We’ve had a few emails lately asking us what’s going on: no new instruments on the site, everything’s sold. Are we asleep, is JGG still alive?

Well, the answer is yes, we are alive, and not so much asleep, but in a chrysalis, shortly to emerge transformed and bigger and brighter and better than before.

First of all, as some of you pointed out, nearly everything was sold and we really needed to get some more guitars. Finding really good instruments is time consuming. We’ve learned a lot since we started in 2008 about what we think really makes a good vintage guitar. This knowledge ensures you better instruments but tracking them down involves research, travelling, following leads, a lot of legwork and finally sitting down and playing each and every one of them before we buy. But we’ve done it and we’ve got a fantastic collection of instruments to offer you now.

The next step was to get all these new instruments checked over by our techs, photographed and written up. We also decided that these lovely new pieces deserved a new website, which looks nicer and more modern, and at the same time should be clearer, easier to use and search or browse through.

We’re right in the middle of this process now. The new site is designed and we’re putting the finishing touches to the programming. At the same time, in a studio somewhere in South London we put in a very long day with photographer Robb Horsley working through a bunch of the new stock. Have a look.

So the answer is, yes, we’re alive, and very busy, and the fruits of that labour will shortly be with you. And, if you’d like a little sneak peak at the list of new stock before it goes up drop us a line and we’ll see what we can do.

You’ve got to admire the spirit of this Chinese manufacturer, with their “12 years experience making all kinds of electric guitar”. Pioneers in the use of the eco-friendly potato-based wood replacement material called “mashogony“, these instruments pay homage to the designers of the Gibsons and Fenders who originally designed the guitars they have been making for the past 12 years.

One can admire the careful attention detail that goes into every aspect of the production and marketing process. Here, in the publicity shot we see the craftsman steadying the precious instrument for the photo but coming into contact with it only through a pure white cotton glove, thus protecting the finish from making contact with the oils of his hands.

The fact he is wearing a black puffa jacket and has stuck his hand through the backdrop would only be of concern to a purist. Certainly it didn’t bother the photographer, owner, marketing team or sales manager!

Ironically, I bet they are perfectly good guitars.

In 1952, Gibson’s President Ted McCarty approached a 42-year-old naval radio engineer named Seth Lover to design a new kind of pickup.

Gibson and Gretsch had a problem with pickup hum. Both were competing with Fender’s brilliant marketing by producing big, powerful pickups, full of depth and character – put also prone to pick up electrical interference from the mains power supply: prone, that is, to ‘hum’.

The ’50s was a savage market. The guitar giants had to innovate constantly to defend their customer base. Solving pickup hum promised a clear market reward.

Seth Lover had been part of the Gibson team before the war, but had found better pay installing radars for the US Navy. Now Gibson was feeling more generous, and wanted Lover to get rid of the hum.

Lover’s solution was to take two pickups, connect them in series, but reverse them both electrically (by reversing the winding direction) and magnetically (by reversing the polarity of the magnet). The vibration of the strings produces current in the pickups in the same direction; but the ambient magnetic field produces current in opposite directions.

The result is that the current caused by the strings is increased due to constructive interference, but the hum currents – which are opposites – cancel each other out. The pickup is more powerful, but the hum is bucked.

The PAF is the same size as a P90. Under the cover there are two coils, sitting side-by-side. Only one of them has adjustable pole pieces – these are the ones which stick out through the cover. So whereas the P-90 has a row of pole pieces along its middle axis, the PAF’s are a quarter of the way from the long edge.

The PAF design evolved – and not, it seems, through deliberate redesign. It looks like Gibson let the specifications wander as they ran out of inventory and replaced coil wire, bobbins and magnets with whatever was available. Through the late 50s and early 60s, these subtle variations have all kinds of effects on the sound.

What all generations of PAFs have in common sonically is depth, weight, and definition. The constructive interference between the two coils gives the sound attack. When you strike the strings there’s an initial spike in the signal: not a ‘twang’, but more solid and articulate. With distortion, it’s a sharp crunch and a snarl; clean, the spike softens to a sound almost like droplets of water.

