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Back Catalog Memories: Bartolini Avanti Electric Guitar

Mike Robinson — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 06:05:00 +0000

In the 1950’s Italian manufacturers were cranking out accordions by the thousands. When Rock ‘n Roll came on the scene, many of these builders switched from accordions to electric guitars. Bartolini was one of them. When the electric guitar boom took off in USA in the early 60’s, Italy became a source to fill the appetite. Accordions were plastic covered, so many of these early Italian guitar were too, some with plastic bodies like this Avanti model.

Vintage 1960’s Bartolini Avanti Electric Guitar – white

Not much is known about them, but here is an excerpt from a Michael Wright article:

Avanti guitars were probably made by the Polverini Brothers of Castelfidardo for European Crafts of Los Angeles beginning in late 1964. Most early Italian guitars had either push-button or rocker controls adapted from accordions, but this is unusual with a fourway rotary select that let you choose each pickup individually or all at once. All in all a sensible arrangement. Whether the pickups are really humbuckers or single-coil is unknown, but they have that bright ’60s sound.

The Italian guitar boom did not last too long, as Japanese manufacturing took over the low end guitar boom in the late 1960’s and soon all the cool European guitars disappeared from North America.

[See image gallery at www.myrareguitars.com]

Back Catalog Memories: Bartolini Avanti Electric Guitar from MyRareGuitars.com

Back Catalog Memories: 1960’s EKO Cobra Guitars

Mike Robinson — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 04:23:33 +0000

EKO was an Italian manufacturer located in Recanati, Italy. Their products include classical guitars, 12-string guitars, arch top guitars, electric guitars and acoustic bass guitars. EKO guitars gained high popularity during the rock’n’roll craze of 1960s, becoming the largest guitar exporter in Europe. Their electric models were often highly ornamented with pearl, featured 3 or 4 pickups and recognizable “rocker” switches for pickup selection. The acoustic models were popular in country and folk rock bands of the late ’60s.

These guitars were imported into the United States during the 1960’s by Milwaukee import company, Deluca Brothers Music. This particular model – The Cobra Series – was a “student” entry level guitar. They were available in single and double pickup 6 string version, mainly in Black, Sunburst or Red. Also in a 12 string version in Sunburst or Red and a 30″ scale Bass in Sunburst. Surprisingly nice necks on these guitars even 50 years later, the body material is extremely lightweight and the guitars are fun to play.

EKO Cobra 6-String Electric Guitar

Vintage 1960's EKO Cobra 6-String Electric Guitar (Red)

EKO Cobra 12-String Electric Guitar

Vintage 1960's EKO Cobra 12-String Electric Guitar (Sunburst)

Back Catalog Memories: 1960’s EKO Cobra Guitars from MyRareGuitars.com

New Arrivals: Vintage 1967 Goya Rangemaster 109R Electric Guitar

Mike Robinson — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 14:00:20 +0000

The guitar brand name “Goya” existed from the mid 1950’s to 1996. Nylon and steel string acoustic and acoustic/electric guitars, hollow body electric guitars, solidbody electric guitars and basses, thinline electric archtops guitars, banjos, mandolins and amplifiers. Sparkle plastic covered Model 80 (ESP24 Standard) and Model 90 (EDP46) hollowbody electric “Les Pauls” (with replaceable pickup assemblies) – made by Hagstrom – introduced mid 1959. These are relatively rare.

Goya was purchased by Avnet in 1966, and continued to import instruments such as the Rangemaster in 1967. By the late 1960’s, electric solidbody guitars and basses were then being built in Italy. The vibrato bar, however, was provided by another Goya supplier, the Hagstrom company of Sweden. It has also been suggested that Italian guitar maker Galanti made the Goya “Panther” models. The Goya Panther and the Galanti guitars look nearly identical.

This cherryburst Rangemaster Model 109R Goya guitar was made by the “Polverini Brothers” of Italy (not by EKO as previously thought) in the late 1960’s. The multi control panels that were common with Italian instruments from that era, include a master volume next to three tone options, low, medium and high. The upper controls are for pickup selection, as the pickups are split into 3+3 x 2. So the controls are: 1+2, 1+4, 2+3, 3+4, off. Pretty cool!

Vintage 1967 Goya Rangemaster 109R Electric Guitar

This model is shown on page 12 and 13 of the 1967 Goya Guitar Catalog in a blonde finish.

New Arrivals: Vintage 1967 Goya Rangemaster 109R Electric Guitar from MyRareGuitars.com

A Taste of Italy (1965 Juliett Delux Electric Guitar)

Michael Wright — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 13:00:23 +0000

It’s always dangerous to deal in stereotypes. Nevertheless, there’s often a grain of truth lurking behind them. Take guitars (what else?) from the ‘60s. Often it only takes a glance to sus where a guitar came from. Look at a Japanese electric guitar and you won’t mistake it for anything else. Or move to Europe. You’d almost never confuse a German guitar—full of engineering bells and whistles—for an Italian one (loaded with style), or vice versa. Take this c. 1965 Juliett Delux guitar.

