Month: January 2016

Doubleneck instruments have always been a unique niche in the guitar market, for good reason. They’ve also carried an air of superiority or the insinuation that they were intended for pro players; i.e., those who could deftly switch from one instrument to another in the middle of a song without doffing their part. And though they look hyper-cool strapped on, doing so quickly reveals them to be excruciatingly heavy and cumbersome.

In business for almost 60 years, the Carvin company has been quite successful in its “factory direct” approach. Founded by Lowell Kiesel in Southern California in 1946, Carvin has expanded its facilities and relocated more than once. It now builds guitars, basses, amplifiers, and sound reinforcement gear under one gigantic roof in San Diego. And while the company has several retail stores, the bulk of its business is still done direct via phone, mail, and the internet, and those who order a Carvin stringed instrument have a plethora of options.

Carvin’s DN640 is a unique example in the doubleneck genre. Unlike production doublenecks from other manufacturers (like Gibson’s EBS-1250 and Rickenbacker’s 4080), the bass neck is on the bottom instead of the top. Introduced in 1980, the DN640 and DN612 were the first modern/U.S.-made Carvin doublenecks, although the company had been assembling instruments with such a configuration at its factory since the mid 1950s. Moreover, this “reverse-neck” layout was only one of several unique facets of the DN640.

Carvin instruments are custom-order (except for store stock), but in the early ’80s, the list of options was much shorter than it is today. The original owner of this doubleneck had it made with Hawaiian Koa wood – thus the K designation in the model number. In more recent times, Koa has gained respect as a tone wood, and has accordingly increased in price. The instrument has ebony fretboards and set-neck construction (in ’88, Carvin went to neck-through on doublenecks). The guitar neck has a 24 3/4″ scale, a la Gibson, while the bass neck’s scale is the standard 34″. Each neck has a brass nut, which was in vogue in the early ’80s. The owner also opted for gold hardware – tuners, bridges, and tailpiece, all by Schaller. The only other option Carvin offered at the time were block fretboard inlays. Finish choices at the time were also limited – white, black, red, or natural.

The pickups are Carvin’s own 11-polepiece humbuckers – M22s on the guitar, M22Bs on the bass. The edge-to-edge polepiece design helped prevent signal loss during string bending.

Logic also permeates the layout of the controls. Each neck has a volume control for each pickup, a master tone, and a three-way pickup toggle. Each line of three mini-toggles consists of coil-tap switches for each pickup and a phase switch.

The mini-toggle in the middle of the body (near the pickup selector) is the neck selector. Some later Carvin doublenecks reportedly had the neck selector on the lower control area.

The two output jacks are wired for separate necks, allowing separate amplification for guitar (lower jack) and bass (upper jack). However, both necks can be run through just the lower jack.

Another potential plus for the DN640 was that its body was somewhat smaller than competing doublenecks, inferring less bulkiness. And the original owner of this example said the bass neck’s lower position gave it better balance than a Rick 4080.

Other Carvin doublenecks include two-bass-neck examples (one fretted, one fretless), bass/guitar doublenecks with the bass on top, and two-fers with a Kahler bass vibrato and Floyd Rose guitar vibrato. There was even one left-handed six-string bass/six-string guitar.

Carvin officially discontinued production of doublenecks in 1993.

And of course, Carvin built other doublenecks that didn’t have a bass neck, but the DN640K was a unique and underrated example of twin-neck instruments built by American manufacturers.

Photo: Kevin Wright. Instrument courtesy of carvinmuseum.com.

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

As prolific as the Radio Shack chain was in the ’60s, it’s surprising we don’t see more vintage Realistic guitar amps today. Maybe they were never valued enough to be handed down, much less hunted down.

If anything, you’re likely to have stumbled on the Carnival 34, a straightforward 1×12″ combo, but even those are few and far between. As for this Entertainer 34, well, we’ve only seen this one in the flesh. And the Fender G-Decs, Peavey Solos, Marshall MGs, and other modern all-in-one “guitar practice systems” had better watch out, because the Entertainer packs a rather nifty surprise.

Much like the hallowed mullet haircut, the Entertainer 34 was all business in the front, and a party in the back. Plug into any of the front panel’s three inputs (Hi-Gain, Lo-Gain, Bright) and you’re rewarded with surprisingly tasty tube tone. Hop around back, and – shazam! – there’s a fully functional gramophone to facilitate play-along jams with your favorite LPs and 45s. Have you ever seen anything cooler? We wager you haven’t.

