Guitars... what you've got / what you want

re: ambiguously desired gretsch, I mean, at $150 it becomes a pretty nice bigsby tremolo with a guitar thrown in as a bonus...

Has anyone gotten guitars just for the parts?

https://i.postimg.cc/02MfqDrT/IMG-0212.jpg

Ordered in Jan sales and just arrived. I’ve never had a guitar with a baked maple neck before but it’s pretty nice.

you're going to absolutely shred w/that

tempted by this: https://chicago.craigslist.org/chc/msg/d/chicago-vox-shadow1960s-vintage/7716510791.html

looks like it's actually a store so maybe i'll go check it out. i do not need or have the money for another guitar but i love the vibe of this one.

for a fairly conventional looking guitar this thing just looks like absolute shit to me

https://www.guitarcenter.com/Epiphone/Dave-Grohl-DG-335-Semi-Hollow-Electric-Guitar-Pelham-Blue-1500000409445.gc

Pretty bland yea

Compare to this, the carcass of a 1968 Yamaha SA-50, the last dumb purchase I made in 2023, arrived today
https://i.imgur.com/4Lbdl2Q.jpeg

Yeah, same, I think the Trini Lopez looks alright though. I think Les Pauls without pickguards look weird also.

Its cool that at least for the premium price you get actual Gibson pickups and decent electronics already there.

does anyone have thoughts about the starcaster (specifically the squier classic vibe starcaster)? i love semihollowbodies and offset guitars but can't decide if i like how the starcaster looks or not

for a fairly conventional looking guitar this thing just looks like absolute shit to me

https://www.guitarcenter.com/Epiphone/Dave-Grohl-DG-335-Semi-Hollow-Electric-Guitar-Pelham-Blue-1500000409445.gc

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Wednesday, 6 March 2024 21:08 (six days ago) link

Definitely a good example of ugly being in the details. Like for a while I thought I wanted an Eastman T-55v, but I just can't get past the look of it.

https://rvb-img.reverb.com/image/upload/s--pWVpdYB_--/a_0/f_auto,t_supersize/v1710195637/axwf6ligkcivtbasyan9.jpg

Why is an ES-335 beautiful and that thing ugly? It's subtle but very palpable.

And it's not the worst looking guitar ever, but there's just something about the body and headstock shape and proportions and the flame top that are just *off*

It looks like something a swing band slinger from Big Bad Voodoo Daddy? in the early 90s would have had custom made.

https://images.ctfassets.net/m8onsx4mm13s/3fhoZP0aDoNdNPYVrSvhqy/c84d1a1eae21c63e32e0fd5a2066a487/__static.gibson.com_product-images_USA_USAVLJ627_Vintage_Burst_ES3500VBNH1_front.jpg

For comparison - body proportions are better, obviously the finish is nicer and simpler, and the headstock just looks much more classic and elegant, doesn't have that cartoonish "squeezed" shape. I also don't like the shape of the inlays on the eastman, whereas this just has dot inlays that basically stay out of the way

i like the look of the eastman other than the gaudy fret inlays. pretty classic
the grohl guitar looks cheap, the diamond cutouts are very 90s for sure and that metallic blue looks chintzy

i think a lot of times we've internalized the classic designs so completely that most small deviations look kind of bad, esp. where many of those involve messing with proportions that were really well done already.

finish quality is another issue as you go downmarket, like i bet pelham blue can look really great when executed well but flat and ugly when not.

I mean, the 335 was one of those classic designs that was meant to be self-consciously classic from the start, right? Electric, but traditional enough to slip into jazz or whatever, not like all those modernist / jet-age / mass-manufacturing gestures on Fenders. They strike me as particularly vulnerable to that thing where fancy tweaks end up looking profoundly out of place. The top on that Eastman is like ... a 335 dressing up as a PRS for Halloween

(Answering the thread question: Marr Jaguar, Tele Custom, Standard Tele, Squire Paranormal Cyclone, Peavey T-15, Epiphone Les Paul. Would love to reduce that to just the Jaguar, the Tele Custom, and a Gretsch.)

Just learned that the Les Paul predates the 335. Would have thought the reverse!

hell yeah, gonna try and sell some stuff and get one of these raphael saadiq teles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XygXGO9bzBY

The solid-body is a lot easier to do first! I think 335 / "Electric Spanish" was second-order problem-solving: You have traditional players with big hollow jazz boxes; adding pickups creates feedback issues; but they're not inclined to switch to weird newfangled solid-bodies. So you do a thin mostly-hollow guitar with a feedback-preventing center block, which is practically just hiding solid-body elements inside the more traditional instrument they want. Some portion of that market must have been, like, "people who admitted the Les Paul was convenient and sounded great but felt stupid playing one."

(I shouldn't say Electric Spanish there, that series had big archtops before the LP —- it's just the thinline / center-block solution that comes in soon after)

oh man that Raphael Saadiq Telecaster is amazing, I like how Fender let him do a non-trad pickguard

gorgeous

though it's funny with vintage spec stuff, my friend who's a pro guitar tech and runs a guitar repair shop here went off on a rant about the "classic" three saddle tele bridge he hates it for intonating properly and thinks it should be retired for good

Barrel bridges and the Gibson wrap around bridges like you might see on a Junior are more limited in fine intonation, but they do have a bit of their own sound. Strum a bunch of electrics unplugged and guitars with those bridges usually are among the louder ones.

