The Different Strummer

It’s odd that I never thought of things this way before but it was encountering Japanese guitars that started me on the road to writing guitar history.  It was probably more about coincidence—and me being cheap—than any sort of far-sighted strategy, maybe salted with a generous dash of aesthetic appreciation.  In fact, it was this very Japanese Yamaha SC-600 that provided the “Aha” moment!

I began shopping for electric guitars in the mid-1980s after I finally started holding on to decent paying jobs.  I’d been an acoustic player for several decades and thought I ought to have a solidbody electric.  I had a radio show at the time and spent a lot of time combing through record bins looking for interesting guitar records.  This brought me in contact with lots of 2^nd-hand stores of various types, where you’d occasionally encounter a guitar.  I was on a record mission at this sort of pawn shop in New Jersey when I found my first, a Japanese-made, 4-pickup 1967 Kent with birdseye maple top and back laminates and this really groovy wide, almost Baroque black and white plastic strips on the side.  It spoke to me and at around $80 was quickly mine.

A few more guitars followed until the day I walked into Lou’s Pawn Shop in Upper Darby, PA.  It’s still there, actually.  That’s when this red beauty reached out to me.  It cost more than $80, but not a fortune.  Back then, Japanese guitars were considered “used guitars,” not in any way collectible.  That denomination was reserved for Pre-War Martins and old Les Pauls and Strats…American guitars.  There were whole books about those.  Nothing about Kents or Yamahas.  Nada.

Every time I would find one of these mysterious beauties, I’d ask the seller, “What’s the story about this guitar?”  And the seller would invariably shrug his shoulders and utter, “I dunno.”  It would kind of annoy me.  But by the time I got to this Yamaha, I’d heard the same ignorant response numerous times.  That’s when, like the Blues Brothers watching James Brown, the light turned on.  I was on a mission from God.  I would figure out the stories of these unloved guitars and tell them.  I called the editor of the then fairly new Vintage Guitar Magazine and asked if he’d be interested in publishing these stories and I’ve never looked back since.  Fortunately, the world has come a long way, baby, since those days in the desert!

So, what was it that caught my eye that day?  Obviously being a nice cherry red helped.  And that distinctive shape, which turned out to have more significance that I knew at the time.  Then I saw that it was a neck-through-body guitar, a feature that was highly prized back then.  Then I cast my gaze over that arm contour, realizing that Yamaha had built a “sandwich” with an alder core between a thin layer of mahogany topped with nicely figured ash.  Slice through that sandwich at an angle and you get a really gorgeous guitar!  I’m usually more of a humbucker than single-coil kind of guy, but these are beefy units and the five-way switch gives you those coveted glassy out-of-phase sounds.

It was only years later that I realized that the Yamaha SC-600 was actually a take—sort of a revival of—on a classic Yamaha design from the 1960s, the “Blue Jeans” models that were unique models, sold only domestically (or at least in Asia), inspired by the Mosrite Ventures guitars so beloved in Japan.  Yamaha kind of got sidetracked in the mid-1970s when its SG series of double-cutaway solids found considerable popularity—and great press coverage—thanks largely due to the endorsement by Carlos Santana.

As much as I liked the SC-600, I think I was pretty much in a minority.  The model was not especially well-received, at least in the U.S., and these were only offered in 1981 and ’82.  The SC-600 had a companion SC-400 that was also a pretty guitar, differing in that it had a set-in neck and the body was flat with no arm contour.  I have no idea it these are especially rare, but with such a short production timeline, they’re probably not plentiful.  Contrary to popular opinion, no Japanese guitar companies were selling boat-loads of guitars yet in 1982.  Certainly I had no one competing against me for that SC-600 the day I walked into Lou’s and the salesman shrugged his shoulders in yet another “I dunno.”

One never knows what path his or her life will take, of course.  I may have been destined to write guitar history even if I hadn’t heard the siren call of those Japanese guitars back in the 1980s.  But finding all those great Japanese guitar designs, pretty much unwanted, unloved, and unknown—and not expensive—certainly turned into a mission from God!

