Eko 400 Resoglas Guitar

I thought it was about time we featured some more guitar cheese, so here for your viewing pleasure is an Eko 400 Blue Sparkle Resoglas guitar, a model also known as the Eko Master.

There's a strong resemblance to certain pearloid and glitter-encrusted guitars from Sweden's Hagstrom and Goya brands, but the Eko brand of course is Italian.

For those not familiar with the story, it was the 1960s and The Beatles amongst other guitar-based groups had created an unprecedented demand for the electric guitar. The laws of supply and demand dicatated that several factories which had for many years been manufacturing accordians switched production to guitars and hence some interesting pearloid and glitter finishes and accordian-like pushbuttons started appearing on guitars.

Quick Quiz: What the hell is THIS? The ANSWER!

As some of you rightly said, this strange item, namely Kustom Electronics "The Bag", is an early predecessor to the Talk Box as used by Jeff Beck and Peter Frampton.

I think the idea was that you'd sling it over your shoulder as you played guitar, and with the tube in your mouth it must have felt like you were playing a bizarre cross between the guitar and bagpipes.

I wonder why they chose to make it look so hideous?

Anyone fancy a nice cup of tea and a biccy?

Never mind guitars that feature artwork that would look more at home on your granny's biscuit tin (see here and here), this guitar appears to be made from the actual biscuit tin itself.

Burns Mirage

Gibson aren't the only guitar manufacturer who can take one of their own guitar designs and flip the body shape around, either vertically or horizontally, and come up with a new design (witness the Flying V, Explorer, Firebird and their reverse counterparts).

Here we have a very rare Burns Mirage which is based on their own Flyte guitar only with the body shape flipped around vertically so that the neck appears to be coming out of the wrong end. I always thought the Burns Flyte was quite a cool guitar but this upside-down variation, the Mirage, just looks peculiar.

Burns collectors will probably love it.

Weird Stand-Up Bass

This handmade stand-up bass was, according to the seller, the creation of someone who didn't understand how to play, and from what he says it sounds like he's carried out some alterations so as to make it playable.

It's a weird one and I'd say that technically its a bass guitar rather than a double bass because of its scale-length and its flat fretted fingerboard (even though it only has the eight frets). It's quite a nice looker, but I'm not sure it'd be too easy to play.

Levi Strauss Stratocaster

Someone has rather bizarrely taken a Mexican-made Fender Stratocaster and covered it in denim from a pair of jeans. And it looks bloody awful.

Vox Standard 25

I just saw this Japanese Vox Standard 25 guitar from the early 1980s on eBay and just had to blog about it as an identical guitar was the first ever electric guitar that I owned. You could say it was the first of many! (One day I'll make a list of all the guitars I have ever owned).

The design was obviously inspired by the Fender Stratocaster but it's not a straight copy. The smaller more-rounded body-shape was very attractive to my eyes. As I remember it was a very heavy guitar, but then the body and neck were made from solid maple. The pickups were DiMarzios so it was pretty pokey in that department. I used it on lots of early recordings and demos and it never let me down.

The seller of this example on eBay says that it "looks like a strat but is much heavier, more robust, and many people who've owned or played both, myself incuded, believe that the Vox is a superior guitar in almost every respect."

I'm sorry, but I have to take issue with this claim. In 1988 I fell in love with and bought a paisley pink Fender Stratocaster. The Vox guitar was a good quality guitar, but - in a side by side comparison with the Strat - the Fender was streets ahead of it in sound, feel and playability. Friends commented on how much better a guitar my new Strat was, and I believe that my own playing vastly improved as a direct consequence. I have to wonder what kind of Stratocaster the seller of the above Vox is comparing it to? If it's a basic Squier or - dare I say it - a Mexican-made Strat, I wouldn't be surprised if the Vox came off better, but compare it to a quality Fender (my paisley was one of the very early Japanese Fenders) and I bet there'd be no contest.

Owning the Strat, and later a Telecaster too, made my own Vox Standard 25 somewhat redundant. I kept it in Nashville tuning for a while (i.e. strung with the octave strings from a 12-string set) but about 12 or so years ago I decided it really was surplus to requirements and sold it to a friend and then used the money to buy a bicycle. Looking at the above pictures I'm feeling a bit nostalgic about this guitar. It was a good guitar, but the replacements were better. I made the right decision.

I'll try to find some photographs of me with my Vox guitar sometime.

Quick Quiz: What the hell is THIS?

This peculiar THING was listed on eBay recently (I'm not letting you have the link just yet), but what on earth is it?

Is it a psychedelic vacuum cleaner, perhaps?

Or a 1960s-era Doctor Who monster?

I'll give you a clue: it IS guitar related.

Answers in the comments please.

'ere, Mister, can we 'ave our ball back?

The seller of this football-shaped guitar with built-in amp thinks for some unfathomable reason that it might be a Pignose, but I very much doubt it. There are factories in China and Korea churning out novelty guitars like these, some of which I've featured in these pages.

Notice how it appears to be a deflated football, as if it had landed on top of some spiked railings.

Vline Sword Guitar

I'll leave it to the seller to tell you about this guitar because I've had a long day and I'm tired and wet:

This is a VLINE 'SWORD' made by Vincent Berton, a French avant garde luthier in the early 1980s. Bound for recognition, he was the protégé of James Trussart of James Trussart Guitars, who recognized his art was beyond anything that had ever been done. He was completely brilliant, maybe too much for sanity, as he would spend months building one-of-a-kind creations and BUILD EVERY SINGLE DETAIL BY HAND, even into the tiniest of details. He would build the knobs, the saddles, the control plates all from solid blocks of BRASS! He also built his own revolutionary pickups hiding the secret of his custom design by integrating them inside the body. He also built his own cases, but even down to the smallest of details like the hinges and the handle, also built by hand from solid brass! Insanity caught up with this TRUE GENIUS, and unfortunately Vincent Berton, after he built a reported 2 dozen instruments, all unique, commited suicide in the mid 1980s, cutting short the recognition that was never to be during his lifetime. Now his creations are scarce and very sought after, as his skills and total mastery of the art of luthiery survive in the less than a dozen surviving instruments worldwide, this one being the rarest of all.

(Apologies for the poor use of the English language. I edited some of the more excruciating punctuation and spelling mistakes.)