Vintage 1965 Juliett Delux Electric Guitar

You don’t need years of study to figure out this came from south of the Alps. A German guitar would have an innovative laminated neck and perhaps two more switches than you can figure out what to do with or a finger-operated, spring-loaded vibrato. No one but Italians—or someone pretty close—would make a guitar in avocado green with a green-black-silver mesh pickguard and matching pickup covers! I didn’t need two seconds to grab it off the dealer who showed it to me, no matter where it came from! I mean, avocado green?! You gotta own a guitar in that color, especially if it comes with color-coordinated appointments!

But there’s a long way from figuring out at a glance that this is Italian to figuring out what the heck it is! Like many of the guitars I’ve picked up over the years, this Juliet became an unsolved mystery buried in the back of my guitar room for ages. Actually, quite a few apparently Italian mysteries collected there gathering dust.

Vintage 1965 Juliett Delux Electric Guitar

But I have this thing about learning what’s up about any guitar I own. It’s why I got into the guitar history game in the first place. So these guitars nagged at me. Then one day I discovered www.fetishguitars.com, a web site devoted to Italian guitars. This site is about the best—and almost only—source on the subject at this point in time.

Besides a general lack of information, part of the problem involves the fact that so many Italian—read European—guitarmakers, like the Japanese, made guitars for a lot of different people carrying many different brand names and logos. Just as guitars made by Tombo in Japan ended up in the U.S. as Norma guitars, guitars made by various Italian manufacturers ended up in both Europe and America carrying a wide variety of names, usually not that of the factory.

Vintage 1965 Juliett Delux Electric Guitar

Back to this Juliett Delux. Mucking around the fetishguitars.com site led me to a company named Zerosette from Castelfidardo, Italy. Castelfidardo was—and is—one of the world’s centers of accordion-making. It began there in the late 1800s and even today it’s the home of an international accordion festival and competition. Its heyday was the 1950s when the accordion craze briefly swept the U.S. That soon ended, and, as we all know, guitars eventually took over. It turns out that Castelfidardo is located in a region of Italy with a long tradition of guitarmaking. So it was not that hard to add guitars to the mix. This explains why EKO guitars were so successful in the U.S. the early years of the ‘60s.

One of the more obscure shops located in Castelfidardo was called Zerosette. Virtually nothing is known about the actual operation, though you may have encountered their work in various guitars bearing the Goya, Contessa, and Sano.

Tucked among the gems produced by Zerosette are guitars bearing the Juliett Delux and JG brands. A comparison of the shape of one of the Juliett solids is the spittin’ image of this guitar…and even in light green! A look at the pickups shows a certain similarity of shape to others made by Zerosette. None of the examples shown there are quite as fancy as this guitar, but it’s pretty clear that this came from the Zerosette shop. Jack Marchal of fetishguitars.com believes this to be from 1965, based on the components and style. JGs may or may not have been related to the Juliett brand’s owners (other than being made by Zerosette); I suspect them to be for the same company but slightly later.

So, I now feel like I know where this guitar came from and who made it, as much as you can know with our lack of knowledge. When it was made or for whom? That remains a mystery.

All I know for sure is that an avocado guitar with matching parts, that’s way cool. Thank god for Italian guitars! Like I said. Style!

A Taste of Italy (1965 Juliett Delux Electric Guitar) from MyRareGuitars.com

Unexpected Eye Candy (1965 Avanti Electric Guitar)

Michael Wright — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 13:00:50 +0000

Maybe it was the smarmy, frozen smiles thrust kind of aggressively into the camera. Or maybe it was because our PARENTS chose the TV programming. Not that there were very many options back in the day when you were lucky to get three network broadcasts, depending on where you lived. If you were lucky enough to have a TV. Or maybe it was because my little sister played insipid beginner tunes on a black-plastic and pearloid Silvertone piano accordion (“The bear went over the mountain”). But every Saturday night it was the Lawrence Welk Champagne Hour “wonaful, wonaful” with those big honkin’ accordions. Take it away Myron. For years I hated accordions. Little did I realize their vital connection to the guitar, as can be seen, if you know what to look for, on this little 1965 Avanti from Italy.

1965 Avanti Electric Guitar

It’s amazing how little you know when you’re in the middle of things. Especially when you’re young. Even though I was prime-time ’60s, I didn’t really become aware of Italian guitars until I began writing about them several decades later and, with a personal attachment to Milwaukee, learned of the Lo Duca Brothers and EKO guitars. It was talking with the Lo Ducas that I learned of the accordion connection. Duh.

