GuitarMatchup: Famous guitars

Jimmy Page's Double Neck

On Led Zeppelin's classic “Stairway to Heaven,” Jimmy Page used an acoustic Harmony guitar, a Fender Telecaster, and a Fender electric 12-string. That made it impossible to recreate the recording in live performances, where Page was limited to one guitar at a time.

However, he found a partial solution in Gibson's EDS-1275 double-neck, which allowed him to switch from six strings to 12 strings without changing guitars.

Gibson's double-neck model started off in the late 1950s with a unique hollowbody carved-top design, but when Gibson transformed the Les Paul line to the pointed-horn SG body style in 1961, the double-neck models followed suit.

The lighter body weight of the SG design made the EDS-1275 more comfortable to play than the earlier version. Due to increased popularity, what had been a custom-order model became a regular production guitar.

Page replaced the humbucking pickups on the six-string side of his EDS-1275 with coverless Seymour Duncan units, but otherwise this is the stock production model - despite the “Custom” inscription on the truss-rod covers.

Gibson stopped offering the EDS-1275 in 1969 - this guitar was special-ordered in 1971 - but thanks to its use by Page (and later by Slash of Guns N' Roses), demand for double-necks did not go away. Gibson revived the model in 1977, and it remains in production today.

Source: www.guitarplayer.com

Dimebag Darrell's Dean From Hell

Dimebag won this 1981 Dean ML at a guitar contest in 1981, the same day that his father bought him his first Dean - the sunburst ML. Owning a Dean guitar was a long-time dream of Dimebag's, and as luck would have it, he got two of them on the same day.

This second Dean that he got that day, the one that would eventually be known as “Dean from Hell” at that point featured a maroon-colored body, and it was just a completely stock Dean ML - far from how the guitar ended up looking later on.

Sometime around 1981, when Dime was sixteen years old, he decided he wanted to buy himself a car. He got his eyes on a yellow Pontiac Firebird, but not having enough money to buy it, he was met with a choice - two Deans and no car, or sell one Dean and buy the car.

At that point in his life, he preferred the latter option, so the Dean that he won at the contest was sold, and Dime was left with the sunburst ML which he got from his father.

At first, Dime offered the guitar to his friend, Buddy Webster, better known as Buddy Blaze, who was a guitar luthier living in Arlington, Texas. Buddy apparently didn't wanna buy it, arguing that Dime shouldn't even be selling it in the first place.

But, Dime had already decided, and he found another buyer, a person who happened to be in the same band as Buddy Blaze. Buddy apparently found out and decided to buy the guitar from that person in secret, thinking Dime would certainly change his mind eventually, and he would keep it safe in the meantime.

Buddy's assumption proved to be correct, so he decided to fix up the guitar, repaint it, install some new hardware in it, and present it to Dime as a surprise.

The new paint job featured a blue background color with white lighting strikes coming from the center of the guitar. As far as the hardware that was changed, Buddy removed the original Dean bridge and the tailpiece, and instead installed a Floyd Rose tremolo - which is something Dime often did on his guitar, as he said in the quote above.

Buddy also removed both of the original pickups and installed a Bill Lawrence XL-500 pickup in the bridge and a Seymour Duncan SH-1 '59 in the neck.

Source: www.groundguitar.com

Edward Van Halen's Frankenstrat

1978 was the year that the original Frankenstrat was first seen by the world. Eddie bought a Strat replacement body and a Strat replacement neck from Boogie Bodies, a guitar shop owned and operated by Wayne Charvel. Eddie paid $50 for the body, and $80 for the neck. The neck had a CBS-Style Fender Strat headstock, and a Birdseye maple neck, with maple fingerboard.

Eddie only liked the sound that a humbucker could give him, and he quickly determined that the body wasn't routed large enough to accommodate the Gibson PAF pickup he intended on installing. Therefore, He took a hammer and chisel and started chunking away at the bridge position rout until it fit the bigger pickup. It was an ugly solution, but as the guitar was covered by a black, one pickup pickguard, the messy woodwork didn't show.

Ed removed all the tone controls also, opting to instead wire the pickup directly to one volume pot. The volume pot was famously topped by a white “Tone” knob. To finish the project, Ed found Schwinn bicycle paint in spray cans. He painted the body black, then wrapped masking tape randomly around the body and painted it white. Once he removed the masking tape, he was left with the famous white and black strat that can be seen on the cover of Van Halen I.

Source: frankenstrat.wordpress.com

Stevie Ray Vaughn's Stratocaster

Sometimes also referred to as the “First Wife," Stevie acquired the guitar at Ray Hennig's Heart of Texas Music in Austin. He allegedly traded a '63 Strat for it. “Number One” consists of a 1963 body fitted with pickups taken from a '59, and a 1962 neck, which has an unusually thick D profile that clearly suited SRV's unique approach.

Over the years, “Number One” has undergone several changes and a few accidents—and even some abuse—all of which adds to its unique characteristics. The original white pickguard was replaced with a black one, which Stevie also glued his initials to, and a lefthand vibrato system (inspired by Jimi Hendrix and Otis Rush) was installed.

