups, some guitars have unique combinations like a Filtertron, a P90 and a minibucker, or two P90s side by side in bridge position; and there are some cool custom pickups like the ones you can see here, with colored bone tops. This, some nice body designs and some highly experimental models make it worth visiting the Michael Spalt website if you never did (no I don't feel that this is advertisement, these handmade guitars are anyway unaffordable).

A funny thing is that these colorful tops are supposed to be arty, but I have more a constructivist idea of art, and for me the highest aesthetic emotion comes from form and ergonomics, not from ornaments, so I show you the back of the guitar, a nice piece of functional sculpture...

Bertram

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

1960s Egmond in spangled vinyl finish

guitarz.blogspot.com:

This Egmond guitar, made in 1960s Holland and covered in spangled vinyl, is currently up for grabs on eBay with a Buy It Now price of £795. I think this is one for the collectors as Egmond do not exactly have the best reputation for instruments of good build quality or playability. You'd be buying this for its kitsch value.

Also, can you see now why I thought Wednesday's mystery guitar might be an Egmond?

G L Wilson

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

Guild X-100 Blade Runner (again)

guitarz.blogspot.com:

The last time we looked at a Guild X-1000 Blade Runner (as used by Joe Perry in the "Walk This Way" video), it generated quite a lot of discussion in the comments.

Back then I was astounded that someone would ask £7000 for such a guitar (i.e. over $11,300 in US dollars), so in comparison this example, which has been on eBay for the last few weeks, seems to be more conservatively priced with a starting bid of $2,995.

Also, since that last post, I have learned that the Schecter Genesis was indeed copied from this Blade Runner.

G L Wilson

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

1960s Melody Guitar

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Hey, it's got a triple cutaway design, a bank of pushbutton switches, a pearlescent celluloid finish, four pickups... it's GOT to be 1960s Italian, hasn't it?

And indeed it is. It's a Melody, which for a while, operated as a subsiduary to Eko. For the full story, check this article on the always brilliant Fetish Guitars website. This particular example (pictured above) sold on eBay just recently for what seems like a very fair price of €412.

G L Wilson

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

Hamer Miller beer promotional guitar

guitarz.blogspot.com:

This USA-made Miller beer promotional guitar by Hamer with a quilted maple top has quite an attractive shape - obviously derived from the Miller logo - but I wonder if there would be any way of removing the lettering?...

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!

Kawai Aquarius in Cellophane Red

guitarz.blogspot.com:

I know that Bertram is a fan of the Kawai Aquarius, but am not too sure if this example with all-over Cellophane Red finish would appeal to him.

We've seen a couple of cellophane red DiMarzio Strats on here before, including one that I own. (We've also looked at a similarly finished Ibanez DT-250 X series). I'm wondering if this Kawai guitar might have been made in the same Harayama factory that supplied the Strat parts to DiMarzio, or could this have been a finish that more than one Japanese manufacturer were specialising in?

G L Wilson

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

Framus Atlantik 5/113 52 T

guitarz.blogspot.com

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!

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!

1983 Fender Telecaster Elite in Stratoburst finish

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Here's another 1980s guitar with a loud two-tone finish. It's a Fender Telecaster Elite model in supposedly rare "Stratoburst" from the end of Fender's CBS-owned period. The USA-made Elites were only made during 1983-84, and there was also a Japanese-made 22-fret neck edition offered in late 1984.

Other than its iconic silhouette, the Tele Elite has no other traditional Tele features. Pickups are active humbuckers with a TBX guitar expander and a MDX midrange booster allowing 12dB of gain. The controls are laid out in an almost Les Paul fashion (indeed, some Tele Elites also sported a very Les Paul-esque pickguard), and other features include Fender's BiFlex trussrod system and a Freeflyte hardtail bridge.