That’s because those very accordions I’d hated as a kid were the equivalent of what the guitar became a decade later. Very popular. And very Italian. The piano accordion “with keyboards instead of buttons” was invented in Vienna in 1863 and brought to the area of Castelfidardo on the eastern coast of Italy. The instrument was embraced and a lively accordion manufacturing industry grew up in the area. It’s still a major center. While accordions were also made in Germany and Sweden, the vast majority played during the 1950s were from Italy.

1965 Avanti Electric Guitar

As fate would have it, the rage for accordions in the US at least passed by the mid-’50s. Accordion makers struggled to replace the lost business. Lucky for them Baby Boomers like me came along with a taste for playing guitars. Doubly lucky for them, there was a long tradition of guitarmaking in the same part of Italy. When the American electric guitar market exploded in the early 1960s, the Italians were among the first European sources of guitars for meeting the demand. One of the hallmarks of early accordions was the use of plastic covering. Thus it was natural that, when switching to guitars, they should be plastic covered, which brings us back to this Avanti.

Avanti guitars were probably made by the Polverini Brothers of Castelfidardo for European Crafts of Los Angeles beginning in late 1964. For this one, they chose a really cool rootbeer-barrel colored faux-rosewood plastic covering. Most early Italian guitars had either pushbutton or rocker controls adapted from accordions, but this is unusual with a fourway rotary select that let you choose each pickup individually or all at once. All in all a sensible arrangement. Whether the pickups are really humbuckers or single-coil is unknown, but they have that bright ’60s sound, and, anyhow, you really want an Avanti because it looks like rootbeer candy.

1965 Avanti Electric Guitar

Italian guitars continued to be plastic-covered through 1965 or so. By 1966 guitar players were becoming more discriminating and Italian guitars switched to more conventional finishes. Though not for long. Rising wages and slacking demand, plus implacable competition from Japanese guitarmakers, led to the demise of Italian guitars by 1968 at the latest, at least in the American market.

Since discovering these plastic-covered marvels I’ve become more interested in the piano accordions that spawned them. I’ve even contemplated picking one up to play it. But one thing they haven’t done. And that’s change my opinions about watching the Lawrence Welk show, no matter how wonaful it may actually have been.

Unexpected Eye Candy (1965 Avanti Electric Guitar) from MyRareGuitars.com

Dealer Profile: Sound Metak (Milano, Italy)

Mike Robinson — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 13:00:41 +0000

Sound Metak (Milano, Italy)

Xabier Iriondo opened SOUND METAK in October 2005. He sells vintage/collector instruments and musical objects like old lap steels (K&F, National, Gibson, Epiphone, Dobro), autoharps, monochords, boutique effects pedals (Cornish, Klon, Menatone, Effector13, etc), accessories, old gramophones and 78rpm records (early blues & jazz, tango’s, etc) and – Eastwood guitars!

www.soundmetak.com

Contact: Xabier Iriondo

Sound Metak
+39 0245493391
P.le Segrino, 1
20159 Milano
ITALY

Dealer Profile: Sound Metak (Milano, Italy) from MyRareGuitars.com

Motorcycle Mama (1965 Wandré Modele Karak Electric Guitar)

Michael Wright — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 13:00:01 +0000

The minute I laid eyes on this c. 1965 Wandré Modele Karak – that is, once I was able to get beyond the knockout shape – I thought “motorcycle.” Take a gander at that vibrato. Look like a motorcycle chevron? And what’s up with that neck? It’s tooled from aluminum, which makes it weird enough. But just like motorcycles have all the works exposed on the outside, this aluminum neck stretches its whole length- head to vibrato – on the outside of the guitar! Even the head frame shouts motorbike. So, is there a two-wheel connection?

Vintage 1965 Wandré Modele Karak Electric Guitar

Of course, you know the answer is yes, although it only later that I learned of the maker’s affection for bikes. Wandré guitars were the brainchild of a flamboyant Italian conceptual artist named Wandré Pioli (1926-2004). Pioli had been an anti-fascist partisan fighter during World War II, and afterward he studied engineering. In the mid-1950s he became interested in guitars. In 1959 he built a revolutionary round factory in his native town of Cavriago and started production. Virtually all Wandré guitars had aluminum necks, most outside the body like this, though there were some with internal necks and some with bolt-ons. Many were hollowbodies, but some were solid. There were a ton of cool Wandré models, including the famous Bikini with a built-in amp and the BB, a tribute to French sexpot Brigit Bardot. However, almost no two Wandré guitars are the same. He liked to use other odd materials, including vinyl piping and fabric soundhole covers. The backs of his necks are given shape with molded polystyrene plastic. This guitar appears to be built of a composite material similar to masonite and is coated rather than painted.

