wandre guitars – MyRareGuitars.com

New Wandre Tri-Lam from Eastwood Guitars

Mike Robinson — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 21:05:14 +0000

In early 1960’s Europe, the Tri-Lam was one of Wandrè’s best-selling models. As all 60’s Wandre models, the original version had an aluminum neck. Our modern version sports a set maple neck, suspended pickguard, pickup and master volume, and a full hollowbody design that includes the unusually stylish grilled f-holes. The original 1960’s models fetch over $3,000. Shipping Now for only $799!

Wandre Tri-Lam Electric Guitar from Eastwood Guitars (Blue)

Wandre Tri-Lam Electric Guitar from Eastwood Guitars (Red)

Order before the NAMM show (Jan 18th) and get a FREE Custom Hardshell Case.

BUY NOW: $799

Colours: Blue, Red
Body: Full Hollowbody, Maple Top, Back, Sides
Neck: Bound Maple, Set
Fingerboard: Rosewood, Block Markers
Scale Length: 24 3/4″ (628mm)
Width at Nut: 1 5/8″
Pickups: New York MINI Humbucker
Switching: none
Controls: Master Volume
Bridge: Floating Tune-O-Matic, Custom Chrome Tail
Hardware: Grover Style Nickel/Chrome
Strings: D’Addario #10
Case: Extra
Unique Features: Custom Chrome tailpiece, grilled F-holes
Suggested Retail: $1029.00US

* North America shipping $49. Outside north America $149.

More Pictures of the Wandre Tri-Lam:

Wandre Tri-Lam Electric Guitar (Blue)

Wandre Tri-Lam Electric Guitar from Eastwood Guitars (Blue)

Wandre Tri-Lam Electric Guitar from Eastwood Guitars (Red)

New Wandre Tri-Lam from Eastwood Guitars from MyRareGuitars.com

Back Catalog Memories: 1960’s Wandre Doris Guitar

Mike Robinson — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 05:23:02 +0000

Wandre guitars are coveted by a very small group of people, but those who do are crazy about them. In 2002 I was not one of those people Now, almost ten years later, I can certainly raise my hand and be counted in the crowd. How big is the crowd? That is an interesting question. I think for every vintage Fender fan there are… wait, for every 200,000 Fender fans, there may be one of us. Then again, probably for every 20 million Fender fans might be more accurate.

Antony Wandre Pioli made guitars from the late 1950’s through the 1960’s. His claim to fame was an aluminum neck, but the attraction to most of us was the crazy body shapes. The guitars were musical sculptures, works of art. But this is not a story about his history – you can read about him on the internet – it is a story about how I came to become a Wandre junkie.

So as to best of my memory in late 2002, I found a curious guitar on EBAY that nobody seems to be paying any attention to – a Wandre Doris. “What the hell is that thing?”, was my first thought. 30 seconds later I’m thinking,.. “damn, I gotta have it”. It is an inexplicable phenomena that guitar buyers go through, but we’ve all experienced it. So I contact the seller, make him an offer (at the time I was cursing myself for spending so much) and we arrive at a deal. Two weeks later I get this beauty in the mail:

Vintage 1960’s Wandre Doris Electric Guitar (Green)

Wow. What a cool, fragile, ridiculously lightweight, spectacular, completely individual, personal, like-no-other-guitar-I-have-ever-held, sexy body shaped, weird?, big switched, comfortable, cozy, guitar. It was a piece of art… I mean a guitar. No, art. Whatever. I was hooked. Can you tell?

My first reaction was to tell everyone I know about this fantastic discovery! How did that work out? Kind of like telling everyone you know in grade seven that liver and onions is the best food on the planet. I started thinking the guy who sold it to me is telling everyone he knows that Mike at www.myrareguitars.com thinks liver and onions is the best food on the planet.

But fear not, I simply loved that thing. So much so that I photographed it from every angle and did some detailed drawings (yes, in my earlier years I was a draftsman, although that name sounds odd these days) so that I could catalog it for future use. Which I did in 2006 when we released the EASTWOOD Wandre to great fanfare.

However, back to the story of this specific guitar. There I was in my office about a year later when one evening the phone rang. “Hi, I see you have a Wandre Doris on your website”, said the caller. “Yep, cool isn’t she?”, said I. It was not for sale. I did not have a price on it, just listed on the 1960’s guitars pages that I’d been updating for reference. “I’d like to buy it”, said the predator. For the next 30 minutes we had a great chat about our guitar collections, how much we loved collecting guitars, where we both lived, families, friends, and all things that guitar fans have in common.

