Author: George Gruhn and Walter Carter

Although popular music of the 1920s featured the tenor banjo as the preferred rhythm instrument, the guitar’s popularity rose steadily through the decade, and by the ’30s, it had overtaken the banjo.

As had been the case with tenor banjos, mandolins, and classical/minstrel banjos in earlier eras, the best-selling fretted instrument attracted the most attention from makers, and the growing competition among guitar makers toward the end of the ’20s sparked a flurry of innovations, the most radical of which were the resonator guitar and the electric guitar.

One of the more subtle – but no less important – innovations occurred at Martin in 1929, with the introduction of the Orchestra Model, or OM, which had 14 frets clear of the body. The move from 12-fret to 14-fret necks, coupled with the introduction of larger-bodied guitars in the early ’30s, marked the acoustic flat-top guitar’s arrival at modern specifications and marked the divergence of steel-string flat-tops from gut-string classicals.

The idea of a longer neck, to give guitarists easier access to the higher register, was hardly revolutionary. Gibson’s Style O Artist model of 1908 had a cutaway body that met the neck at the 15th fret. Even Gibson’s lowly L-1 of 1908 had 13 frets clear of the body. Gibson’s first f-hole guitar, designed in 1922 by Lloyd Loar, had a 14-fret neck. But all of these Gibsons were steel-string archtop guitars. Flat-tops were a different matter, probably because of their longstanding ties to classical music, where the 12-fret neck remains the standard today. The difference was evident when Gibson introduced its first flat-tops in 1926, and even though they were built for steel strings, they had 12-fret necks.

With the rising popularity of the guitar, competition among players raised the level of play, and one could reasonably argue that the emergence of virtuoso non-classical, steel-string guitarists (starting as early as 1922 with Nick Lucas’ recording of “Pickin’ the Guitar”) would have inevitably led to a demand for longer necks. However, the strongest force behind the move to 14-fret guitars came from the banjo players who started switching to guitar in the mid ’20s. Their tenor banjos typically had at least 15 frets clear of the edge of the resonator and all 19 frets clear of the body (extended fingerboard notwithstanding), and plectrum banjos had 19 frets clear of the edge of the resonator and 22 clear of the body.

Consequently, it should have come as no surprise to the Martin company when orders came in for longer-necked tenor guitars. For their first 14-fret tenors, Martin simply made the neck longer and moved the soundhole accordingly. Perry Bechtel, an Atlanta-based plectrum banjoist and guitarist, already had a 14-fret Gibson L-5, and asked Martin to make him a guitar with a 15-fret neck and a 27″ scale (plectrum banjo scale). Bechtel settled for a 14-fret version of his 000-28, and Martin designer John Deichman drew up a new, shorter body that would allow the soundhole to remain in the same place relative to the waist and the lower bout.

Bechtel received his 000-28 Special in August, 1929, and ordered another. The Wurlitzer company apparently heard about it and ordered one, too. These first 14-fret 000s had Martin’s standard slotted headstock. Martin began working on what was to be a Perry Bechtel signature model, but by December, Bechtel’s name was dropped. Martin replaced the slotted headstock with a solid headstock and billed the new model as the 000-28 Orchestra Model, soon to be OM-28.

This month’s featured guitar is an OM-28 from early 1930, and features the rectangular bridge with pyramid ends that had been Martin’s standard for the better part of a century. The new OM also had a small, teardrop-shaped pickguard – the first Martin with a pickguard as standard equipment. It had a 25.4″ scale length, the same as the 12-fret 000-size guitars, which was longer than the 24.9″ scale on all the smaller sizes. Martin had made a number of solid-headstock six-strings since the 1800s, typically with ivory friction pegs, but the OM’s solid headstock reflected the influence of the banjo, because the OMs were fitted with straight-through banjo-style tuners (as were earlier Martin four-string tenor and plectrum guitars).

Martin quickly introduced a full line of OM models, including an OM-18, OM-18P (plectrum neck), OM-42, OM-45 and OM-45 Deluxe (the latter would be the fanciest production model offered by Martin until the recent D-50 and D-100). Acceptance of the 14-fret neck was immediate, as indicated by the fact that Martin produced only a single 12-fret 000 model in 1932 and none in ’33.

Changes came quickly for the OMs. First, the pickguard was enlarged, the belly bridge replaced the rectangular pyramid-end bridge, a gold silkscreen logo (soon changed to a decal) was added to the front of the headstock, and right-angle tuners replaced the banjo tuners. On the OM-28, fingerboard inlays were added at frets 12 and 15.

By ’34, the 14-fret neck, the pickguard, belly bridge, and headstock logo had made their way across most of the Martin line. All Martins with a 14-fret neck were being referred to as Orchestra Models, and to eliminate confusion, Martin simply dropped the OM name. The OM-28 became the 000-28. Then, inexplicably, Martin shortened the scale length on the 000 size from 25.4″ to 24.9″, effectively eliminating the OM specs.

In its five-year run, the OM-28 sold 487 units. Sales of OM-28s dropped quickly after its initial burst. One factor may have been the introduction of the cheaper OM-18, which sold 765 units in four years. Another factor was the introduction of the Martin dreadnought, which would become Martin’s most popular body size.

The OM – in essence, a long-scale 000 – was absent from the Martin line until a special run of OM-28s in 1969. The style returned to regular production with an OM-21 in ’93. Distinguished from the 000 by its 25.4″ scale length, the OM once again has a secure place in the Martin line.

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For more, see Martin Guitars: A History by Richard Johnston, Dick Boak and Mike Longworth, and visit www.perrybechtel.com.

