Rickenbacker 660 Electric Guitars | Mapleglo and Fireglo | £2,699We\'re so excited to have these new Rickenbacker guitars in stock, particularly the Mapleglo, which we hand-picked ourselves from all those arriving in the UK to make sure we got the one with the most beautiful wood grain – but we also brought in the classic Fireglo too for traditionalists!>>> Buy Now!Guitar Set-Up and RepairsAs with all our guitars, these wonderful new Rickenbackers are eligible for a free set-up within the first year. We recommend you let the instruments settle while you play them in at home for 3-4 months and then bring them in for us to take a look at for you!Today we\'re also pleased to announce a new addition to our repair team! Danny is working in the shop on Saturdays and Wednesdays, 12 – 5pm, doing guitar set-ups and minor repairs, so if you have a guitar you need adjusting you can book an appointment to see him for an in-person assessment.Meanwhile, Glen is still available for more involved work which he\'ll be doing from his home workshop so...
Guitars
Martin\'s dreadnought guitar, introduced under the Ditson brand just over 100 years ago and reaching its classic modern form in 1934, is probably the most iconic acoustic guitar design of the 20th Century. From Elvis to Johnny Cash, from the Louvin Brothers to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, from Johnny Marr to Kurt Cobain, the roll call of musicians who have played these fine instruments is unparalleled. It\'s also the most copied acoustic guitar design, with dreadnought guitars offered by almost every major player in the acoustic guitar market. Martin themselves offer dozens of variants on the design including replicas of the classic 1930s D18 and D28.In this blog we\'re going to delve into Martin\'s range of Dreadnoughts and take a look at ten that should be on any shopping list if you\'re looking at these fine instruments.The D-28 2017 ReimaginedThe D-28 is the Martin design that you\'ve heard on thousands of bluegrass and country records from the 50s to the present day and it\'s a wonderful beast. They\'re phenomenally loud, with a...
If there\'s one thing every guitarist should know how to do, it\'s changing strings! It\'s one of those jobs that is easy once you have the knack, but if you haven\'t restrung a guitar before it can be an intimidating proposition. In our next few blogs we\'re going to show you how to go about it. We\'ll start with a steel string acoustic.[caption id=\"\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"600\" caption=\"1. First of all we need to take off the old strings. You can change strings one at a time or all at once on a steel string - it really doesn't matter. We tend to do all at once so we can give the guitar a quick clean whilst the strings are off.\"][/caption][caption id=\"\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"614\" caption=\"2. If you're lucky the bridge pins will easily lift out of the bridge as soon as the string tension is reduced. Often though they can be quite a tight fit, so in this photo we're using the pin remover part of a string winder to pull them out. If they're really firmly in place you can push them out from underneath - just...
We do a lot of set ups on acoustic guitars, and a common task that we do as part of a set up is reducing the saddle height to lower the action of the guitar. The saddle might need lowering for a number of reasons: perhaps the soundboard has expanded slightly due to an increase in humidity in the ambient conditions the guitar has been stored in, or perhaps it was simply left too high at the factory to begin with. In addition to that however, as guitars age the components can start to move in relation to each other causing the neck pitch (ie the angle the neck sits in relation to the body) to be shallower than it originally was. Eventually this becomes so significant that there is no longer any room to lower the saddle further, so more drastic measures are necessary to lower the action.In the old days, the obvious solution was to get out the plane and start shaving: either the bridge was thinned in height or the fingerboard was planed at the nut end to add an extra degree or two of angle. The problem with this is shaving the bridge can impact...
Regular readers of our blog will no doubt be aware that we’re big fans of the modern Danelectro brand: what we haven’t touched on is that we also love the originals, and we thought it might be interesting to do a comparison. The most popular model in the current range is the DC59 based on Jimmy Page’s legendary 3021 model Danelectro, and I’ve been doing some restoration work this month on an original ’59 Danelectro – it seems like a good opportunity to get them up on the bench and see how they compare.A bit of backgroundDanelectro was founded in 1955 by Nat Daniels in Neptune, New Jersey, and they were always something of an oddity in the guitar world. There was no shortage of companies producing high quality guitars in the US in the mid 50s: indeed, this was the start of the golden era of the solid body electric guitar. Likewise, many companies saw the commercial potential of producing cheap solid body guitars that could be marketed to amateurs who aspired to playing Gibsons and Fenders but were restricted to more modest budgets – but these...
