Fascinating observation. I wonder why they did this?
Thanks for correcting my little composite pic there, your edit shows what I was getting at much better!
As dhdfoster alluded to in a previous post - it's most likely Mike Lewis' idea. And also suggested, and true in that post, is that Mike Lewis (of FMIC) did amazing work for Gretsch as well as Guild. When Fender took over Gretsch production and distribution in 2003, he was the guy that completely redesigned the line - and he did it right. From 1989 to 2003, almost every guitar in the "new" Japanese built Gretsch lineup was built plain wrong.
They were a strange mix of Baldwin-era body and headstock shapes, severely overbuilt and crazy heavy and dead, and they weren't at all like the classic 50's and 60's Gretsches that had become iconic by that time. Didn't look, feel, or sound like them, and certainly weren't built like them.
What he did was both clever and simple in its logic : he blueprinted vintage guitars, and copied almost everything except the sloppy build and crummy neck joints of the originals. He must have spent weeks reading posts on the Gretsch forum finding out what people hated about the new guitars, and loved about the old ones. He really did his homework.
He was the guy that took a vintage 6120 and put it in an X-ray machine to analyze and bring back the famous trestle bracing in the Brian Setzer models.
And so many years later, in what turned out to be a last ditch attempt from FMIC to breathe new life into Guild, they put him on Guild, and the whole Newark street line and American Patriarch line was his work, and he (obviously) did the same thing : he blueprinted a bunch of vintage Guilds, and translated those into guitars that could be built to a price point in a modern Korean factory.
And I was amazed when I first laid eyes on a NS X175 - it looked almost exactly like the 1960 I used to own at one point - same body shape and depth, even the neck on the first NS guitars were a flat out copy of the original ones. (they've gone to a less rounded, slightly smaller profile since)
So that's some of the crazy awesome stuff he did. So don't get me wrong. He's a cool guy who REALLY knows guitars and amp, and he's a pretty smokin' blues player.
But when it came to Gretsch's cheaper Korean built "electromatic" guitars, he got a little more creative and less respectful of the vintage guitars, and implemented some changes that would appeal to modern/novice players who weren't necessarily looking for a close copy of Chet Atkins' or George Harrison's guitars.
And that where that bridge pickup thing comes in : the Electromatic Gretsches, since 2003 (up to today) have that bridge pickup sitting a good deal closer to the neck.
And it does make sense in a way : the traditional location IS a little surprising to people raised on on les paul inspired guitars, superstrats, guitars with fat chunky bridge pickups that get a big fat bass response that works great for rock with some gain, that get that "chunk chunk" rock tone that works great with power chords and palm muting.
And clearly, when Mike got to work on the Newark street guitars, he must have felt the twangy, thin, skinnier sounding Franz bridge pickup on a vintage X175 could use some help in that department. It does get a lot more bass response and it sound fatter and less spiky in the treble than the vintage ones, and I bet a lot of players prefer that, and would positively hate the much thinner sounding vintage guitars' bridge pickup.
I've "corrected" it on my own Newark Street X175 and put the lead pickup in the "vintage correct" location, and predictably, having played a vintage X175 for two decades, I like it much better that way. It's pretty easy with the Franz pickup, as it's top mounted, and the cover is just wide enough to hide any "scars" the previous location left. But with the skinnier DeArmond pickups, and the holes underneath your pictures show, I don't think you can move it back without a gap showing.