Literature on this thing is very scarce (we could find none other than a mention in a Radio Shack Washington’s Day Sale ad in the sports section of the February 21, 1967 edition of The Lowell Sun of Lowell, Massachusetts… lurking below a story about boxer Casius Clay’s failure to achieve a deferment of military service). As part of Radio Shack’s “Red Hot Guitar Amp Sale,” which stretched to a whopping two models, the Entertainer 34 was down from $99.50 to $69.50, alongside a $20 reduction that took the gramophone-less Carnival 34 to a mere $49.95. The ad copy also tells us the Entertainer 34 is a “34-watt guitar amp with built-in record changer,” though once you scope the specs, you realize that output rating is the kind of scandalous exaggeration that only your cheaper makers tried to get away with.

Aside from the obvious answer, where did this thing come from? Did Radio Shack manufacture guitar amps back in the day? So many questions, and perhaps not quite so many answers. To the first, it’s difficult to tell for certain, but we have ferreted out some likely origins. To the second, of course not: Radio Shack or its umbrella brand, Realistic, didn’t make much of anything, and sourced the universally budget-minded goods from other manufacturers. While the control panel, graphics, and grillecloth were quite different, the Entertainer 34’s cabinet and handle are in line with those of the Mark X amp made by the New-Jersey-based Gregory in the mid/late ’60s. More tellingly, it carries the same tube complement and displays similar construction within the chassis. There are slight differences from the only Mark X amp we have seen, but it was not uncommon for budget brands to alter layouts on a whim, and the basic circuit and signal path are virtually identical. It might seem surprising that a major national chain jobbed its work to a fleeting, fly-by-night maker (we believe Gregory vanished in the late ’60s), but these amps were cheap as chips, of course. To discount them to $69.50, you can bet Radio Shack was buying them for very short money indeed.

For all that, though, there’s no mention of Gregory to be found on the Entertainer 34, so such speculations remain unconfirmed. The record-player side of the package is stocked with components mostly of European origin, so who knows how that came to be; perhaps it was simply an affordable import of a size convenient to mount into the erstwhile Carnival 34.

Despite the rather generic design and parsimonious construction, the Entertainer 34 isn’t a bad little guitar amp. Or, consider the going rate for the Carnival 34 sans turntable up against $114 for a ’67 Fender Princeton… but, yeah, it’s from Radio Shack. Regardless, it has the ingredients to get the job done, particularly if crunchy and tactile British-voiced tones at fairly low volumes float your boat. The powerhouse runs on a pair of EL84s with a EZ81 rectifier tube (as found in a vintage Vox AC15) supplying the voltages. The simple preamp uses half a 12AX7 for gain (with a passive treble-bleed Tone knob) and half for the bias-modulating tremolo circuit, while a second 12AX7 constitutes driver and cathodyne inverter for the output stage. The EL84s are cathode-biased, but without the traditional bypass cap to fatten things up, and there’s a little negative feedback between the output transformer’s secondary and the cathode of the driver to tighten the response a little. Textbook stuff, of course, and probably copied pretty directly from any of several available applications manuals, but it’s effective enough.

As for that rather specious claim to 34 watts of power, well, the far-from-oversized output transformer is mounted right there inside the chassis, and stamped on top with its rating – “12W.” And that sounds just about right. Even up against a 22-watt Fender Deluxe Reverb of the same era with a similar 12″ speaker the Entertainer 34 was likely to leave the budding garage rocker feeling rather anemic, and perhaps somewhat cheated. Crank it in the space of your own home, though – or your own home studio – and there is certainly a tone you can work with. And then your Deluxe Reverb owner had to jerry-rig the family record player and plug it into his amp’s #2 input to get anything close to the same all-in-one, play-along excitement, and that’s got to count for something. The fact that the record player achieves some of the same “juicy, crunchy” EL84 tone as the guitar amp might not do much for the audiophile in you, but for the budding garage rocker in all of us, it’s a pretty groovy way to go.

This article originally appeared in VG October 2013 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

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Certain guitar brands develop a mystique among aficionados – sometimes it’s even deserved! Somewhere on this continuum lie Charvel USA guitars made in the early ’80s in San Dimas, California. Curiously, that “San Dimas guitar” mystique didn’t rub off to its foreign cousins like the Model 4 – the fine Japanese-made Charvels produced beginning in 1986.

Japanese Charvels were the result of a collision between the dominance of ’80s heavy metal, the maturation of Asian guitarmaking, and the realities of economics. American-made Charvels were the namesake of Wayne Richard Charvel, who began making guitars as a teenager in the 1960s. In the early ’70s, Charvel worked as a refinisher for Fender. In ’74, he opened a repair shop in Azusa, California, which in ’76 became Charvel Manufacturing, offering a variety of parts so you could “build your own.” Charvel had an assistant named Grover Jackson. In ’77, Charvel Manufacturing ran into financial problems, and in ’78, Jackson bought the company from his boss, becoming Jackson/Charvel.

