AN INTRIGUING DESIGN
Good luck finding a Hutchins Chandler 6 today, but you can buy a very similar-looking offset semi online for under £200 – or indeed another for $10,000, as I find out…
Back in 2017 I’d been approached by Graham Stockley who was previously with Höfner in Germany, and back then was working with Hutchins Guitars. He wanted to see if we could find some space to review some of their new guitars. One we looked at the end of that year (in issue 428, January 2018) was the Chandler 6, priced at £595. In the autumn of 2017 I’d been dispatched to visit Taylor Guitars and on my way back I picked up a copy of GuitarWorld at the airport, which happened to feature an interview with Josh Homme pictured with what I thought was a Hutchins Chandler 6… It was, in fact, an Echopark Esperanto, a guitar that today lists from $10,000. I really had to look twice: clearly, the Echopark was a classier piece with numerous vintage-y boutique references, but I couldn’t understand how it could have the same, or at least very similar, shape with that same pulled-in neck join and identical f-hole shapes.
At some point, I’d also stumbled across another ‘Chandler 6’ style in the form of Gear4Music’s San Francisco “semi acoustic guitar”, which is still ongoing for a paltry £199 in Wine Red and slightly cheaper in Sunburst.
Emailing my findings, Graham replied: “That’s a lot of money and a very cheap guitar! Hutchins first used the shape as the Chandler about 10 years ago [around 2007] and then I think they were the only ones using that shape. It started out as a short-scale bass first and then they made the guitar. I changed some bits around and changed the pickups and neck profile before we launched it as the Chandler 6. I think there is no exclusive or trademark control [on Chinese builds] so any shape is pretty much open to anyone. We had this issue a lot when I was at Höfner. Two months before we had the first Verythin [Chinese] production, for which we paid tooling and supplied German samples to be copied, another Chinese company had launched their own version!”
In 2018 ex- Guitarist staff member Chris Vinnicombe, then editing TheGuitar Magazine, ran a review of an Echopark Esperanto 313 with a price of £6,899 (including hard case). Again, I couldn’t help thinking it was so similar to the shape of the Chandler 6. To quote Chris: “Echopark mainman Gabriel Currie began working with Queens Of The Stone Age star Josh Homme back in 2013.‘He commissioned five instruments, three of which were semihollow,’ remembers Currie, then based in Los Angeles but now building out of Detroit. ‘We had the same tastes and leanings sonically so I went to work on a couple of ideas, twisting the design in a couple of ways to make it Echopark. I own an ES-330 from 1959 with a dot neck and it’s got a perfect feel. He has a Casino from 1964 that we love, too – it’s really a combo of those two with the offset kinda design that is not as wide as an ES-335, not as bulbous, a little more feline…’”
To this day, I have no idea what had gone down. Had Echopark seen that Chandler design and thought, ‘That’s cool!’ and tooled up to make the laminate pressed top and back in the USA? Or was any similarity simply pure coincidence? Either way, it’s a design that’s ripe for a modding makeover. Can you really take that Gear4Music or Hutchins semi and turn it into a slice of USA boutique?