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This article originally appeared in VG’s October 2010 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

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Much of America was still recovering from the Depression in 1934 when Gibson introduced a guitar at a price that was almost $100 higher than its current top-of-the-line model, the L-5. At $400 (with case and zippered case cover, compared to $302 for the L-5 with case), the Super 400 seemed a more appropriate model for the opulent 1920s, when Gibson sold fancy banjos for that much and more, than for the shell-shocked economic atmosphere in the first half of the 1930s.

It was a risky move for Gibson, which had only recently been producing wooden toys to survive the hard times, but it was a move Gibson had to make to protect its reputation and its future. The risk paid off as the Super 400 became not only the standard archtop for players, but the industry leader for a new era of super-sized “jazz” or “orchestral” guitars.

Gibson created the Super 400 to quash an attack by Epiphone on Gibson’s status as not only the inventor of the archtop guitar – the company had been founded in 1902 on Orville Gibson’s concept of carved-top guitars and mandolins – but also as the only maker of carved-top f-hole guitars. Until 1931, that is, when Epiphone launched its nine-model Masterbilt archtop line. Suddenly there were more Epiphone archtop models than Gibsons, and to add insult to injury, Epi’s top models were ³/8” wider than Gibson’s L-5.

Gibson had more than one battlefront at the time, as Martin had introduced its large-bodied dreadnought-sized flat-tops in 1931, and Rickenbacker (nee Ro-Pat-In) would release the first viable electric guitar in ’32. It was ’34 before Gibson mounted a counterattack against Epiphone, but when it came, Gibson unveiled a secret weapon called the Super 400.

Gibson did not just move up to the next logical dimension with a 17″ guitar; the L-5 was “advanced” to that spot, and all the other archtops moved up an inch in size, too. The company went on to the next step, to 18″. They had a ready-made body design in the form of 18″ oval-hole guitars that Orville Gibson had made at the turn of the century, before the Gibson company was founded.

In ornamentation, too, Gibson took giant steps. The pearl block fingerboard inlays that had identified the L-5 archtop since 1929 were appropriated for the Super 400 and given diagonal slashes. A five-piece diamond-shaped headstock inlay also incorporated an angled slash, and the diamond was repeated on the back of the peghead in a three-piece inlay.

Every edge of the new model was at least triple-bound, with the top receiving seven-ply binding. A massive Y-shaped tailpiece was engraved with the model name, and the gold-plated tuners also had engraving on the buttons. Even the neck heel cap was engraved with the model name. The pickguard was celluloid with an eye-catching marbleized pattern.

Initially, guitarists had a choice of a thin top or thick top. The difference of about ¹/16” was expected to make a noticeable difference in tone, but it proved a negligible tonal difference, and the tops soon became all the same.

If the $400 price tag seemed high, Gibson literature gave a simple explanation: “Its price is a criterion of its quality.”

Musicians agreed, as they found the Super 400 to have the power and tone to cut through the sound of the big bands of the 1930s. Muzzy Marcellino with the Ted Fio Rito orchestra was one of the first to set his L-5 aside for a Super 400, just in time for the group’s two #1 hits of 1934, “My Little Grass Shack…” and “I’ll String Along with You.” Gibson catalogs showed a young guitarist at Chicago radio station WJJD who had also put down his L-5 for a Super 400; he was billed as Rhubarb Red but he would soon be known to the nation as Les Paul.

One measure of the Super 400’s influence was evident in the reaction of other makers. Epiphone responded with the Emperor, which, true to form, was ³/8” wider than the Super 400. In New York, John D’Angelico had been making 16¹/2” guitars along the lines of Gibson’s L-5, but by 1936 he was offering 17″ and 18″ models. In Boston, Elmer Stromberg began making 17″ and 19″ models, and named his top model the Master 400.

The Super 400 went through several changes, including a slightly wider upper-bout dimension in ’37, an improved tailpiece in ’39, parallel top bracing (the originals had been X-braced) in ’39, and most important, the addition of a cutaway version in ’39 called the Super 400 Premier (later shorted simply to Super 400C).

As the electric guitar and rock and roll began to dominate popular music, the Super 400 maintained its position as Gibson’s top model with an electric cutaway version, introduced in 1951. Scotty Moore began using a natural-finish Super 400CES (for Cutaway Electric Spanish) with Elvis Presley in ’56. When Elvis made his 1968 “comeback” TV special, Moore was once again on hand with a Super 400, this time a black-finished 1963 model (with pointed cutaway) that Elvis borrowed from Moore to perform “One Night With You.”

Beginning in 1948, Gibson offered a spinoff with plain ornamentation called the Super 300, along with a Super 300C (cutaway) in ’54. The Super 300 actually sold as well as the Super 400, but carried no prestige and were gone after ’57.

The non-cutaway acoustic was discontinued in 1955 and the cutaway acoustic in ’82, but the CES version has never gone out of production. Gibson has also taken advantage of the Super 400’s familiar slashed-block and split-diamond motifs to enhance several models, starting in ’61 with the Johnny Smith (later LeGrande) and including the Super V CES model (essentially an L-5 body with a Super 400 neck) from 1978 to ’93. In addition, the slashed-block inlays appeared in the solidbody line on the 25th Anniversary Les Paul in ’79 and on the Les Paul Custom/400 in 1991-’92.

Gibson’s Custom, Art & Historic division reissued both cutaway and non-cutaway acoustic versions of the Super 400 in ’93 and featured a natural-finish Super 400 alongside the new R9 Les Paul on the cover of the first Historic Collection catalog. The acoustics were last offered in ’97, but the electric cutaway Super 400 CES not only remains in production in the Historic Collection, it still holds its traditional position as the highest-priced of Gibson’s “core production” models.

