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Post by RickW on Apr 20, 2014 9:17:24 GMT -5
You could say it's thrice, McCoy, because he did the tele, as well.
Hobson, I think that's one of the endearing things about Fender products. They are solid. Indeed, they don't look quite right without a few war wounds on them. But it's the kind of instrument, you can tell, even when dinged to hell, will still be sweet. It's funny, you don't seem to see as many banged up Les Pauls or ES 335s. They always seem to be kept in perfect shape.
But I have always thought Gibson players were kinda prissy, ya know.
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Post by RickW on Apr 20, 2014 9:17:56 GMT -5
Except for people with Ripper basses. Now, there's a tough old bird.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 20, 2014 9:22:36 GMT -5
"But I have always thought Gibson players were kinda prissy, ya know."
Yup. All of us are. We're a huge, homogenous mass. Just like Canadians or white people or Republicans.
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Post by Marshall on Apr 20, 2014 9:23:36 GMT -5
You could say it's thrice, McCoy, because he did the tele, as well. Hobson, I think that's one of the endearing things about Fender products. They are solid. Indeed, they don't look quite right without a few war wounds on them. But it's the kind of instrument, you can tell, even when dinged to hell, will still be sweet. It's funny, you don't seem to see as many banged up Les Pauls or ES 335s. They always seem to be kept in perfect shape. But I have always thought Gibson players were kinda prissy, ya know. A Les Paul weighs so much that it damages everything else it bangs into.
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Post by Cosmic Wonder on Apr 20, 2014 10:03:50 GMT -5
This guitar sounds beyond fab, and the end of the vid Koch's playing had me laughing out loud.
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Post by RickW on Apr 20, 2014 13:02:59 GMT -5
"But I have always thought Gibson players were kinda prissy, ya know." Yup. All of us are. We're a huge, homogenous mass. Just like Canadians or white people or Republicans. Army officers, too. Say, I wonder what the cross sectional relationship between army officers and gibson players is?
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Post by Deleted on Apr 20, 2014 13:22:36 GMT -5
You'd actually need to take the cross sectional relationship between Army officers and players of both Gibson and Fender guitars into account. They're out there.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 20, 2014 18:13:26 GMT -5
Prorotype photos 1953, Pickguard made from phenolite, the same material that Fender used for Tele pickguards and pickup bobbins. Tele knobs and no knob on the un-threaded vibrato bar. 1954 Fancy prototype made for George Fullerton, figured body, 2 piece pickguard of phenolite or black anodized aluminum and white vinyl. Knobs are not the standard placement. Clear Plexiglas Strat made for the 1957 NAAM show. On a side note, I'm researching that painting behind George Fullerton. It may be by artist Stanley H Walker, grandfather to Luthier John Walker.
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Dub
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Post by Dub on Apr 20, 2014 19:05:37 GMT -5
I wonder if Leo applied the Golden Ratio or the Fibonacci sequence to any of the design elements of the Strat or P-bass... the shapes of the body and headstock are so visually compelling that it hardly seems to be accidental. Remember when CBS changed the headstock dimensions on the Strat for a couple years? It was just ugly. Of course you know where Leo got his idea for the Stratocaster headstock...
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Post by Lonnie on Apr 20, 2014 19:17:21 GMT -5
I wonder if the original idea was to portray a violin scroll turned sideways? The function aspect (which works better on the Strat than the Bigsby) is straight string pull through the nut to the tuner.
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Post by lar on Apr 20, 2014 19:35:48 GMT -5
My first Strat was a Lake Placid Blue Mexican Strat. It had the most stable neck of any electric I had owned until that time. It almost never went out of tune on a gig. I saved up and traded it a few years later for a 3-color sunburst American Standard. Since then I've bought several guitars but when I was playing rock & roll all of the time I would always drift back to the Strat sooner or later and wonder why I had ever played anything else.
Now I play country and my Strat just isn't a country guitar. About a month ago I bought a new American Standard Tele, same 3-color sunburst (do you see a pattern here? LOL). I'm in love all over again. For my money I've got the best of both worlds; a Strat and a Tele.
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Dub
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Post by Dub on Apr 20, 2014 22:02:01 GMT -5
I wonder if the original idea was to portray a violin scroll turned sideways? The function aspect (which works better on the Strat than the Bigsby) is straight string pull through the nut to the tuner. No, the idea for the Bigsby came from Merle Travis. He liked to lay his Martin D-28 on his lap to change strings. Changing the strings on the away side was a bother and he asked Paul Bigsby if all the tuners could be put on the same side. He had already asked Bigsby to make a new neck (narrow and radiused) for his D-28. The first one had the "scroll" part of the headstock pointing the other way but it didn't work out because it made it hard to turn the treble E string tuner so they made another one with the "scroll" pointing the other way. Later, Travis designed a solid body electric that he had Paul Bigsby make. Bigsby wound up making a fair number of those. A friend of theirs named Leo Fender asked to borrow one and, as they say, the rest is history.
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Post by Lonnie on Apr 20, 2014 22:04:30 GMT -5
Fascinating, Dub... thanks for that intriguing piece of insight.
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Post by Dub on Apr 20, 2014 22:40:27 GMT -5
I suspect the two head stocks in the comparison graphic aren't to the same scale. I think the actual nut widths should be nearly the same which would make the Bigsby headstock look much larger at proper scale, as it should.
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Post by Lonnie on Apr 21, 2014 8:18:26 GMT -5
I do recall that the Bigsby was the Jimmy Durante of headstocks.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 21, 2014 20:24:48 GMT -5
A = 1947 Bigsby Merle Travis B = 1949 Fender "Snakehead" Esquire Prototype C = 1950 Fender Esquire D = 1954 Fender Stratocaster E = 1966 Fender Stratocaster
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Post by Doug on Apr 21, 2014 20:34:13 GMT -5
This board can supply me with an amazing amount of trivia that I will never need that will none the less find it's way into the deepest recesses of the useless junk trivia that I have spent six decades filling up.
Do y'all think we have a finite amount of internal hard drive and after a while if we put new things in our memory old things are shoved out? I don't think so but then if I didn't remember the things I didn't remember I wouldn't know it, I think.
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Post by Dub on Apr 21, 2014 21:32:48 GMT -5
Just to add unlooked for trivia to this discussion... Merle Travis also designed the Bigsby tremolo. Paul Bigsby, as I recall, was a motorcycle repair guy who was also making steel guitars on the side. The first "Bigsby" tremolo used a motorcycle valve spring for tension.
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