KNOCK ON WOOD
I’ve been an avid subscriber to your great magazine for as long as I can remember and hopefully will carry on forever more. Anyway, that’s enough brown-nosing. The case in point: how often we see distressed and road-worn electrics in your pages. Surely the manufacturers are missing a trick here. Could there be a market for road-worn acoustics, I wonder? There’s so much hype generated around road-worn Strats and aged Les Pauls – but where is the coverage about the threadbare, beat-up old acoustics?
I am only writing this because I was recently frowned upon for having a guitar in what a friend said was, I quote,“a disgusting state” and what the hell had I been doing to it? I was quite taken aback: I’d simply been playing it. I own a variety of guitars that all started out ‘new’ and are all at various stages in their lives. Surely it’s not about what they look like but how they feel and sound? Has any one else got a great big, heavy right hand like me? Jeremy Blick, via email While not common, this is in fact a ‘thing’ already, Jeremy, though it tends to belong to high-end acoustic guitar makers. Martin’s Authentic Series includes meticulously detailed ‘Aged’ recreations
of typical playing wear found on pre-war guitars, as well as innovations that are more than skin deep such as its VTS heat-treated tops that aim to emulate the effect of age on making tonewoods more resonant and sonorous. Here in the UK, Atkin Guitars also does lovingly aged models. Neither are cheap exactly, but they sure do look and sound great. But, like you, our favourite way to make an acoustic look and sound well used is simply to play it a lot!
VOX POP
Hi all, I would just like to tell you about my Vox Tonebender MKIII. I got mine around 1967/’68 from Macari’s shop in Charing Cross Road (it’s still there!). They were the original makers under the Sola Sound label. I think it cost approx 12 guineas? That’s in old money, of course – £12 12 shillings.
It is the two-knob version, only produced for about four months before the more common three-knob version took over. It has kept going all that time, never any faults or repairs, which is a tribute to the good workmanship and design. It even survived being trod on by Paul Kossoff at a gig we did with Free at The Country Club at Haverstock Hill. It got left on stage during the turnaround and the tone knob got chipped and bent sideways a bit – but with no effect to performance. They really were stompboxes!
Anyway, last year I had to sell it for reasons beyond my control. A guy in Japan brought it for a staggering £1,995! Present-day players obviously still hold them in very high regard. Ashley Rowe (still playing!), via email In a world in which gear is all too often just another impulse-buy commodity, it’s great to hear how your piece of British pedal history stood up to decades of music making – including being trodden underfoot by a giant of British blues-rock. Also interesting to learn that your humble purchase became so sought after with the passage of time. Vintage pedals are definitely becoming real collectors’ pieces – let’s hope its new owner keeps playing the mighty Vox and that it becomes ‘big in Japan’ thanks to those enduringly classic tones, not just in terms of value.