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This article originally appeared in VG April 2008 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

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During his 30-plus years as an independent guitarmaker, James L. D’Aquisto was acclaimed as the premier maker of archtop guitars. He gained the title initially as the successor to his mentor, New York maker John D’Angelico. Then, after carrying on and embellishing the D’Angelico tradition for more than 20 years, D’Aquisto suddenly changed direction, as if to prove that his reputation was not simply inherited, but well-deserved. Like an artist moving from one stylistic period into another, D’Aquisto shed the restraints of traditionalism and began to design modernistic new models.

It wasn’t an instant change, however, from the New Yorker and Excel (models handed down from D’Angelico) to the Centura and Avant Garde. D’Aquisto first retreated from the traditions of ornamentation to arrive at what he felt was the essence of the archtop guitar. Only then did he let his imagination drive his designs.

The New Yorker Classic show here, from 1986, represents D’Aquisto’s bridge between the traditional and the modernistic – the end of one era and beginning of another. However, it was not D’Aquisto’s first outreach to establish himself as a gifted and influential maker in his own right. He had learned the art of archtop guitar making in the New York shop of John D’Angelico, where he began working in 1952 at age 17. He took over more of the workload after D’Angelico’s first heart attack in 1960. Following D’Angelico’s death in ’64, D’Aquisto finished 10 guitars that were in progress, then began implementing his own design ideas, changing the peghead shape from a broken scroll pediment to a rounded shape and modernizing the f-holes to a smoother S-shape. But, since he was taking orders from essentially the same group of players who had ordered guitars from D’Angelico, the guitars remained essentially the same – high-quality, handmade archtops in the D’Angelico tradition.

By ’69, D’Aquisto’s reputation was strong enough to attract the attention of the Hagstrom company, which introduced a D’Aquisto-designed model called The Jimmy, featuring a 16″-wide electric archtop with a pressed (not carved) birch body. The initial run was not too successful, but a reintroduction of The Jimmy in ’76 (with oval or f-shaped soundholes) helped establish D’Aquisto as a designer as well as a maker.  

In 1984, Fender sought D’Aquisto’s input while creating a guitar to compete with Gibson’s electric archtops, and the result was the Fender D’Aquisto Standard and D’Aquisto Elite. Made in Japan, these were sleek, 15³/4″ jazz guitars with bodies of laminated maple and set necks. They featured an ebony tailpiece and a bound ebony pickguard. Like the Hagstrom, the Fender D’Aquisto was initially produced in limited quantities, followed by a more successful reissue period (1989-’94). 

In the meantime, D’Aquisto was feeling ever more trapped by a backlog of orders for traditional-style guitars. In 1986 he decided to break with that tradition and called one of the customers on his wait-list, “The Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson, and talked about his concept of a guitar with no celluloid, no metal except where absolutely necessary, and minimal ornamentation. It would be all-wood and all-acoustic, with a sound as well as a look that would expand the appeal of archtop guitars beyond the circle of traditional jazz guitarists. Larson agreed, and he received D’Aquisto #1191, the first New Yorker Classic. 

Guitarists in 1986 would have had to look twice at this guitar to recognize it as a D’Aquisto. The pearl peghead logo does say D’Aquisto, but it does not stand out from the natural-finish maple peghead veneer. The top of the peghead – the round broken pediment with ornamental finial – is a de facto D’Aquisto signature, and the simplified, S-shaped soundholes are also D’Aquisto indicators. But overall, this guitar is missing more of the D’Aquisto/D’Angelico features than it retains. The multi-layered nitrocellulose binding – the sign of an expensive guitar since the first D’Angelicos in the 1930s – is nowhere to be seen, replaced by a tasteful outer layer of maple and two thin lines of violin-style purfling. The standard pickguard, typically of nitrocellulose with multi-ply binding, is also gone, replaced by a smaller, simpler, angular guard made of ebony. A matching ebony tailpiece replaces the heavy, ornate brass tailpiece of the earlier D’Aquistos. The minimal ornamentation continues on the fingerboard, which is plain ebony with no inlaid position markers whatsoever, bound in natural maple. The truss rod cover has a double-flared shape, continuing the ebony motif to the tuner buttons. 

As important as its aesthetic beauty is this guitar’s performance. Before the first note is played, the player will notice that it is lighter in weight than the typical 17″ archtop guitar. And it has a tone to match – a lighter, more complex tone than one expects from an archtop. It clearly was not designed to be played with a heavy hand, not designed strictly to fill the rhythm role that acoustic archtops have played since the ’30s (and, without a pickup, it obviously was not designed for electric play). It was designed to prove D’Aquisto’s belief that the archtop is simply the best guitar design, for versatility as well as for power and tone. 

After making this New Yorker Classic, D’Aquisto pushed on with a determination to pursue his own design ideas, to the point of abandoning traditional models – along with the security that his backlog of orders provided. (Ironically, this breakthrough design for D’Aquisto did not excite the guitar’s original owner; Larson preferred the bigger, more traditional sound of an 18″ archtop, so he eventually parted with his New Yorker Classic.) D’Aquisto proceeded to develop new models with the all-wood concept of the New Yorker Classic, with such new features as elliptical and double-elliptical soundholes, and adjustable baffles and sound ports. Modern names, such as Solo, Centura and Avant Garde drew a line of demarcation between the old D’Aquisto and the new. A Centura with a blue sunburst finish captured the attention of the late collector Scott Chinery, and when D’Aquisto died in 1995 (coincidentally at the same age D’Angelico died – 59), Chinery paid tribute to D’Aquisto by commissioning blue guitars from all of the leading archtop makers.