Vintage 1965 Wandré Modele Karak Electric Guitar

Most of Wandré’s electronics were provided by his friend and collaborator Athos Davoli. Sometimes the Davoli name on the pickups is the only identifier of a Wandré guitar, causing some to mistake the maker, but once you’ve seen a Wandré you won’t miss it. Pioli favored “blobby” shapes, both for his guitars and inlays, and usually somewhere there’s a “W.”

Vintage 1965 Wandré Modele Karak Electric Guitar

Ok, these make groovy art, but are they good guitars? Actually, Wandrés like this Karak can be remarkably good. The pickups are nice, loud, clear single-coils, and the necks allow for a swell set-up. If there’s a down side, the guitars can feel a little delicate. Maybe it’s the thin plastic on the neck. Or the fact that the vinyl starts to shrink over time and is easily loosened. Probably not the guitar you’d pick to play while jumping off your amp stack.

Vintage 1965 Wandré Modele Karak Electric Guitar

Oh yes, did I say motorcycle? At some point Pioli found an old motorcycle and spent much of his life restoring and redecorating his prize, tooling around Italy on it. Whether this love of motorcycles actually informed his guitar designs, or simply reflect his tastes, is unknown. In 1969 Pioli tired of guitars, sold the factory and turned to designing leather clothing. Later in his life he was fond of creating art out of found objects, but it’s for his whacky ’60s guitars that he’ll be most fondly remembered.

Motorcycle Mama (1965 Wandré Modele Karak Electric Guitar) from MyRareGuitars.com

Mama’s Got a Squeezebox (1967 Galanti Grand Prix 3003 Electric Guitar)

Michael Wright — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 13:00:27 +0000

Accordions. If you play guitar, you probably don’t think much about them. But from several perspectives they played an important role in giving the guitar a boost to prominence that it now enjoys. A role that is nicely evidenced by this very swell c. 1967 Galanti Grand Prix electric guitar.

1967 Galanti Grand Prix 3003 Electric Guitar

Accordions were actually pretty popular in the US from the 1920’s on, probably due to their popularity in Vaudeville acts. They were heavily associated with Italians, which is no surprise since the center of accordion-making then and to this day is focused on the area of Castelfidardo on the northeast central Italian coast. The entertainment industry was one avenue open to many Italian immigrants, and by the early 20th Century there were a lot of Italian acts working the Vaudeville circuits, often playing to ethnic stereotypes. Accordions began showing up in Sears catalogs in the 1920s and accordion orchestras for kids began appearing. A number of mostly Italian virtuoso accordionists became popular in the 1930s, although the rise of Polish polka music (with accordions) also had influence in certain areas of the U.S.

But the real rage for accordions came in the mid-1950s with the early Post-War Baby Boom. Suddenly accordions proliferated. Companies built up large chains of music studios and imported and distributed Italian accordions bearing their name. One such was a company out of Chicago run by Frank Galanti.

1967 Galanti Grand Prix 3003 Electric Guitar

Galanti was a well-known Chi-town accordionist, but he was probably also a relative of the firm that made the accordions he imported. Galanti accordions were invented by Antonio Galanti in a small village called Mondaino near Romagna in 1890. Production began in 1917 and, indeed, the company is still in operation.

Unfortunately for all these squeezeboxers, by the mid-1950s the accordion craze had run out of air. Accordions were no longer hip. Then, after some floundering, the salvation arrived in the hands of the Kingston Trio. Significantly, in around 1959 the publication Accordion World changed its name to Accordion and Guitar World! Virtually all the accordion manufacturers added guitars to their lines. The fabled Guitar Boom had begun!

1967 Galanti Grand Prix 3003 Electric Guitar

Few of the early acoustic guitars built by the accordionistas were particularly notable, but especially after the Beatles, they produced some of the classic electrics. This c. 1967 Galanti Grand Prix 3003 (#2843) is a real sweatheart. It’s made out of mahogany and sports a lot of typically European appointments, including nice Van Ghent tuners and three nice clean single-coil pickups. As on many guitars made by the accordion guys, the electronics are inspired by the push-buttons on squeeboxes, so here you get buttons for (in order): O (off, my fave), 2 (middle), 1+3, 3, 1, and M (all three pickups). As on a lot of Italian guitars, there’s not a great deal of tonal subtlety between positions.

Actually, Galanti guitars, mostly finished in subdued sunbursts, were pretty restrained for an accordionista guitar, which typically favored plastic coverings, sparkle, or at least bold color schemes like black-green sunburst. IMHO Galantis were among the best made at the time. They got pretty wide distribution during their day, but drop from sight by 1968. Accordions did rebound a bit in popularity, though never as much as in their heyday. But at least we have them to thanks for cool artifacts like Galanti guitars!

Mama’s Got a Squeezebox (1967 Galanti Grand Prix 3003 Electric Guitar) from MyRareGuitars.com