The Guilds of Grot said:
gilded said:
Oh, they feed back, all right!
Do you know this from experience?
Do you have one?
If so, make with the pix as I have never see one!
Grot, I used to have one. For me though, it was more about the George Barnes connection than the Geo. Barnes Acousti-Lectric connection.
When I was a kid (17 to 25) I lived in NYC. When I was 19-ish, in '72, I began to play guitar and bass. Ellis, my teacher, was a student of George's. We used to go over to George's apt., rehearsals, gigs (if we could afford the tickets), etc. George was, at least to us 'kids', a wonderful guy. For what it's worth, I saw George's guitar a bunch of times.
Ellis left town for music school in the mid-'70's; we only got in touch sporadically. George left, too, moving to San Francisco. He passed away in '77.
One day in the late '70's, I saw a 'burst Acousti-Lectric in the window of one of the shops on the South Side of 48th St (Sam Ash?). I knew Ellis would want it, so I bought it, then spent six months tracking him down. When I found him, we traded; two terrible bottom-of-the-barrel '70's ES-175Ds for one Geo. Barnes. Cash-wise, it was a fair deal at the time.
This particular Acousti-Lectric was a great guitar. It didn't have the heart of George's personal guitar in terms of single note playing, but it was a better overall instrument. If you needed to add a couple of overtones or harmonic notes to a chord passage, they would come out with startling clarity. Never had a guitar like it.
The guys at the store said it belonged to a Guitar Player from Spain, who played with the 'Tom Jones of Spain'.
It may have originally been blond, too. It looked like it was a really good refin. The only giveaway was that the red portion of the burst was not quite right; more like very small dots of red than a shading or wash of color, if that makes sense.
Do I have pictures? No, I never even thought of it, I would have had to have a camera. Back then, I was so broke, I didn't even have a TV.
That's the story. Wait, feed-back. Oh yeah, you could make it feed-back in a hurry, more so than an L-5CES. The top moved freely, since it wasn't dampened by the weight of the pickups (think about it). Since it was moving freely, the strings were moving more, too (especially moving more compared to the pickups which were stationary with respect to the top movement, in that the were suspended inside the body, blah blah), and that in turn excited the electromagnetic fields of the pickups which made the guitar, wait, here it comes......feed-back fairly quickly!
Still, it wasn't un-useable by any means, just something you had to watch out for. In practice, I guess it was the reverse of George's theory. Oh, well, it was a cool guitar.
If anybody hears about one for sale, I'd really like to know. I think I'm probably good enough to play it now, a mere 30 years later.