While D’Aquisto’s blue Centura and his other modernistic models represent the fulfillment of his concepts of new, modern archtop guitars, this New Yorker Classic is equally important as the starting point for the imaginative, non-traditional designs that became D’Aquisto’s legacy.

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This article originally appeared in VG‘s November 2007 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

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The Fender Precision Bass, introduced in 1951, was arguably more revolutionary and more influential on popular music than the Telecaster or Stratocaster. As the first commercially successful electric bass, it was a landmark in the evolution of musical instruments. As an electric bass guitar, it was even more important, as an instrument that allowed bassists the same physical freedom as well as the same playing technique enjoyed by electric guitarists.

However, unlike the Tele and Strat, which required only minimal wiring changes to reach their optimal design, the Precision had an evolutionary history more like Gibson’s Les Paul model, not reaching its preferred configuration until it received an upgraded pickup (among other changes) in 1957 and a new finish color in ’58.

When it debuted in November, 1951, the Precision did have a lot in common with the Telecaster and Esquire, which Fender had introduced a little over a year earlier. The solid ash body had squared-off edges and a blond finish. Strings anchored through the body. Two adjustable saddles (made of a pressed fiber material rather than the brass saddles of the Tele) each accommodated a pair of strings. The pickguard was black Bakelite. Hidden under a handrest, the pickup was a single black bobbin without a cover, similar to the Telecaster’s bridge-position pickup. The neck was Fender’s one-piece maple design, with integral fingerboard. The peghead was relatively narrow, with all tuners on the bass side. A round washer functioned as a string tree to give the two highest strings a sharper break-angle over the nut.

The only fundamental design difference between the Precision and the Telecaster was the body shape. The Telecaster’s upper bass bout hinted at a cutaway, angling into the neck on a line that emerged on the treble side about three frets higher up the neck. The Precision had an extended bass horn. Aesthetically, it was of monumental importance, because it transformed the square-ish Tele body into a sleeker, much more modernistic design, and it introduced the basic shape that, after a heavy contouring treatment, would become the legendary Stratocaster body three years later.

Functionally, however, the extended bass horn provided only the illusion of an improvement. While the bass side of the Precision’s body was scooped for a double-cutaway look, it still joined the neck three frets lower on the neck than the treble side, just as on the Tele. And the strap button on the longer horn made the Precision even more unbalanced and body-heavy than was the Tele.

The Precision obviously differed from the Tele in the elements that made it a bass guitar; the 34″ scale required a longer neck, but some of that extra scale length was moved to the body by placing the bridge closer to its end. The body was enlarged only slightly – about half an inch.

The scale length was rather arbitrary in the context of upright basses. A standard ³/4-size Kay bass had a 42″ scale. The smaller “¹/2-size” (a.k.a. ¹/4-size or junior) was 35¹/4″. Fender probably settled on 34″ because it was five frets longer than the Telecaster’s 25¹/2″ scale.

The idea of an electric bass or a guitar-like bass did not originate with Leo Fender. Gibson put frets on a bass mandolin, which could be played upright or in angled guitar position, in 1912. Seattle-based instrument maker Paul Tutmarc offered a fretted, solidbody electric bass guitar under his Audiovox brand in 1935. Still, most of the pre-Fender efforts at electrifying the bass were upright concepts, such as the minimalist bodies of Rickenbacker and Vega in the ’30s, or the Ampeg endpin-mounted pickup developed in 1946.

Fender’s development of an electric solidbody bass guitar in ’51 seems today to be a questionable business decision. Guitarists had been slow in the ’30s to accept the electric guitar because it did not sound like an amplified acoustic guitar. Bassists were no different, and to make matters worse, few upright bassists could be expected to “downgrade” to a guitar in order to gain more volume.

While there were apparent drawbacks to the Precision, it also had some unique attractions. The guitar-based design may have turned off traditional upright bassists, but it opened up an even bigger market for the Precision. Now, guitarists could make an easy transition to bass, and a band in need of a bassist – particularly a rock and roll band – no longer needed to find a trained upright bassist. Any guitarist could cover simple bass parts with virtually no extra training.

The second unique attraction of the Fender Precision was not part of the bass, per se; it was the amp that Fender introduced along with the bass. In the pre-WWII era, amps were barely powerful enough to handle a single-note electric guitar line. Manufacturers beefed up their amps in the post-war years, but until the Precision, there was no demand for a dedicated bass amp. Fender all but sealed the success of the Precision – and the electric solidbody bass in general – with the Bassman amp.
In 1954, Fender introduced a new and improved guitar called the Stratocaster, while leaving the Telecaster design intact. The Precision got some of the Strat’s features – beveled body edges, two-tone sunburst finish and white pickguard – but presumably because it already had the Strat’s general body shape, Fender did not think it necessary to make it a new model.

The Precision received another round of upgrades in ’57 (as seen on the ’58 model shown here), the most important of which was a new, split-coil pickup. A new bridge design featured string anchors as part of the bridgeplate, eliminating the holes through the body. The peghead was widened to more closely resemble that of the Strat. And the pickguard changed shape, no longer covering the upper bass horn (but encompassing the control knobs), and it also changed material to a gold-anodized aluminum.

At that point, the evolution of the Precision was complete. There were more changes, including the three-tone sunburst finish sported by this month’s featured example from 1958. A rosewood fingerboard became standard in late ’59, though the maple neck would return as an option in the late ’60s. At about the same time, the pickguard changed to laminated tortoiseshell celluloid (or white with custom finishes). Through the end of the ’50s, the Precision filled players’ needs to the extent that Fender offered no other bass model.