G L Wilson

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

Ibanez XV500 - so very very pointy!

guitarz.blogspot.com:

This Ibanez X-series XV500 in "Violet halfburst" is from the "be careful not to impale yourself" school of guitar design. It has Ibanez V5 pickups and an incomplete Ibanez "Pro Rock R" tremolo system. Some of the close-up shots on the eBay listing show a few battle scars - not unusual with an unwieldy shape like this. I don't suppose anyone reading will be surprised to learn that this guitar hails from the 1980s: May 1985, apparently. The seller describes the finish as being "flip-flop", but I think this might just be a reference to the two tone diagonal pink/violet colour scheme, rather than a colour-changing finish depending on from what angle you view the instrument.

G L Wilson

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

Pink Shocking Hohner ST Lead

guitarz.blogspot.com

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!

Jackson Soloist SL2H in Yellow Bengal finish

guitarz.blogspot.com

(Almost) everyday I search the Internet about guitars, to learn more about them, to feed this blog, or to see what I will buy (or more likely not buy) to improve my guitar work (and my GAS). I look for special guitars, often vintage ones because we are living in strange times, when most guitar makers and lovers are stuck in the 1950s and consider that the first models built are for ever the best ones, then to find the innovation and creativity we lack nowadays, one has to go to the 1960s and 1970s (I know, I know I said this already but we have new readers all the time!)...

So I look for special innovative guitars in term of sound, technology and design, but also for classics to have a better understanding of the history of electric lutherie, but what I see the most on the web are guitars like this Jackson Soloist the so-called superstrat aimed at metal shredding! And when I have to select a guitar to post here, I always overlook an endless stream of ESP, PRS and other Jacksons to find the Teisco or Eko gem, the one-off built in a garage by an obscure genius or the tripping East-german bizarro that we'll enjoy together. Once in a while I try to show a superstrat to keep connected to the whole guitar universe but I don't have much to say about it like today (did you notice the tigerish finish? about as scary as a stuffed kitten - exactly what you need to play hair metal).

I know that metal is the most spread style of pop music, but there is something twisted in the guitar business, because of all the kids who buy a superstrat in the hope of becoming the next Kirk Hammett, only 1% will actually learn more or less how to play - since shredding is highly technical and difficult, and 1% of these 1% will do something good out of it. If they would play good old garage rock, they would enjoy themselves much more, reach a better result in a few moths, and play much cooler guitars, wouldn't they?

Bertram

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

The Coolest Guitar Ever Built

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Bertram, remember in Crocodile Dundee, when he pulls out a big hunting knife and says "that's not a knife ? THIS is a knife"? Well, I say "That's not a sparkly retro guitar! THIS is a sparkly retro guitar!" In fact this is THE sparkliest retro-est guitar that wasn't made in the golden era of sparkly retro guitars.

This is the holy grail of any vintage guitar collector. This is the COOLEST guitar EVER built - EVER and it's on eBay at this very moment!

We usually think of Guyatone as a typical 60's brand (well, I do) but a quick Google will show that it's still alive and well and selling very expensive effects pedals. And, back in 1982 it was still making guitars.

Hang on, 1982 was the beginning of the era that brought us The SuperStrat, The Parker Fly, The Ibanez PointyThing, The Dean Dime-a-Dozen, The Jackson OMFG! and the original and super-est of SuperStrats - The Charvel. So what was this glittering, glamourous beauty doing being made amidst all those shredder-tastic, testosterone fuelled, dive-bomb-bombastic, cock-rock Phallocasters?

This guitar has an OMG! factor that is measured on the Richter scale. It is sparklier than Elton Johns underpants. It should have a 24 hour armed guard. It will melt your face off if you look at it with an impure heart.

This guitar anticipated the current nostalgia boom spearheaded by the likes of Eastwood and Italia by nearly 30 years and must have looked as out of place as EVH's logo guitar at Yngwie Johann Malmsteen's induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

If you're feeling blue, down in the dumps or just a little moody, get yourself over to eBay right now and scroll through the plethora of wonderful images that barely do justice to the majestic beauty of this oh-so-fine musical instrument and listen very carefully. You will hear, in the distance, the sweet singing of a heavenly choir and a herald of angelic trumpets and you will know you are in the presence of a rare treasure that is a privilege to behold.

Have a very nice day.

David in Heavenly Barcelona

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