The sustained sound of a PAF is generally more mid-range than a single coil; richer, but usually less bright. Part of the reason for this is that the two coils of the humbucker are in slightly different positions under the strings. String overtones with nodes falling between the coils are cancelled out, and these tend to be the higher frequencies.

The combination of these is what creates the unique sound: a growl, human-voice-like singing. Distorted, the sound is rich and smooth. Clapton’s ‘woman tone’ is a PAF in the neck position with the tone control turned right down. With the trebles turned up the sound cuts through: it blazes.

That’s the basic PAF character. But around this there’s a lot of variation. The key is the number of winds on each bobbin. When the number of turns is exactly the same on both the pattern of constructive interference between them is very accurate, and the PAF has a creamy sound. But if there are slight differences, the twin coils accentuate different frequencies and the PAF takes on an individual character. Some people say that this difference in the number of coil windings is because the early coils were wound by hand, and that the people winding would lose track of how many they had put in. But Seth Lover himself denied that early PAFs were hand-wound; he says they had mechanical winders, but that they didn’t much care too much how many coil windings they put in – they just put on ‘Whatever would fill up the bobbin nicely’.

By the early ’70s, the PAF sound has changed. Better winding machines mean that the number of turns is precisely the same. Players called these pickups T-Tops because the bobbins had a letter T stamped on them (Lover said: to make ‘sure they keep the “T” on top when doing assembly’).

The T-tops, a.k.a. T-Buckers, are the sound of the 70s guitar: brighter and thinner than the PAFs. Still with that human voice-like quality; only now the voice is more constricted, and sometimes less expressive. The T-Tops give a tight, sizzling 70s glam sound; the sound still burns, but it’s held back, tighter.

Not many people prefer the T-Top to the PAFs; uniformity of production means reliability, but less accidental brilliance. Rather late in the day, the Gibson Corp. seems to have agreed. It now produces a range of pickups designed to the specification of the original PAFs, and these are supposed to be very good. But for the real thing, find yourself a vintage PAF – with all its variation, accident and technical genius.

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Gretsch designs are suspended between acoustic and electric, between nostalgia for the cowboy past and indulgence in the high-tech (50s) present. And that link with the acoustic is reflected in the sound: The sound is tight and powerful, with an initial kick to each note: Gretsches can growl, even played clean. With the tone set low the guitars produce jazz tones with a little more grit than a Gibson; as you ascend the frequencies you pass through blues, country, and into twanging 50s rock.

You get all that range without any processing. Yet even under blistering distortion, all the strings of a Gretsch come through clearly. It’s a Gretsch 6120 (possibly a 1622) that produced the big final chord at the end of The Who’s ‘Don’t Get Fooled Again’: the high A ringing out over the explosive distortion on the bass strings. On lesser guitars, the treble strings would be overpowered. The core of the early Gretch sound is the pickup. Until 1957 Gretsch guitars came fitted with DeArmond Dynasonics. These are powerful single coil pickups, with a solid cast bakelite bobbin and a heavy metal housing. Like the Gibson P-90, Dynasonics are sometimes mistaken for humbuckers, as they have six screws through the middle as well as the six pole pieces. The power comes from its sheer size, and the quantity of metal running through the coil. Dynasonics go deep into the body of the guitar—they look like bits out of a car engine, the underside a mass of metal rods and springs.The secret of the Dynasonic sound is those six screws which make people think it’s a humbucker. Those screws are not for mounting the pickup on the guitar, but for adjusting the height of the spring-loaded poles. Although the mounting screws aren’t magnetised, they add to the inductance in the coil, increasing its output. The sound is raw and very clear, as powerful as a P-90 but with extra high end. All that metal gives the pickup an initial spike—that’s the twang—but the strength of the pickup also tends to suck out the sustain of the strings by dampening string vibration. This was what wound up Chet Atkins, who wanted sustain without feedback, and why he thought it was better suited for Duane Eddy. But the DeArmond Dynasonic is one of the great pickups.

Towards the late 50s the Dynasonics were replaced by evolving humbucker technology in the various FilterTron pickups. These are also great pickups; thicker, like humbuckers, though with higher fidelity (‘Don’t Get Fooled Again’ is a Filtertron).