Finally, in 1960, Fender introduced its second bass. Called the Jazz Bass, it offered two pickups with blending capability, and a neck that tapered to a narrower 1¹/2″ width at the nut (compared to the Precision’s 1³/4″ nut width). The Jazz Bass eventually found its own market with players who preferred its sharp attack, and numerous models today feature the “P-J” configuration, with one pickup from each model. However, for the full, fat sound that established the electric bass as a vital instrument in popular music, the late-’50s Precision remains the standard bearer.

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This article originally appeared in VG‘s November 2009 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

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In the world of archtop guitars, the Stromberg name represents the ultimate instrument – in size, at least – in the big-band era of the late 1930s and ’40s. The huge 19″ Master 400 and Master 300 models are worthy of their flagship status as the best-known and most revered Strombergs. However, this smaller, short-scale G-5 cutaway from the ’50s may be equally important, not only in the context of Stromberg history, but in the overall history of the guitar.

No major manufacturer offered a short-scale archtop guitar when this one was made, but the Stromberg family shop in Boston was open to new ideas. In fact, they’d been changing and adapting the focus of their instrument-making, weathering shifts in American musical tastes for almost 50 years.

Charles Stromberg, a native of Sweden, established the shop in 1906 and quickly built a reputation as a top-level maker and repairman for a variety of instruments. He made banjos, mandolins, guitars and drums, and he was also a highly skilled engraver and a nationally known harp repairman.

Charles’ oldest son, Harry, worked in the shop until 1927. His younger son, Elmer, began in 1910. Though Elmer would remain in the family business for the rest of his life (except for a stint in France during World War I), virtually all instrument labels or business cards said “Charles A. Stromberg and Son.”

Through the ’20s, East Coast tenor-banjo players knew the Stromberg shop as the place to go for a fine custom-made instrument. As the guitar began to supplant the banjo in popular music in the late ’20s, the Strombergs continued to cater to the preferences of musicians, and as early as 1927 they began taking orders for carved-top guitars, which were built primarily by Elmer. Based on Strombergs that survive today, serial numbering on guitars started at 300.

Early Stromberg archtops, like those of Gibson and Epiphone from the same period, were a far cry from the behemoths that would provide the rhythm for the swing bands of the ’30s. They were only 16″ wide, and the back and sides and tops were of laminated wood. The tops, too, were laminated, and he earliest had segmented f-holes.

Following the examples of Gibson and Epiphone, who widened the body width on existing models in the mid 1930s and created even larger new models measuring 18″ and 183/8 ” (the Super 400 and Emperor, respectively), Stromberg widened his original G-series and Deluxe models to match the Epiphone Deluxe at 173/8″. Then in 1937 or 1938, Stromberg topped all other archtop makers with the 19″ Master 400 and the less-ornamented but no-less-wide Master 300. With these guitars, Stromberg introduced a new bracing design – a single diagonal bar that distinguished his guitars from the double “tone bar” or X-pattern bracing that virtually all other archtop makers used. These guitars pushed acoustic guitar volume – not to mention the size of the guitar – to its practical limit, as demonstrated most famously by Freddie Green’s rhythm guitar work with the Count Basie band.

By 1952, Elmer had come up with a new model designed to increase sales. It was a 17″ cutaway that was essentially a Deluxe but with less binding and a shorter, 231/2″ scale. Priced at $315, it was about 25 percent less than the cutaway Deluxe, which sold for $404. Consequently, the G-5 became one of Stromberg’s most popular models. Of course, “popular” is a relative term when it comes to a shop that only produced about 340 guitars in a little over 25 years. Total production of the G-5 is estimated at no more than a dozen, all of which are cutaways and probably all short-scale.

Barry Galbraith, who was influential in the careers of such jazz greats as Tal Farlow, Sal Salvador, Jimmy Raney and Joe Puma, was the most prominent guitarist to buy the G-5, and he owned two. Jazz player Tony Rizzi got one, and actor/singer John Payne, best known for his role as the attorney who defended Santa Claus in the 1947 film Miracle on 34th Street, also bought a G-5.

One who ordered a G-5 failed to come through with his payment when the instrument was finished, so Stromberg put the guitar up for sale in his shop. A local guitarist named Murray Nichols bought it. Bearing serial number 620, Nichols owned it until 2008.

Through the years, its nitrocellulose headstock overlay began to deteriorate. A replica overlay was made by Pete Kyvelos, of Unique Strings. Known in the world of Greek instrument as “the Stradivarius of oud makers,” Kyvelos used a non-disintegrating material and followed Stromberg’s tedious process of hand-engraving and using a camel brush to hand-paint the logo.

Stromberg’s reputation as a maker of short-scale jazz guitars spread quickly, thanks in part to Barry Galbraith. On his recommendation, Nashville jazz player and session guitarist Hank Garland ordered a cutaway Deluxe model with the short scale. Garland’s guitar was numbered 626, just six guitars later than the featured instrument. It may or may not have been Garland’s first short-scale guitar, but he obviously liked it enough to include the short-scale specification on his Byrdland signature model (named for him and his fellow Nashville guitarist Billy Byrd) Gibson introduced in 1955.

Stromberg made only 17 more guitars after this G-5. The elder Stromberg died in ’55 at age 89. Elmer, who was 60 at the time, died by the end of the year, leaving one G-5 cutaway unfinished. Hank Garland gained greater fame for himself and more exposure for short-scale guitars through the ’50s, but an auto wreck in 1961 ended his career.

