0:00 history and description
1:30 recording chain
1:39 solo guitar
2:21 the whammy bar!
3:03 with OD
3:36 light drive and reverb (the classic tone)
4:18 in a band context
5:29 mic'ing the sound hole!
These guitars are vanishingly rare! It's from the Lawsuit Era - where Japanese manufacturers flagrantly copied American designs until they got hit with a ton of lawsuits, forcing them to develop their own designs and leading to some great innovation. Some of these guitars are still out there, and some are actually very well made.
Rickenbacker makes a significant point to vigorously protect its trademark, which is actually a requirement in IP law - if you let people copy you, you lose the option to prosecute obvious fakes. For a guitar with such a distinctive shape, I can understand why they want to keep their market cornered.
Fender has pretty much let most things slide, but will still try to keep people from selling fakes (like putting the Fender logo on) or explicitly naming their designs a "stratocaster" / "telecaster" / etc.
This one is like 40 years old, so the lawsuits that were filed stopped the factories from making any more guitars with obvious infringing shapes. That did eventually lead to Ibanez and other companies making some new designs that became classics in their own rights!
The GOOD :
+ It looks super rad
+ Neat little bit of history
+ surprisingly great acoustic tone
+ it's very light!
The BAD :
- bridge covers are annoying tbh
- personally, i always find ricky shapes awkward to play on.
- It's not as aggressively bright / jangly as the real ones without some EQ
- this particular guitar had its neck re-set at some point - just a cosmetic issue really but worth noting.
5 авг 2024
