My Guitars

I have a couple of interesting guitars.  One is new, and one is very old.   Click on the thumbnails to enlarge the pictures. 

The Jag-Stang:  The Jag-Stang is a meld of the old Fender Jaguar and the Fender Mustang.  It has a short (23 1/2") scale and was designed by Curt Cobain, the late lead guitarist with Nirvana.  You can read all of the details about this guitar model on the website www.jag-stang.com.  My model is interesting because I replaced the "Texas Special" pickup with a Seymour Duncan version of the old Johnny Smith humbucker.  This gives the guitar a mellow jazz guitar sound, which I like.  Here is the guitar and a closeup of the humbucker, and the tune-a-matic bridge I also installed. .  

This guitar is my "bread and butter" guitar -- best suited for this climate, and the day-in-day-out rigors of practicing and playing in this strange land.  

The Gibson ES-140 3/4.  This guitar is historically much more interesting.  Superficially, it has the same shape as the Les Paul, but as you can see, it is a thick-bodied guitar with a short (22 1/2 inch) scale.  This 140 was part of a run of 23 built in December of 1952, and I bought it in 1953.  It has been back to the factory twice: once to have the second (bridge) pickup added, and then to have the custom neck, pick guard, and truss-rod cover added.  It now looks very much like the baby-brother to an ES-175, the most famous jazz guitar of all.  The Bigsby tail-piece was added in 1965 -- I wrote Leon Bigsby and asked what would fit, and he personally replied, sketching the outline of the Bigsby on the guitar outline which I sent him.  I bought it directly from him for $65 and installed it myself.  This tailpiece is far and away the best thing for tremolo effects, since it stays in tune nicely in use.   The fingerboard was built (by Gibson) using all but the top two frets of an ES-345 fingerboard. 

Here are some pictures.  The "twin" guitar in the bottom photo is an Ibenez Artist model owned by my friend Hugo Vasquez.  I put this in to show just how small the ES-140 really is.  

This guitar was not built for the tropics like my Jag-stang. I thought I would never part with it (my first wife threatened to bury it with me) but I need to sell it.   

New:  I sold this guitar to a very short guitarist in Minneapolis for $3000 cash.  I think it was worth a lot more, but I was glad to get the money to come back to Belize with.  

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