...and 40 years to the day since I first bought it from Arcade Music in North Finchley, for £186, including a fitted case.
My Guild S-60. The only guitar I've kept from when I was gigging, having sold my 80s Strat a few years ago, and the others back in 1990. This one wasn't getting much attention, with a lot of fret wear (they were pretty flat to begin with), and pots that were falling apart. Feline have done a great job on the refret, also fitting Graph Tech locking ratio tuners, and replacing all the electrics. This included swapping the Seymour Duncan I'd added in 1980 for a Railhammer Hyper Vintage pickup, and fitting a TBX tone control to mimic the Reverend bass contour within a single pot (I really didn't want to change the controls). Lovely work, and I'm really happy to have this one back as a player again.
I had thought about keeping this as a bit of a relic from my past, but I've been having so much fun with the single pickup Gordon Smith GS1000 since I got it in August, I really wanted to get this one back in action too. And I'm really glad I did.
Here they are together, the GS has a recently added Les Trem II
Comments
The photography is top notch also.
My only guitar that I own now ( well I’ve 2 others but their up for sale) is a single humbucker musicman Sub 1.
With the volume and tone control you can get lots of varied sounds.
Can I ask what bridge you're using with the Les Trem... is it a roller bridge of some type?
I bought my very first three guitars from Arcade Music in Tally-ho North Finchley, I used to live in Sandringham Gardens off Summers Lane..were you a local North Finchley boy too?
Ha! The Guild was the only one I bought there (my first two came from the Bell catalogue), but I did visit quite often for bits and pieces. There was a guitar store in Barnet too - can't remember the name, and it may have opened a few years later - I bought my next guitar in there, a Yamaha SG700.
My family had moved to Whetstone - and there wasn't much going on there, so I spent a lot of time in North Finchley or Barnet. I remember the Torrington in North Finchley was a good place for gigs.
I use the trem a lot... so, on something like a PRS, I tend to saw through the plastic material that they use for nuts. I'm not sure what material Graph Tech use - but I imagine it to be some kind of polymer, so I guess I could have the same problem. Which roller bridge did you use on your SG... and does it work well?
(I'm looking to fit a Les Trem to a Flying V)
Thanks.
Graph Tech make bridges with a choice of materials for the saddles, details are here. I bought the NV2 version. Perhaps because they "have a more balanced sound with sizzling highs, full mids and big open lows" - I do love marketing talk.
The SG now has a Göldo roller bridge. It seemed to need a bit more help with the tuning stability. I do wonder if the extra string length on a B3 has something to do with this, the Les Trem is very close to the bridge. In fact, on the GS there's probably less than half a mm between the Les trem and the thumbscrew on the bridge! Another possibility is that the Les Trem is inherently more stable than the Bigsby, which has to rely more on looks for coolness...
Obligatory SG pic with roller bridge, Towner tension bar and B3:
And thanks to everyone for the kind words about the pics above.