Though Stromberg’s short-scale cutaway G-5 was arguably as important and as influential as the Master 400, its moment in the sun was just that – a moment – while the Master 400 endured and eventually emerged as the standard bearer of the Stromberg reputation.

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Special thanks to Jim Speros.

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This article originally appeared in VG‘s October 2009 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

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Orville Gibson invented the carved-top guitar in the 1890s. The Gibson company refined the design with the addition of f-holes in 1922, and brought the concept to full potential in the mid ’30s with larger-bodied archtops.

While Gibson inarguably blazed the trail in the industry when it came to archtop design, that trail had at least one wrong turn, exemplified by this month’s featured guitar – essentially an f-hole version of the company’s 13³/4″ roundhole archtop L-3.

From a historical perspective – the perspective of someone in 1930 looking back at earlier Gibsons – this guitar would seem a great idea. In Gibson’s first catalog, published shortly after the company was formed in October, 1902, all seven guitar models were offered in several body widths – 12¹/2″, 13¹/2″ and (except for the L-1) 16″. The surviving models quickly settled into standard sizes of 13¹/2″ for the round-hole L-1 and L-3, and 16″ for the roundhole L-4 and the oval-hole Style O.

In the early 1900s, a 13¹/2″ guitar was not considered small. Martin’s size 0, for example, was 13¹/2″ wide and was in the middle of the range. A Gibson L-1 or L-3 was adequate for the way Gibson marketed guitars, as accompaniment instruments in mandolin groups. While professional guitarists gravitated to the larger and louder L-4 or Style O, the L-1 and L-3 were still mainstays of Gibson’s archtop line at the beginning of the 1920s. Somewhere along the way, the L-3 grew slightly, to a catalog spec of 13⁹/16″ and to an actual size of 13³/4″.

With the guitar growing in popularity, Gibson discontinued the L-1 in 1925, replacing it in ’26 with a pair of flat-tops – the L-1 and the L-0 – which used the same body size and shape with a circular lower bout. The L-3 continued through the ’20s. Gibson tried to elevate its status by changing the round soundhole to an oval hole circa ’27, but by the end of the decade it was clearly a model from a bygone era.

In the meantime, Gibson acoustic engineer Lloyd Loar had devised a new archtop design that used violin-style f-holes. The “star” of the new Style 5 line was the F-5 mandolin, but Loar extended the f-hole concept across the mandolin family, which in Gibson’s view included the guitar. The L-5, a 16″ archtop with f-holes, made its debut in ’22.

The f-hole archtop was not an instant success, but by the late ’20s, guitarists began to discover the cutting rhythmic power of the f-hole design. For many guitarists, the only problem with the L-5 was its price. At $275, it was almost double the price of the roundhole L-4 at $150. In ’29, a new model called the L-10 appeared, sporting the same 16″ body and f-holes as the L-5, but with a black finish that made it more affordable. When it finally appeared on a price list in November, 1931, it came in at $175. At the same time, as evidence of changing preferences among guitarists, Gibson dropped the L-4 to $100.

In order to extend the f-hole archtop line downward to an even less expensive – and, hopefully, better-selling model – Gibson would have to make a smaller guitar. The next size down was 13³/4″, which Gibson was still producing in the form of the L-3. In a last-ditch attempt to maintain interest in the model, Gibson had just fitted it with the elevated fingerboard extension found on the L-5 and L-10.

Curiously, Gibson was well along in the process of moving its flat-top line upward in size, from 13¹/2″ to 14³/4″. In addition, Gibson introduced an even larger flat-top – the 16″ HG-24, an oddball with a round hole plus four f-holes in the top, as well as an inner baffle. Although Gibson wouldn’t “advance” the size of its archtops until ’35, the movement toward larger, louder acoustic guitars was clearly recognized by Gibson and underway by 1930.

In addition to the f-holes, this guitar is distinguished from almost all L-3s by the fingerboard extension, which is elevated off the top. The L-3’s fingerboard was flush with the top except in ’32, its last year of production, when it received the elevated fingerboard – a feature found only on the f-hole models.

Whether this guitar was a custom order or a factory experiment is immaterial. In the context of an ever-growing demand for louder guitars, a smaller f-hole archtop was a step in the wrong direction. And Gibson apparently recognized it as such. The company’s next archtop was another 16″ f-hole model, the L-12.

In ’32, Gibson finally introduced a smaller, more economical archtop. Ironically, its model number, L-50, might have suggested a higher-quality guitar than the existing models, but it ushered in a new era of Gibson model names that corresponded to list prices. It had an odd body shape, with a width of 14³/4″ and a length of 17¹/2″ – almost two inches shorter than the 14³/4″ flat-tops – which gave it a squat look. The standard specification called for a round soundhole, though a few were made with f-holes. Within two years, Gibson would lengthen the body, at which point f-holes became standard.

In 1935, when all Gibson archtops “advanced” a step, the L-50 went to 16″.

Gibson filled the vacated spot with a pair of cheaper 14³/4″ f-hole models, the L-30 and L-37, priced at $30 and $37.50 respectively. Although Gibson’s primary competitor in the archtop market, Epiphone, was moderately successful in the early ’30s with its 13″ Olympic model, Gibson never again ventured below 14³/4″ when it came to f-hole arch tops.

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This article originally appeared in VG October 2011 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

By the advent of the solidbody electric guitar in the 1950s, tenor guitarists were a dying breed. Consequently, electric tenors are relatively rare, and a tenor guitar made by solidbody pioneer Paul Bigsby is one of the rarest of all electric guitars. And if that’s not rare enough, consider the setting of this story – this Bigsby tenor was used exclusively in a Christian music group, which is the last place one would expect to find an electric guitar of any sort in the 1950s.