That same year, Edward Van Halen brought attention to the name when he appeared playing a Charvel “parts” guitar. After supplying guitars to B.C. Rich and basses to Music Man, in 1980 the Charvel line of bolt-neck solidbody electric guitars and basses appeared, basically variations on Fender models. Even though Van Halen soon jumped ship and hooked up with Floyd Rose and Kramer guitars, Charvels found a steady clientele, and the brand prospered. In 1983, Charvels with the more-familiar pointy/droopy headstock appeared. When American manufacturing ceased in ’86, Charvel had produced nearly 6,000 guitars.

Meanwhile, the Japanese juggernaut of the ’70s continued into the ’80s, though while Japanese quality continued to excel, unfavorable exchange rates made it increasingly difficult to import them. Rewind. Two enterprising Americans named Jerry Freed and Tommy Moore started the International Music Corporation (IMC) in Fort Worth, Texas. In 1969, they traveled to Korea and, transferring Japanese technology and techniques, established the budget Hondo brand. Cheaper Hondos were made in Korea, but its better models were produced in Japan. The Hondo brand thrived into the ’80s.

Desiring to garner some of the hard-rock-player market, in 1985, IMC entered a licensing agreement with Jackson/Charvel to produce Charvel guitars in Japan. Chu Shin Gakki, in Matsumoto City, was awarded the business and samples were sent. It was this contract that ended the early phase of Robin guitar imports and thrust that brand into U.S. manufacturing. In 1986, IMC purchased the Jackson/Charvel company and that year, the first Japanese-made Charvels appeared in the U.S. Jackson-brand guitars continued to be produced in the U.S., though Asian-made Jacksons soon appeared.

Basically, there were six models of Chu Shin Charvels in ’86. At the top of the line were the Models 6 and 5, with a two-octave neck-through down-sized bodies called Dinky. Both had American-made Jackson active electronics. The Model 6 had a bound fingerboard with the ubiquitous “shark’s teeth” inlays, the Model 5 was unbound with dots. Models 4 and lower had bolt-on necks with regulation Strat-style bodies, all unbound dot-necks. Models 3 and lower had passive Jackson pickups; Model 3 (humbucker/single/single, locking vibrato), 3A (two humbuckers), Model 2 (single humbucker, locking vibrato), Model 1 (one humbucker, maple fretboard, traditional vibrato), and Model 1A (pickguard, three single-coils, traditional vibrato). A number of examples were “off-catalog.”

The Model 4 was at the top of the bolt-neck line, with the same hardware and active electronics as the 6. Its thin, quartersawn rock maple neck has a satin finish and a wide, flat fingerboard. The body is basswood – medium weight, but solid. The single-coils are Jackson J200s; the humbucker a J50BC with “accentuated high frequency.” Like most good active pickup systems, it has a clean, wide frequency response with no noise. The toggles are on/off for each pickup, the vibrato is a Kahler Standard, and controls are one Volume, one Tone, and a pre-amp midrange boost/cut. The nut is phenolic.

The Chu Shin Model 4 proved highly successful for IMC – so much so that in 1987 they upgraded it with a bound fingerboard and shark’s teeth inlays. This example carries serial number 227735 – lacking any apparent date encoding.

Under the IMC/Jackson hegemony, the Charvel line continued to expand, and some fine and innovative guitars were produced. In ’89, the Charvette, made in Korea, was introduced. In the early/mid ’90s, IMC began to be hit by bad economic news, and parts of the company began to be sold off. Charvel electrics disappeared, though some acoustics remained. In ’97, IMC’s assets were sold to Akai Electric Company, leaving only the Jackson brand. In 2002, the entire kit and caboodle were sold to Fender, which to this day produces some very beautiful guitars and basses made in Asia. Wayne Charvel and his son, Michael, make and sell guitars remarkably similar to the original Charvel USAs under the Wayne brand name.

Charvel guitars conjure a fascinating time in American guitar history when shred was the name of the game. American production lasted less than six years. Japanese production lasted about the same. Korean production probably didn’t last as long. Quite a few were sold, but no real information on production totals is available, so we have no idea how rare this guitar is (or isn’t). These Japanese Charvels may not have the caché of the American models, but if you play electric guitar and this was your only option, you would be happy with a guitar this nice!

This article originally appeared in VG August 2013 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.