VINTAGE PROSHOP V120 & V100 £999 & £1,499
What You Need To Know
1 Reliced copies! Whatever next?
Vintage already has its Icon range where the models are reliced in their factories of origin in China and Vietnam. These ProShop Unique guitars are one-offs that start with a standard Vintage model and are aged and modded here in the UK.
2 Do they offer custom orders?
At the moment, these are almost concept guitars illustrating what the small team at John Hornby Skewes can create. They hope to offer a bespoke service in the near future, but you can put in a request via any Vintage dealer.
3 We don’t usually see Bigsbys and Bare Knuckle pickups on a Vintage guitar…
That’s the point. A staple of retailers all over the world, Vintage is renowned for its affordability and obviously has to use hardware and pickups that don’t break the bank. These ProShop guitars illustrate that a good chassis can really punch well above its weight when combined with some quality parts.
We last caught up with Vintage, the house brand of the large and long-running UK distributor John Hornby Skewes (JHS), back in issue 465 to celebrate its 25th Anniversary. Many players will be familiar with its legal copies of many classics, and the company was also quick to jump on the relic bandwagon with its Icon range, which started back in 2006 and currently features over 20 models aged at their source in the Eastern Asia.
The ProShop Unique guitars were launched just before the pandemic at Winter NAMM 2020. However, these instruments are created from standard Vintage Reissued or Icon models in Garforth, Leeds, at JHS’s HQ. It’s not really a range as much as a continuing collection of one-offs, often quite heavily distressed, using a selection of aftermarket parts.
Each guitar includes a Vintage-branded luxury gigbag, ProShop leather strap, pick tin, t-shirt and certificate of authenticity. Obviously, since all the modding and refinishing work is done here in the UK, these ProShop Unique models can easily double the prices (or more) of the regular Vintage models – and the builds so far start at £569 for a lightly reliced standard Strat-inspired V6, up to £1,299 for a Bare Knuckle-equipped Keef-style V52 fivestring named ‘Brown Sugar’. We were asked to spec a couple of builds for this review. Here’s what we got…
V120
Many people creating one-off relics like to imagine a backstory because that can really influence the choice of upgrades and relicing level. This one, for example, is based on this writer’s experience of being asked to evaluate a Les Paul Junior some years back that a friend had been offered. Apparently a 50s Junior previously owned by a big-name player, it had been heavily, ahem, customised with a bright red refin. It might have said Gibson on the headstock, but we couldn’t find any part on the guitar that we could 100 per cent ID as being from a real Gibson. For all we knew, it could have been a copy with a faux Gibson headstock facing masquerading as a mucked-about real LP Junior.
No-one is going to mistake this V120 for the real thing. The headstock, with its fluted square top, might not be as graceful as some, and the V120 and our V100 share a similarly thinned and pointed horn on the treble side, plus a curved shaping to the top of the body that recalls an Aria Pro II more than a Gibson from the 50s.
Based on the Vintage V120TB, which will cost you £339, the body and neck are spec’d as mahogany – we don’t know any more than that – and you can certainly see that through the simulated wear-through of the red finish. While it’s not the lightest Junior we’ve ever encountered, it’s only marginally heavier than our original.