I’ve talked a bit about the all-rosewood Telecaster; here’s its not-as-popular sibling, the all-rosewood Stratocaster. This axe would weigh a ton unless they chambered [hollowed out] the body. They might, and that would explain why the body is a three-layer plywood — see the stripe running the length of the body’s side; rosewood is too …
Continue reading “Reverb Madness Strat Week, Day Three: Rosewood”
One of the most fascinating things about the Stratocaster is its endless potential for customization/mutation. Here are two on the inner fringes of what you can do to a Strat before it ain’t a Strat no more: So close! The composite checkerboard body is so cool — maple and I’d guess mahogany — but …
Continue reading “Reverb Madness Strat Week, Day Two: Oddball Partscasters”
I can appreciate the default handsomeness of a Fender Stratocaster’s tobacco-brown sunburst — it was a savvy move to finish such a radical for its time body shape as the Strat in the traditional color scheme when the countered solidbody was introduced in 1954. But, if we’re talking about stock Stratocasters and all things about …
Continue reading “Reverb Madness Strat Week, Day One: Seafoam Green”
As a postscript to my weeks-long acoustic archtop window shopping, let’s talk about two electric archtop guitars I think are just swell. First up, the Gibson ES-150, the unofficial “Charlie Christian” model, whose defining characteristic I’ve written about before. One of things I find interesting, which regrettably wasn’t examined much when the guitar players and …
Continue reading “Reverb Madness: Charlie, Chuck and Orville”
Our last stop in my acoustic archtop crawl takes us back to where we started: Gibson. In 1985, Gibson picked up stakes and moved production from Kalamazoo, Michigan [where Orville H. Gibson founded the company nearly 90 years before] to a newer facility in Nashville. A substantial number of Gibson artisans decided not to move with …
Are the Japanese- and Korean-made copies of John D’Angelico’s classic and obscenely expensive archtop guitars little more than exceptionally and passably tuxedo t-shirts [respectively] when compared to the tuxedo original? Probably, but with the average guitarist likely to never even see a real D’Angelico guitar in hir lifetime, much less play one — much less …
