OGD! (Old Guitar Day - Non-Warmoth Content)

[Verne Bunsen]

Old Guitar Day! There is a bit of a double meaning of "old" here, in that not only is the guitar 60 years old, it also used to belong to me once before. It has quite a story!

This is a 1959 Silvertone Aristocrat. It has Dearmond "Speed Bump" pickups which are just cool as hell. It belonged to a friend of mine's mother, and she gave it to him when we were in high school back in the mid-90s. It was in a house fire in the late 90s and, while he salvaged it, it was in poor shape. He knew I had an interest in guitars, so he gave it to me. I carried it around for a few years and ended up giving it to my dad, who moved with it to California. While there, he took it to a luthier he knew and left it with him for some restoration work. It was in for a neck reset, new frets and the Bigsby, among other things. The guy sat on this project for quite a while and my dad ended up moving away and it was lost to the sands of time. This was about 15 years ago now.  The story resumes last month when the guitar showed up on dad's doorstep! We went over for a visit and he presented it back to me. What a journey! The guitar is super cool, sounds great acoustically and plugged in, and I'm just tickled about it.

For you Bigsby owners out there, you just haven't lived until you've re-strung a Bigsby equipped guitar with floating bridge....  :help:  I strung the guitar up with Thomastk Infeld Jazz Swing flats, and installed a Callaham string-through main shaft in the Bigsby. She shows her years, but she's a peach! Check her out!

I recorded this piece with her. It is a chord melody arrangement of the jazz standard "The Way You Look Tonight" that I've been working on for some time. Of course, my rendition is slow, dreamy and has probably too much reverb, 'cause that is just how I do stuff...

[soundcloud]https://soundcloud.com/vb-tunes/the-way-you-look-tonight?in=vb-tunes/sets/music-for-interstellar-travel[/soundcloud]

 

[new-killer-star]

This sounds really good.

My gretsch silver falcon has a bigsby and a floating bridge.  It inspired me to order the callaham upgrades for my supro and install them instantly. I haven't quite recovered enough to change the strings on the gretsch again... I'm still pretty traumatized.

 

[Verne Bunsen]

:toothy12:

Thanks!

 

[PhilHill]

I love it! You don't find stuff like that anymore. Time trip back to the end of an era........... :icon_thumright: :icon_thumright: :icon_thumright:

 

[Great Ape]

Very. cool! Neat guitar, fantastic story!

 

[Re-Pete]

That's a nice looking old guitar! Sounds great too...

My first half decent guitar was an old Yamaha. My Dad found someone to set it up properly & install some really good pickups in it which I still have today (Fender L series Telecaster bridge pickup & Guild humbucker). The path leading to Warmoth was started by needing to replace that Yamaha - I had botched up the body by having a Kahler trem installed and it never sounded the same again. MANY years later, I installed those pickups into my first Warmoth build. A Telecaster. To match the disparity between those pickups I used an EMG active blend pot.

To my surprise, last month I found that Eastwood guitars now have the exact same Yamaha in their line up of reissues. I'm half tempted to buy one, but I swore to myself that the SG I bought earlier this year was the last. And I keep reminding myself how much a pain that guitar was to play, you couldn't sit down with it due to the goofy body shape and the trem was a shocker. Pickups were thin & tinny sounding too...

https://eastwoodguitars.com/collections/mrg-series/products/sg2c-flying-banana#features-specs

Here's an old pic of me after finishing a practice session when I was MUCH younger. You can see the guitar in question in the corner in the background.

 

[Verne Bunsen]

No doubt, that guitar makes a Flying V look downright ergonomic  :toothy12: I've never seen one, cool!

 

[fdesalvo]

Thanks for sharing!

 

[DangerousR6]

Nice Silvertone, cool story too...

I have an old '57 Espanada I need to refurb...

 

[Verne Bunsen]

Wow, it looks to be in pretty great shape! What kind of pickups are those routes for, and do you have the originals?

 

[NedRyerson]

My "oldie" is a late-'90s Jackson Kelly.  I think it was around '98 or '99 that I bought it, after the Internet had taken off and Musician's Friend was my go-to online retailer.

Only has a single volume knob because why would a guitar as metal as this need anything like "precision" or "fine tuning?"   I'm honestly kinda' unsure why there's even a neck pickup and a switch, really.....

Did a refurbish in 2016.  The original pickup rings were plastic and breaking off in pieces.  Screws and studs were corroded, so bought a bunch of replacement hardware and other bits & pieces, gave her a full "spa day" treatment, sprayed some pot cleaner, checked the wiring, etc.  Fresh strings, fresh lemon oil on the fretboard, total clean-down.  Still a couple of dings on the points -- unavoidable given its oh-so-very-'80s shape -- but otherwise felt and played like a fresh instrument.

After my acoustic bass, she's my second-most traveled instrument.  All the rest of my arsenal have stayed safely at home because I acquired them after I quit the band scene.

 

[DangerousR6]

Wow, it looks to be in pretty great shape! What kind of pickups are those routes for, and do you have the originals?

It appears they were some sort of single coil, probably similar to a P90...And no, i don't have any of the original electronics...I bought it as it sits...

 

[Verne Bunsen]

Very cool. Do you think you'll try to source a set of the original pickups or make it work with a modern option?

I would like to re-visit the wiring on mine, the neck pickup tone pot shorts out above 8 or so (not that you'd ever have a jazzbox up higher than that... :laughing11: ). However, it does not look like fishing a wiring harness in there would be very much fun at all.... Maybe after the thrill wears off and she can sit around for another couple of years  :toothy12:

 

[DangerousR6]

Very cool. Do you think you'll try to source a set of the original pickups or make it work with a modern option?

I would like to re-visit the wiring on mine, the neck pickup tone pot shorts out above 8 or so (not that you'd ever have a jazzbox up higher than that... :laughing11: ). However, it does not look like fishing a wiring harness in there would be very much fun at all.... Maybe after the thrill wears off and she can sit around for another couple of years  :toothy12:

I would want to source originals. But it's been sitting for some years, and I doubt I'll get to it anytime soon. I may just leave it as it is... :dontknow:

 

[BoomerBoognish]

That is a sweet old guitar... reminds me of the callouses I got playing my dads old Harmony haha