One of the problems we occasionally face when working on older guitars is that occasionally we encounter an instrument with too much relief in the neck and no adjustable truss rod with which to correct it. Today\'s patient is a really special guitar: a beautiful Fylde Falstaff from the 1980s. These earlier Fyldes were built with an aluminium bar inside the neck and generally they don\'t develop issues with the necks bowing - unfortunately for this owner, this one is a rare exception so we need to do something to correct the neck relief.There are three common solutions to this problem. The fingerboard can be planed to straighten it but this means removing the frets and refretting so it\'s a big job and it also has a disadvantage in that by removing material from either end of the fingerboard the board will no longer be of uniform thickness, the neck may feel different as it is fractionally thinner than it started out and it\'s definately not something you would want to do more than once. A better solution is to do a compression refret, where...
Exploring The White Rice guitarThis guitar, we’re sure you will agree, looks like a guitar with a story to tell.That story starts with the legendary country picker Clarence White and a very worn, battered 1935 D-28 the young White found in a music store in desperate need of attention. The guitar was in a terrible state of repair, was missing a fret board and had undergone a series of modifications. The top had been sanded thin and the neck shaved. The owner previous to Clarence had played the guitar sufficiently hard to wear away patches of wood around the sound hole, and attempted to improve the appearance of the guitar by enlarging the sound hole so that the damaged wood was removed. Still, it was a D28 at a price Clarence could afford, and he purchased the guitar and entrusted it to a repairer who fitted a Gretsch fret board and attended to various cracks. White was advised not to fit heavy gauge strings to it due to the sanded top being too thin to support them, advice that was swiftly ignored and the guitar was soon back for more...
Ok, so regular callers have probably spotted we\'re a bit behind in our new arrivals updates! Truth be told, January is always geared towards the sale and new stock is a little thin on the ground - so we haven\'t had much to report. Still, February is upon us now and the new arrivals are coming in thick and fast!First up this month are Gretsch, who have a whole new range hot off the press. Made in Indonesia rather than Korea, these new Streamliner models are hollow and semi hollow designs that take their inspiration from classic Gretsch models whilst adding their own twist. The 2420 is a deep hollow bodied design inspired by the tradition Brian Setzer styled Gretsch models, with newly designed Gretsch humbuckers and small, Gibson-esque F holes. The 2622 pitches its tent somewhere between the popular Electromatic 5422 and a Gibson 335 with a centre block to reduce feedback and increase sustain. Unlike a 335 it\'s made of Spruce so it\'s not as heavy as you might imagine, and you get a choice of stop tailpiece or Bigsby B70. The 2655 is...
One of the nice things about working with John and Linda at the original Gordon Smith workshop in Manchester was that, being just down the road, the opportunity to drop in for a cup of tea and a nosy about what guitars were currently on the bench was always available. When the chaps at Auden took over production of Gordon Smith last year they were quick to extend the same offer and we finally made it down to Northampton to check out the new facilities.A quick look through the workshop door and we could immediately see that several of the extremely ingenious self designed jigs and machines that John built to facilitate the build process are still being used. Aside from these jigs the guitars are very much bench made instruments with band saws, thickness and spindle sanders, hand routers and pillar drills being used for most of the build stages. It\'s a little more labour intensive than letting a CNC machine do the work but it\'s a relief to see that the traditional hand building techniques are still at the heart of Gordon Smith.Although the...
Yes, it\'s that time of year again and your son / daughter / significant other has intimated that they quite fancy having a go at learning the guitar. This is a good thing, obviously! The trouble is, the internet is full of the most bewildering range of guitars and you don\'t know where to start. Fortunately, we may be able to help...What type of guitar is best to learn on?The first question is there are a few different overall types of guitar - electric, acoustic, classical and bass being the four main ones - and you\'re going to need to pick one to start with. So which is best to start on?For very young children, the first question really comes down to whether they can cope with metal strings, which can be tricky for a youngster. Up the the age of 8 or 9, we recommend a classical style guitar with nylon strings(technically the top three are nylon and the bottom three metal wound around silk). They\'re relatively easy to hold and press the strings down on and there are a lot of small sized ones out there. For under 6s we recommend the...