Technology was moving on, and those raw days of the unprocessed Gretsch and its postwar growl were slipping away. After the revolutions of the 1960s those 1950s rockers looked too clean-cut, too polite, too patriotic. Fingerpickin’ Chet Atkins himself was airbrushed from mainstream guitar history: George Harrison called his 1622 Country Gentleman model his ‘Eddie Cochrane/Duane Eddy’ guitar; and in the 1960s the original Chet Atkins 1620 was renamed the Nashville.

Gretsch itself took a dive in the late 60s. After three generations family-run, no descendent wanted to take it on. It was bought out by a multinational that cut corners, costs and quality. Chet withdrew his sponsorship. The company limped on to the millennium in various states of half-life, until it was bought over by Fender and the designs brilliantly revived.

Maybe the problem for the twangy guitar is exactly that the sound is distinctive of the 50s: you play a Gretsch 6120, clean, loud, digging into the strings, and people will think you’re Eddy Cochrane. Or perhaps the sound was too raw and too striking for an era of rising commercialization and digitalization. But the sound is making a comeback, and those early Gretch guitars are still loved and played by the best players around.

In today’s world of digital effects, the sound of the pickup can be lost amid waves of delay and chorus. But it wasn’t always thus: in the 1950s, everything turned on the raw sound of the guitar. The sound had to lunge out of the juke box and grab you by the ears. It had to be the sonic equivalent the snarling, sexy, but clean-cut guy who was spanking it. This was the sound of 50s rock and roll. It was the sound of twang.

Of all the giants of American guitars, Gretsch is most associated with that rock and roll twang. Gretsch is behind some of rock’s most iconic sounds: think of Duane Eddy and Eddy Cochrane, Bo Diddley and (less cool, but undeniably influential) Chet Atkins. Gretsch was the sound of 50s rock and roll; and the company seemed to share in the self-destructive excess of the players themselves. Gretsch only barely survived the end of the rock and roll era.

Gretsch predates Gibson by a decade or so. Friedrich Gretsch, who had emigrated to the US from Germany aged sixteen, set up shop in Brooklyn, 1888. His son built up his music empire, getting into electric guitars around 1940 with the launch of the Electromatic. With a ten-storey factory on Broadway, Gretsch was big, and they built big guitars.

World War Two interrupted business. When he returned from the Navy, Fred Gretsch, Jr. (grandson of the founder) got the company stuck into new designs. Like Gibson and Fender, Gretsch wanted a cut of the growing electric guitar market.

Compared to Fender—whose names and designs were fixed on the science-fiction future as imagined by the ’50s — Gretsch guitars can seem old-fashioned. Compared to Gibson—who seemed too proud of the instruments to land them with silly names — Gretsch can seem kitsch. But Gretsch’s designs are rooted in the look and romance of 1950s USA.

Some designs show nostalgia for America’s Wild West past. An early post-war release (1951), for example, was the 6192 Country Club, a jumbo sunburst with Dynasonic pickups. That big-bodied cowboy look is continued and developed in the later models.

Other designs reflect the 1950s romance of cars and jet planes. 1954 was Gretsch’s biggest year for new designs. This saw the 1628 Duo-Jet, the 1929 Silver Jet, and the 6131 Jet Firebird. The Jets are single cutaway solid bodies, and are clearly aimed at the Les Paul market. But unlike the Les Paul, they have so much routing inside that they have the resonance of a semi-solid. Later Jets have dazzling modifications: double cutaways, sparkling finishes, SuperTron pickups, Burns vibratos and stand-by switches (though the latter is, arguably, a switch too far).

One of our Gretsch Jet Firebirds, the double cutaway version

’54 was also the year of the 6136 White Falcon. The White Falcon was originally designed as a one-off ‘dream guitar’ for a trade show, an upholstered Cadillac of guitars that you could admire but never hope to own. The design attracted so much interest that a production line was quickly set up. Dave Grohl and Neil Young both play one today.