Source: www.guitarworld.com

Peter Green's Greeny

Peter Green might not be a name that the uninitiated recognize. But, to the disciples of British blues, he's a towering influence. The man who replaced Eric Clapton in John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, Green went on to found the original, blues based incarnation of Fleetwood Mac.

The '59 Les Paul was bought by Green during his Bluesbreaker days, reportedly costing him the equivalent of $300 second hand circa 1966. There were plenty of other '59s doing the rounds those days, but Greeny's sounded unlike any of them. Why? Because one of the pick-ups is fitted the wrong way around. What this means is that, when both pick-ups are played in the middle position, the instrument sounds more like a Fender Strat than a Gibson Les Paul.

Accounts suggest that a repairman accidentally rewound one of the gapickups while working on the instrument.

In reality, though, the pickup was installed that way from the start as a factory error, a fact confirmed by legendary guitar tech Jol Dantzig when he examined the guitar in 1984 (On a sidenote, this error wasn't limited to Peter Green's Les Paul. Modern day guitar hero and noted vintage guitar collector Joe Bonamassa also owns a burst Les Paul from the same era with the same defect).

An error by accident rather than design, then, but one that defined the early Fleetwood Mac sound nonetheless. For evidence of that out-of-phase, Strat-like sound in effect, you only need to listen to the band's legendary early recordings - “Albatross,” “Dragonfly,” “Oh Well” and “The Green Manalishi (With the Two Pronged Crown).”

Anyone familiar with early Fleetwood Mac probaby knows the sad story of Peter Green's mental health struggles throughout the '70s. by the turn of the decade, Green had started to unravel, completely losing interest in music. It was around this time that he loaned the guitar to a then-unknown teen guitar wunderkind he'd befriended by the name of Gary Moore. Moore was eventually prompted by Green to purchase the instrument - Peter wanted to make sure “it would have a good home” - for the same $300 that green had paid for it.

The Les Paul soon became Moore's signature instrument as it had been Green's. He played it on his 1973 solo debut, throughout his stints in Thin Lizzy, and on his signature solo song, 1978's “Parisienne Walkways.” He even used the guitar on a tribute to its former owner, the Peter Green covers album “Blues for Greeny” in 1995.

For a long time, it seemed like the Les Paul had found its permanent owner in Moore. But then, in 2006, money problems forced the guitarist to sell it for somewhere between $750,000 and $1.2 million - a considerable chunk more than he'd paid for it back in 1970.

After being purchased by Phil Winfield at Maverick Guitars, the instrument floated around on the private collector's market for a number of years. And it looks like that's where it was going to stay until 2014, when it was announced that Metallica's Kirk Hammett had come into possession of the guitar.

Hammett reportedly paid somewhere in the region of $2 million for it, a steal according to the man himself.

“It'd been on the market for a few years, but the price was just way too high. And then I kind of waltzed into a situation where the owner of the guitar needed money. And of course I totally took advantage of the situation, worked out a deal and bought it, all within an hour's time, because I was so friggin' blown away by the fact that I was holding a guitar that Peter Green played in Fleetwood Mac and then Gary Moore played for, like, 25 years after.”

It's an eye-watering price, for sure. But, many will be pleased to know that Hammett doesn't see the guitar as a museum piece. He played it on Metallica's latest album, “Hardwired to Self Destruct” and even takes it out on the road with him. Appropriately enough, it gets brought out when the band performs their take on Thin Lizzy's “Whisky in the Jar,” bringing the Greeny Moore story full circle.

Source: www.thaliacapos.com

Eric Clapton's Blackie

Blackie was Eric Clapton's primary stage and studio guitar between 1970 and 1985. The guitar debuted at the Rainbow Concert on 13 January 1973 (the early show - Eric Clapton played a Les Paul he borrowed from George Harrison at the second late show). Blackie was retired in 1985 after years of service in the studio and on the road. Not only had it been in the studio for every album recorded during that time, it was used at such famous events as the ARMS benefit tour in 1983 and Live Aid. Blackie was also used in Eric Clapton's first music video, “Forever Man” filmed to support his album “Behind The Sun.”

Blackie ventured out of retirement on two occasions while still in Eric Clapton's ownership. The first was for a television commercial for Honda Cars Japan in 1990 at the company's request. Eric was filmed over-dubbing some new licks onto his track, “Bad Love” (from the 1989 album, “Journeyman”). The second instance was for one number at the Royal Albert Hall in 1991.

In 2001, Lee Dickson, Eric Clapton's guitar technician from 1978-2008, said “Blackie is still around and 100% playable, contrary to all rumors otherwise. It's the nature of those old Fenders that the neck can eventually loosen in the neck pocket, even with the bolts tightened. It had been refretted a couple of times and there was a lot of wear on the edge of the neck, which made it difficult to get E string vibrato easily. We tossed around the idea to have a new neck made for it, but eventually the decision was made to just retire Blackie.”

Source: whereseric.com