One of the great things about this job is you meet people every day that share your passion for guitars. This guy was one of those people. Yet he was a persistent fellow. “How much did you pay for it?”, he asked. I told him. “Can I offer you three times what you paid for it?”. I think, “WTF?” to myself. “no, I love this thing, really don’t want to sell it”. So we chat for another 15 minutes about other guitar stuff, then he says, “I’m thinking you’d be pretty stupid to refuse five times what you paid for it”. And of course I reply, “I’m not that stupid”. or something like that. Thirty seconds later my email pops up with a message, “You’ve Got Money” from PAYPAL.

Yes, it is in the amount of five times what I paid for it… plus shipping.

The next morning it got filed under THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY.

VIEW EASTWOOD WANDRE DORIS TRIBUTE FOR SALE

Back Catalog Memories: 1960’s Wandre Doris Guitar 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

California Dreamin’ (1960’s Domino Californian Rebel CE82 Electric Guitar)

Michael Wright — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 13:00:12 +0000

And we’ll have fun, fun, fun ’till daddy takes the T-bird away. The beach. The sun. California has flirted with national popularity ever since the Gold Rush. And when filmmakers discovered the endless summer of Hollywood, its ascent to national dominance as a symbol became assured. But it really wasn’t until the 1960s that California became the center of the youth-culture universe. From the Beach Boys to the Doors, California was where it was at. So, when the Maurice Lipsky Music Co., a prominent importer and distributor in New York City, wanted to name the more adventuresome parts of his Japanese-made Domino line, creating an association with the Left Coast seemed natural.

Vintage 1960's Domino Californian Rebel Electric Guitar

Lipsky, by the way, was the company that offered the Orpheum brand of guitars at least from the 1950s on, if not earlier. Many Orpheum’s were made by United Guitars of Jersey City, NJ, the successor to the Oscar Schmidt Company. United also built most of the Premier guitars sold by the Peter Sorkin Music Co. There is some evidence that Lipsky’s Orpheum name was used on some Italian Wandré guitars, as well.

In 1967 Lipsky introduced a line proto-copies carrying the Domino brand name. Most were inspired by European models such as the EKO Violin guitar. Among the offerings were two models sporting a California cache, the #502 Californian, an asymmetrical copy of a Vox Phantom, and the #CE82 Californian Rebel (wouldn’t California Rebel have made more sense?) shown here. As far as I’m aware, the Californian Rebel was like no other guitar available at the time. I suppose you’d call this a semi-solid, since most of it is solid, but built in halves with a sound cavity routed out under the one sound hole. The top has a nice German carve relief, which makes the painted-on “binding” kind of amusing! The slotted head adds a kind of retro vibe. Note the cool dots along the top side of the bound fingerboard. What looks like a rosewood pickguard is wood grained plastic. Like a lot of mid-’60s guitars, the vibrato has a flip-up mute, basically a spring-loaded bar with a piece of foam rubber that deadens the strings. Kind of neat, but it’s hard to imagine how anyone would use it.

Vintage 1960's Domino Californian Rebel Electric Guitar

With these big chunky pickups you get a 50-50 chance on having good sound, or maybe much better than that. Most are pretty high output for a single-coil. I once bought a bag of these and found pickups ranging from 5K to a whopping 13K resistance (a hot Humbucker runs around 8.5K)! To make these even cooler, the two sliding switches are attached to different value capacitors to give you more tonal variety.

Vintage 1960's Domino Californian Rebel Electric Guitar

Who actually built this guitar is unknown, but these pickups appear to be associated with Kawai guitars, and that’s probably a good guess.

Alas, the 1960s were closer to the heavy, meandering solos of the Doors than the strum-a-lum twang of the Beach Boys when this guitar appeared. Besides, the guitar boom of earlier in the decade was grinding rapidly to a halt. 1966 was the peak year of guitar imports, with a dramatic decline in ’67. In 1968 Valco/Kay and a bunch of Japanese makers went out of business. Maurice Lipsky drops from sight around this time, and the industry went through a period of transition which yielded the Copy Era of the 1970s. Still, the Domino Californian Rebel is a very boss guitar, perfect for picking Pipeline on the beach at sunset.

California Dreamin’ (1960’s Domino Californian Rebel CE82 Electric Guitar) from MyRareGuitars.com