Heeding the Siren Call from MyRareGuitars.com

The Different Strummer

Blame it on disco.  I remember it well…as an observer, of course!  The excesses of early ‘70s hard rock inspired a vapid dance craze reaction toward the end of the decade with mirror balls and platform shoes and, well, you know, Studio 54, glitter spandex, and Donna Summer and all that.  The music was mostly played with keyboard synths and drum machines, fairly new technology at the time.  The guitar press predicted: It’s The End of guitars as we know it.  But was it really?  (Obviously, we all know the answer to that rhetorical question!)

I didn’t really pay much personal attention to disco.  I didn’t dance and I didn’t hear too many guitar solos to make me interested in listening.  I was working at a commercial classical radio station at the time and my greatest exposure was a somewhat satirical—and as it turned out quite successful, I might add—disco party for key advertisers, for which I had to obtain the music.  I was mildly alarmed by the press predictions regarding the demise of guitars, but I needn’t have worried.

Anyhow, the response of the guitar industry was to try to turn guitars into synth controllers.  Keyboards are ideal synth controllers.  They are immediate and precise.  You hit a key and you get a clear electronic connection that is instantly, easily, and unequivocally recognized by the machine and its software.  They’re perfectly polyphonic.  And once you eliminate the need for anything but the keyboard—no strings, no soundboard, no pipes—they can become quite compact and portable.

Guitars…well, not so much.  A good clean note is obtained with good clean contact between the string and the fret, but you know how often that doesn’t happen!  We bend notes, even when we don’t intend to.  We move our fingers around to put “English” on the tones.  In short, despite the best efforts of brilliant engineers at Roland, Korg, Yamaha and elsewhere, guitars make lousy synth controllers at best.  To play guitar synth you’d best possess pretty darned good technique.

Don’t get me wrong.  I really admire the synth guitars that were created during the period from roughly 1977 to 1987 or so.  But if you want to play some disco, get a keyboard.

That said, there were some interesting attempts to create a hybrid solution, notably by Casio, like this nifty little 1987 DG-10 Digital Guitar. Okay, I hear you sniggering about this toy guitar.  You might say it doesn’t even look much like a guitar, although, if you recall guitars from the 1980s, you remember there was some weird stuff that was popular, from minimalist headless Steinbergers and Kramer Dukes to Prince’s elaborate guitar sculptures.  All right, I’ll give you that it looks more like a toy than a guitar.

But let’s not focus on what it isn’t, let’s concentrate on what it actually is.  This juicy little “toy” is actually a full-blown amp-in-guitar and MIDI controller.  The fingerboard is a rubber touch pad with, presumably, articulated “frets” with 6 contact points each.  The nylon strings are all like 3^rd strings.  Yamaha did this same thing on its synth controller, by the way.  I suspect that’s to equalize the contact using identical string mass.  There’s a built-in battery-powered amp with 4” speaker.

You can play this like a guitar, or guitars.  On top you can choose from 20 preset sounds.  You can add automatic percussion rhythms.  Pick the tempo.  Punch in sustain and reverb, and change the key.  On the front you have an on/off switch, master volume and rhythm volume.  You can mute your guitar, activate or turn off the rhythm sounds, add in some fill.  Oh yes, and there’s a manual drum machine pad if you’re dexterous, with a choice of cymbals, low tom, hi tom, and snare drum sounds.

And if that’s not enough, you can send the signal out to an external amp.  You can plug in headphones.  Pick two MIDI modes, omni or poly, to coordinate with whatever gear you use.  Plug in a MIDI DIN cable.  And use an AC plug, should you be so inclined.

Yeah, any kid can figure this toy out.  Well, maybe a kid could.  I never got past the amp in guitar with automated drum machine and I hope my life never depends on knowing the difference between omni and poly synths.  Not that I mastered even just playing guitar.  I think I played at a couple of my son’s baseball games, sitting in the bleachers doing “charge” sounds.  But the Casio DG-20, in the right hands, might just be the guitar you need to do disco!

For the record, as it were, I did continue to peruse disco record bins for a few years—disco was LP music, before CDs—and found, to my great surprise and delight, that there actually were some disco disks that featured hot guitar licks!  Metal guitar disco.  Numerous disco-flamenco fusions.  Rasgueado goes great with the turn-around pump of “unh-uhh, unh-uhh, unh-uhh.”  They were never too popular, though.  Blame it on disco.

1987 Casio DG-20 Digital Guitar from MyRareGuitars.com