Gretsch’s most famous design, though, was the 1620 hollow body, which, in an inspired bit of cross-marketing arranged by Jimmy Webster, became endorsed by Chet Atkins. The 1620 Chet Atkins model had a maple body finished in orange or amber-red with bound f-holes, two single-coil DeArmond Dynasonics with individual volume controls, plus tone knob, master volume, pickup selector switch, and a Bigsby vibrato. Some models have a large and rather kabbalistic letter G branded into the top, the block inlays engraved with cows and cacti, and a Longhorn steer inlay design on the head.

Chet wasn’t happy with the guitar that bore his name; he complained that the Dynasonic pickups ‘sucked the tone right out of the guitar’, and said that Duane Eddy was the only person who could get a good sound out of them. He kept pressing Gretsch to redesign. Gretsch’s second big design wave, around 1957, includes the ultra-rare White Penguin, a beautiful development of the Duo-Jet in the manner of the White Falcon, and the 6122 Country Gentleman. The 6122 was the result of Chet Atkins hassling Gretsch to make a semi-hollow body with bound f-holes and a solid block down the centre, so giving less feedback and greater sustain. The guitar he got — the 6122 Country Gentleman — later became a favourite of George Harrison.

The decades after World War II were a battle for supremacy between the two then-giants of guitar tech: the Gibson Guitar Corporation and the Fender Electric Instrument Company. Unlike in real wars, everyone was a winner.

Gibson had spent WWII making wooden parts for the military; getting back into guitars, the corporation needed to invent something to take some of the growing electric guitar market from Leo Fender. The Gibson Corp. got stuck into R&D. One of ideas which emerged was a prototype for a pickup with six adjustable pole pieces protruding through a black plastic cover, secured to the guitar with dog-ear end lugs. In 1946, this was released as the P-90.

From its size you might think it’s a humbucker: it’s roughly twice the size of a standard Fender pickup. In fact, the P-90 is single-coil—but it’s a big coil. It comes in three main shapes: the “soap bar,” a rectangle in which the mounting screws are positioned between the pole screws (leading some to think that it has eight pole pieces; it doesn’t); the “dog ear,” where the mounting screws are in extensions to the ends of the cover; and a humbucker casing allowing you to retrofit a P-90 to a guitar routed for humbuckers (such as the Les Paul Standard).

Soap bar P-90 in a 1952 Gibson Les Paul

Dog ear P-90 in a 1961 Gibson ES-330

Gibson needed something which would compete with Fender’s crisp, clear pickup tone. To grab the market, it needed to be technically as good, but with a different aesthetic. Two main lines in guitar sound evolution date from this tech war: the translucent, wiry tone of the Fender, as opposed to the fat Gibson sound. We can trace the evolution of the sound through the solo on the Beatles’ “Tax Man” — that’s McCartney armed with P-90s — versus the leaner sound of Hendrix’s Fender pickups on Are You Experienced? We can go on, if we dare, to contrast Guns’n’Roses fat lead guitar sound with Eric Clapton’s modern-day crystalline semi-clean blues. Jazz went for Gibson early on; one of the P-90’s older sisters was named after Charlie Christian, a fan of the sound.

Inside the P-90 there’s a large, flat coil with adjustable steel screws as pole pieces, and a pair of flat alnico bar magnets lying under the coil bobbin. Adjusting the pole pieces, screwing them closer to or further away from the magnet, alters the signal strength and tone. The sound is distinct: it has the single-coil clarity and responsiveness, but the sound is thicker than Fender’s crisp and snappy single-coils. It still has some single-coil twang, but with more punch in the midrange. P-90s age gracefully over the decades as the alnico magnets weaken. An older P-90, being slightly demagnetized, has a slightly softened sound; wiser, if you like. Some specialist pickup makers will build you a P-90 with pre-demagnetized magnets: a bit like wearing pre-aged jeans. I say, buy your P-90s now; enjoy in retirement.