Paul Adelbert Bigsby – “P.A.” to his friends – was a late bloomer as a guitar maker. Born in 1899, he started his professional career as a motorcycle racer. Hired by the Los Angeles-based Crocker Motorcycle Company, which produced the most powerful racing and road motorcycles from 1932 to ’42, when production ceased for World War II. Bigsby was a factory foreman and the designer of many Crocker components.

Bigsby was a fan of the Western music that began to flourish in southern California after the Depression and the Dust Bowl of the mid ’30s forced many families to move westward from Oklahoma and surrounding states. Sometime in the 1940s, he met fingerpicking legend Merle Travis, who was also a motorcycle enthusiast. Travis was having trouble with his guitar’s vibrato unit, which was the side-pull type designed by Doc Kauffman (Leo Fender’s early partner). Rather than fixing the Kauffman unit, Bigsby designed a completely new “vibrola” with a simpler, more effective, up-and-down motion.

That vibrola alone would qualify Bigsby for a prominent place in the history of the electric guitar. Through the 1950s it was the vibrola of choice for those who played Gibson and Gretsch guitars.

At the same time, Bigsby began making his mark in the history of the pedal steel guitar. Earl “Joaquin” Murphy, a.k.a. the Charlie Parker of the steel guitar, had Bigsby build him a lap steel in 1947. Another legendary player, Wesley “Speedy” West (who replaced Murphy in Tex Williams’ band that year), was right behind Murphy at Bigsby’s door, commissioning a triple-neck with pedals in ’48. The pedal steel came into its own in ’54, when Bud Isaacs featured its pitch-changing/note-bending capability in mid-solo on Webb Pierce’s hit “Slowly.” (Previously, pedal steel players had used the pedals to change tunings, but not as an “effect.”) Isaacs’ instrument was a Bigsby.

In the meantime, Bigsby’s friend, Merle Travis, had come to him in 1948 with an idea for a guitar he drew on a menu while the two were having lunch. The guitar would have the appearance of a solid body, with a thin body depth, flat top and back, and no soundholes. Ironically, despite Bigsby’s influence on the development of the solidbody electric, to our knowledge he never built one; his were all semi-hollow. Perhaps the most innovative element of Travis’ design was the headstock. It was an angular shape with the hint of a scroll and – most important – all six tuners on the bass side. Travis has said he’d seen the design on some traditional European stringed instruments, and it was used on guitars built by Johann Stauffer in Vienna in the early 1800s and on the early guitars of C.F. Martin in the 1830s. Regardless of where the Bigsby headstock design originated, its influence on Leo Fender’s headstocks, which would appear in 1950, was unmistakable.

Had Bigsby chosen to build electric guitars at a production level, he might be known today as the most important guitar maker of the 1950s, rather than as a pioneer. Instead, it was Leo Fender who ran with the concept of a true solidbody guitar, while Bigsby continued to work out of a shop next to his home in Downey, California, building instruments and replacement necks to order for individual musicians. Between 1946 and ’63, when he quit building instruments, his output probably totaled less than 100, at least two-thirds of which were steels. In addition to steels and standard guitars, he made a doubleneck for Nashville session man Grady Martin and a mandolin for Tiny Moore of Bob Wills’ band.

Shortly after Merle Travis received his Bigsby guitar, he gave a public performance in Los Angeles that was attended by Eschol Cosby, a student at the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. Cosby had grown up in the southwest singing and playing at church revivals. After World War II, he enrolled at BIOLA and formed a band called the Christian Cowboys, which he fronted with his Gibson ES-150 and a Gibson mandolin. Cosby’s son, Bobby, recalled the effect of Eschol’s first Bigsby sighting. “One day he went to a concert and saw Merle Travis and said ‘I’ve got to have that!’”

With a standard guitar and a mandolin already in his arsenal, Cosby ordered a Bigsby tenor, which he received in 1949. The price was $350, which was expensive and on a par with Gibson’s top electrics, the ES-350 Premier in natural finish at $340 (plus case) and the natural-finish ES-5 at $390. The Bigsby’s price would be extravagant compared to the solidbodies on the horizon. Fender’s Esquire of 1950 was priced at $140, and Gibson’s first solidbody, The Les Paul model, debuted in ’52 at $210.

Cosby liked his tenor Bigsby so much that in 1951 he went back to Bigsby for an electric mandolin, for which he paid $400. The serial number of the tenor was lost when the rim area around the jack was replaced, but it would have been lower than the mandolin, which was serial number 51. Cosby later added a third Bigsby to his collection when he purchased a standard Bigsby guitar from a third party.

The top and back of this guitar are flat pieces of birdseye maple, 1/4″ thick, and glued to a sturdy grid of horizontal and vertical “braces” that extend from the front of the guitar to the back. The pickup, hand-made by Bigsby, is anchored by six screws that go into the support grid – not into the top – so functionally, this is a solidbody instrument. As a solidbody, the design pre-dates Fender’s Esquire by two years. If considered a semi-hollowbody, which is a more technically accurate description, the design was even further ahead of its time, pre-dating the Gibson ES-335 by a full 10 years.