Now Firebird banjo tuners and those jazzmaster threaded saddles are objects of the devil.

xpost, interesting I'll listen for that next time he's at a store. obv my friend has a perspective of a touring tech/repair guyso he's constantly fixing/doing setups etc and I'm sure it's more of a pain in the ass

i just got my first electric guitar-- a casino bought from a friend in superb condition. it really is delightful, getting it and playing it has been my favorite event of the year.

i am still terrible and learn-y basic at guitar, but it is friendly, very light. i'm just playing it with a mustang micro and wheeeeeee! so similar to that 335 in appearance, but full hollow. i guess they are howling feedback machines, but i'm a long way from that worry i think.

mine has a trapeze-- is that because of the hollow body maybe?

congrats! Casinos are so cool

nice hunt3r!

ty!

i am pretty guitar ignorant but saw pics of some wildkats and i was like, "huh, that is the hottest possible guitar thing i've seen," and friend said "similar in look to gretsch g5655t, if you like that." maybe if i ever learn to play i can "what i want" it.

mine has a trapeze-- is that because of the hollow body maybe?

file under things i want badly and have no business buying

https://minneapolis.craigslist.org/hnp/msg/d/medford-ovation-magnum-bass-guitar/7725488125.html

what a beast

get it and re-install that EQ system PRONTO

That’s so cool, had no idea they made an electric bass

Kim Gordon played one of those in the early days of Sonic Youth.

does anyone have experience with Rickenbacker guitar knockoffs? I'd really like a Rick but it's pretty hard to find anything that's not $2K+...or any other type of guitar that might give you that sound

aren't ric knockoffs famously hard to come by since the company loves to sue people?

Neer really looked into this, but I wonder if you could just buy some Rickenbacker pickups and have them installed on a different guitar.

Rick is really weird on that stuff, you pretty much cannot buy their pickups.

Duncan makes some but even then they are in their custom shop lines.

Get a Gretch with some Filtertrons, I’d say that is an easier to find option in a similar part of the ball park.

Those G&L wide ranch pickups on say an ASAT are not totally dissimilar to the modern Rick pickups which are hotter than the old ones.

thanks for the info all, rick is a weird company...but i guess they keep people paying a super premium price

gretsch sounds like maybe the best bet, they are so common to see used now

This is not the fun answer but if I had to pick one guitar to imitate the sound of a Rickenbacker, I would quite possibly take a single-coil thinline Tele, a compressor, and an EQ pedal. (And honestly the thinline part is optional.)

maybe seek out one of those Greco Ric copies, you can get them thru those sites that handle Yahoo Auctions transactions

also this was too good a price and too pretty to pass up. 2004 R serial, G&G case. Nothing much to tell other than it's great, and stock apart from the bridge and the knobs because I had them spare. Sticker is the previous owner's, I'll let it go for a while but its days are numbered.
http://i.imgur.com/VJJwLWL.jpeg

gorgeous

i did some deep-ish research into rickenbacker a few years ago, they basically still run the company like it's 1958, but it seems to work for them

Used to have an early 90s Tanglewood Ric 330 copy with weird toaster pick ups. Pretty crappy guitar, traded in my perfectly serviceable Fenix Tele for it due to a teenage love of Peter Buck and George Harrison. Sounded thin (and not in the way I wanted) and was set up badly, but at least grappling with it made me a better player in the long run. If only I'd known and held on to that Tele - it would have saved me years of frustration and pain. I'd second the Tele compressor and EQ trick. A Danelectro will also get you into that jangly zone, although it has a character of its own. I've got a Gretsch and never found it particularly Ric-like - bought it as my Neil Young/Howe Gelb guitar.

Have to say that while I used to think they were great looking guitars, I find them kinda ugly these days, particularly the 330. The bass is a design classic though.

they look more and more like furniture to me

- my main guitar is a late ‘60s galanti grand prix - a funky weird old Italian guitar i love: https://www.instagram.com/p/CPcDy49hhBl/

― na (NA), Saturday, 29 May 2021 01:37 (two years ago) link

i love this guitar, it plays great, sounds great, stays in tune etc. BUT as you can see in the picture, it has pickup selector buttons instead of a switch (galanti started out as an accordion company and they used accordion buttons i guess). the button mechanism is notoriously fickle, and mine has always had problems. basically the bridge pickup always works, but often i am unable to switch to the neck pickup or the combination of the two - if i pick those buttons, there is no sound. occasionally everything works like it should for a while but it always eventually stops working again, sometimes in the middle of playing. however, this suggests the problem is the mechanism, not the pickups or wiring. i have had it "fixed" twice by different shops but both times it has started up again after a couple of months.

i'm vaguely considering having a tech replace the buttons with a standard pickup switch. i am loathe to mess with the aesthetics of the guitar and make it less "original" but also it would be nice to be able to actually reliably use all the pickup options. i think the ideal would be to leave the switches as they are, but not connected to anything, and have them add the switch, but that might require them cutting some wood out to make space for the switch wiring. i haven't actually looked under the pickguard myself. anyone have any thoughts on whether getting this done is worth it?

Any switch can be replaced with a better quality equivalent, but I’d start with some Deoxit on the contacts inside if you’re comfortable with opening it up. No need to ruin its originality if it can be persuaded to work better.
You may also have a short somewhere, e.g. the neck pickup signal touching a ground (would explain why the combo setting makes no sound). A little tube of deoxit and a cheap multimeter will get you a long way.