In the rush to compete with Fender, Gibson made technical compromises which led to what some consider a drawback. The P-90 is susceptible to the 60 Hz hum induced in its coil by external electro-magnetic fields. All single-coils have this property, but the power of the P-90 makes it worse: having around 2,000 more turns of wire in its coil than Fender single-coils, the P-90 produces a relatively larger amount of hum. You don’t have to see this as a drawback, of course: remember John Peel’s defense of the surface noise of vinyl: “listen mate, life has surface noise”. It goes damn well for hum as well. Gibson didn’t see it this way, however, and by the early 50s was looking to replace the P-90 with Seth Lover’s new humbucker design.

Don’t feel bad. We’ve all done it at one time or other.

For those who don’t know, Denmark Street, London’s Tin Pan Alley, is home to
half a dozen or so guitar shops. Andy’s Guitar Shop at the far end was perhaps
the most famous, as it was in business seemingly for ever, but went into
receivership in 2007.

The problem faced by the shop-keepers on Denmark St is the rent and business
rates. Rents there are much higher  than anywhere else in central London,
which is already expensive, largely because the property is owned by one individual.
Think about the game Monopoly. If you own all the shops on one street you can
charge what you like, and the owner certainly does like to charge. This is partly why Denmark St prices
are so high and perhaps why the shops themselves are so shabby – huge
overheads to meet every day and hard-nosed landlord.

There are plenty of colourful stories about Denmark St, people ‘taking guitars
off the wall’ because they couldn’t get their money, guitars being stolen from
one shop and sold to another – no questions asked. The stories may or may not be
true, but the street certainly has more than its fair share of characters and
there’s usually a buzz to the place. Pop and rock stars abound – go there, be
inspired, but do be careful. (Or in the words of Pete Townshend – “Pray: We
Don’t Get Fooled Again”).

Of course, Denmark St shops aren’t all bad and we exaggerate for your
entertainment. There are some beautiful guitars for sale and some very
knowledgeable people working there. Indeed, our very own luthier and repair guru
Graham Noden is there in his basement, underneath Andy’s old shop. (“Meet the
new boss, same as the old boss.” Graham’s business remains unchanged although
the shop now has new owners.)

Nice picture of Mark Ronson and a vintage natural Epiphone Century guitar.

Check out the thinline Epi Century fitted with dead cool Bigsby on the JGG site at: http://www.justgreatguitars.com/product/Electric/Thinline/Archtop/59-Epi-Century-wBigsby.aspx

Both from 1968, both cherry red, the Gibson on the left is a 335, the one on the right a long-neck 330.

These big 33s share identical body and neck shapes. The 330 is a hollow-body guitar with chrome-covered single-coil P-90 pickups. The 335 has humbucker pickups, Kluson deluxe tuners and a solid block through the body. Both fingerboards are inlayed with blocks, but the 335 has a headstock inlay.

Playing them, the 330 has that slightly raw / woody / rich P-90 sound that just oozes vintage tone (think Beatles – after all this is the same guitar as the Epiphone Casino used by John Lennon / Noel Gallagher). It’s a light and comfortable guitar to wear for hours on end as the crowd demands more and more…. By this date in manufacture, Gibson had altered the body/neck set-up of the 330 to match that of the 335, giving players access to the higher frets. Not that that was such an inspired move, as the 330 has always been more suited to rythym playing and rythym players aren’t usually drawn to frets higher than the 16th.

So we pick up the 335, and although it looks similar, its clearly a different beast. It’s noticeably heavier – that solid block is very solid – there’s more air inside the body than in a Les Paul, but a padded strap is a must-have for playing a stand-up gig. So, if the neck’s the same, what’s the big difference? Humbuckers. These pickups have got serious output. Way louder than the P-90s and the bridge pick-up can do some very serious rock. The block was originally there to reduce feedback, but it does produce a lot more sustain as well. What do you get with lots of high output, clear access to frets 16-21 and sustain? Lead rock guitar guitar of course, which is why the 335 has become such an important and iconic guitar.

A pair of Vintage Gibson ES-125 TC guitars

(1963 and 1962 from left to right)

Here's a fun little quiz – which one is worth (a lot) more?

Some clues: both have wonderfully unfaded, original cherry sunburst finishes; metal bridges were an option and do not affect value; pickguards are 'nice to have' and affect value only marginally.

Have fun…