This instrument also pushed Eschol Cosby and the Christian Cowboys far ahead of their time in gospel music. “Their music was quite radical in Christian circles,” Eschol’s son, Bobby, said. “And he had to overcome a lot of prejudice to use the instruments he had. He was one of the very first people to use anything other than a piano or organ in Christian music.” For Eschol, however, the Bigsby proved a double-edged sword. Any satisfaction he might have enjoyed by being a pioneer of the electric guitar in Christian music would be offset by the rock-influenced music and attitudes the electric guitar eventually brought with it. As Bobby notes, “In his lifetime, he was the trailblazer for a lot of people who took it far beyond what he thought was right.”

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This article originally appeared in VG‘s January 2009 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

The Epiphone Riviera helped reinvent Epiphone in the 1960s as a modern guitar company whose instruments sported such contemporary features as thinline, semi-hollow, double-cutaway bodies and humbucking pickups.

In the minds of older guitarists, Epiphone was a traditional New York-based company, with roots in 19th-century Greece, that came into prominence with tenor banjos in the Jazz Age and challenged Gibson in the archtop and electric market of the 1930s. In the minds of younger guitarists of the late ’50s, however, Epi barely existed. The company floundered after World War II due in large part to the death of founder Epi Stathopoulo in ’43, and it was virtually dead when Gibson’s parent company, Chicago Musical Instrument Company (CMI), acquired it in ’57.

Although the reason for the acquisition was to give CMI/Gibson the capability of producing acoustic basses, Gibson president Ted McCarty recognized an opportunity to create and exploit what was essentially a second Gibson brand. McCarty drew up a new line of Epiphone guitars and debuted them in 1958. His electric archtops represented an abrupt departure from Epi’s past; four of the five new models were thin-bodied, a style Gibson had offered since ’55, but Epi had never done. And one of the new Epis – the Sheraton – was a semi-hollow double-cutaway, a style Gibson was introducing concurrently under the Gibson brand as the ES-335.

The semi-hollowbody design gained immediate acceptance, and Gibson expanded the offering with the more-ornamented ES-355 (later in ’58) and midline ES-345 (’59). On the Epi side, however, the Sheraton was a fancy model – the equivalent of the ES-355 – so the expansion went in the opposite direction. The new model was introduced in ’62 and dubbed the Riviera. (Another semi-hollow Epi, the Professional, was also introduced in ’62, but it was in a class of its own, with guitar-mounted amplifier controls, requiring its own specially designed amplifier.)

Some of the original Gibson-made Epiphones featured Epi-style necks (either leftover or newly made by Gibson) and Epi’s “New York” pickups, which resemble humbuckers with the polepieces offset from the center, though they are single-coils. By the time of the Riviera, however, the makeover of Epiphone was complete. This example illustrates the distinctive Epiphone peghead shape – more curvaceous than Gibson’s, but with Gibson’s “dove-wing” top edge design. The single-parallelogram fingerboard inlay pattern is also distinctly Epiphone and is shared by the double-cutaway fully hollow ’62 Casino (although it does show up on occasional ES-335s in the ’60s). The pickups are humbuckers, but in order to keep the Epiphone line slightly below Gibson in status and sound, Epiphone humbuckers were slightly smaller. Consequently, they’ve become known as mini-humbuckers. Although they’re not as desirable as the full-size versions, Gibson did think enough of them to make them standard equipment on the original Gibson Firebird line and Les Paul Deluxe model. The vibrola on this example, which became available as an option in ’67, is unique to Epiphones; the strings wrap around a shaft with a graduated diameter to compensate for different string diameters.

As if those features weren’t enough to distinguish the Riviera from a Gibson, the pickguard and the tailpiece insert sport the stylized upper-case E from the Epiphone peghead logo. It’s actually a lower-case version of the Greek letter epsilon, which ties in this modern instrument with Epiphone’s roots. The shape of the pickguard, too, is inspired by traditional Epi archtop pickguards and is different from the standard Gibson issue.

In other respects, the Riviera is the same as the Gibson ES-335 in workmanship and design. Unfortunately, though, while the ES-335 continued through Gibson’s Norlin years (1970-’85) and into current production, the Riviera went away with the entire Epi line when Gibson sent Epi production to Japan in 1970. (It reappeared briefly in 1982 and came back for good in the early ’90s, and is still produced overseas.)

Despite the Riviera’s similarity to the ES-335, it has been overshadowed in the vintage market by the less-expensive Casino. The Casino, introduced in ’61, had single-coil pickups and a fully hollow body. It was to the Riviera what the ES-330 was to the ES-335. For example, in ’66, the Riviera (shaded or cherry finish, no vibrola) listed for $369.50 and the Casino (two pickups, no vibrola) listed at $325 for cherry finish and $310 for shaded finish. That same year, the ES-335 was $365 to $385 and the ES-330 was $335 to $350.

While 1960s ES-335s bring double or triple what a same-year ES-330 would bring, the Riviera has not maintained the same relationship with the Casino (except as new models in the current Epiphone lines). In fact, vintage Casinos bring more than Rivieras, and the reason is simple: the Beatles played Casinos. Not only has their indentification – in particular that of John Lennon – with the model made vintage Casinos more valuable than Rivieras, it has also made Casinos more valuable than equivalent Gibson ES-330s.

It is only by the fickle finger of fate that the Riviera sits today in the shadow of the Casino. After all, the Beatles surely would have been perfectly satisfied with Rivieras. The Riviera’s similarity to the ES-335 makes it, in our opinion, a “sleeper” in the vintage market. While it is not wise to expect the vintage market to behave in an orderly manner, it is reasonable to view vintage Rivieras as undervalued, with excellent future investment potential, since they are currently available for significantly less than an equivalent ES-335 and less even than many new guitars with similar appointments.

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This article originally appeared in VG‘s December ’05 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

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