I’m no stranger to Jay Turser guitars. I’ve had many over the years and found them very affordable and well made. I’ve seen them all. Or so I thought. I spotted this baby on eBay a while back and was bewildered by the design. It has an interesting swirl carved right into the body, giving it a kind of futuristic look. In addition, it has a reverse-Firebird-type headstock, two slanted Turser “Phantom Coil” pickups, and an odd metal adjustable-height nut. I was baffled because I had never seen this model before. I tried doing a little research on it, but couldn’t find much. The auction opened at $150 and I won it for $207.88—my maximum bid. I barely won it because another bidder bid $207.34, so I ended up winning the auction by 54 cents. Whoa—that was strange!
I decided to do more research after I won and, to my horror, found that a guitar exactly like mine sold just a few months earlier (from the same seller, too) for only $100, so that bummed me out a bit.
Bottom Feeder Tip #381: Do your pricing research before you bid. Ha!
When the guitar arrived, it was difficult to play. The action was high and it had heavy-gauge strings, plus the neck had excessive bow. In addition, the strings buzzed all over the place. I changed strings to my gauge, adjusted the neck, and lowered the action, but it still buzzed with the open strings. Then I took a good look at the metal nut. I didn’t realize it had two adjustment screws, so I raised the nut just a pinch and all the buzzing went away. Whew!
Photo 2 — With its Phantom Coil pickups and contour-in-body design, this model has its own sound—which may need a little goosing up—and look.
When I gave it a spin through an amp, the guitar sounded very Strat-like, but with the addition of a 2-way phase switch. The Phantom Coil pickup design keeps the guitar very quiet, but it sounds a little sterile. The guitar seemed to lack a sonic personality you’d get from a Strat or Tele, so it took me a while to find the right amp and pedal settings. I use modeling amps, and the settings that worked best were a blackface Fender with some help from a compressor and a Tube Screamer.
Photo 3 — The headstock on the Branson is reverse-Firebird style, with the pegs at the bottom. Some contend this affects tuning, and it certainly alters the feel when bending low and high strings.
In all my research, this is what I found on the Branson: They only made a limited number for one year, around 2002. The model was available in natural (like mine), transparent red, or transparent black finish. It’s similar to the Fender Lead II guitars from 1979 to 1982. The pickups use some kind of phantom-coil noise cancellation. And that’s all I found. There’s very little information out there on these guitars, so if you know something more, give me a shout.
So it’s a keeper—at least for now. I probably paid more than I should have, but I love the look and it’s fun to play. And isn’t that enough? Listen to my sound sample and be the judge.
The Rickenbacker 481’s body style was based on the 4001 bass, popularly played by Paul McCartney. Even with that, the guitar was too experimental to reach its full potential.
By the early 1970s, the great interest the lads had sparked in 6- and 12-string Ricks had waned. But thankfully for the company, there was still high demand for yet another Beatles-played instrument: the 4001 bass.
Paul McCartney was gifted a 4001 by Rickenbacker in 1965, which he then used prominently throughout the group’s late-’60s recordings and while leading Wings all through the ’70s. Other rising stars of rock also donned 4000 series models, like Yes’Chris Squire, Pink Floyd’sRoger Waters, the Bee Gees’ Maurice Gibb, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Stu Cook, and more.
And like that, a new star was born.
So, what’s a guitar company to do when its basses are selling better than its guitars? Voilà: The Rickenbacker 480. Introduced in 1972, it took the 4000-series body shape and created a standard 6-string out of it, using a bolt-on neck for the first time in the brand’s history.
The 481’s slanted frets predate the modern multi-scale phenomenon by decades. The eight-degree tilt of the frets is matched by an eight-degree tilt of the nut, pickups, and bridge.
“It was like a yo-yo at Rickenbacker sometimes,” factory manager Dick Burke says in Rickenbacker Guitars: Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fireglo. “We got quiet in the late ’60s, but when the bass started taking off in the ’70s, we got real busy again, so making a 6-string version of that was logical, I guess.”
The gambit worked, for a time. Sales of the 480 were strong enough at first that, in 1973, a deluxe model was introduced—the 481—and it’s one of these deluxe versions that we’re showcasing here.
“The 481 features slant frets—pointing ever-so-slightly toward the body of the guitar—and the eight-degree tilt of the frets is matched by an eight-degree tilt of the nut, pickups, and bridge.”
Take a close look and you’ll notice that the body shape isn’t the only remarkable feature. The 481 was Rickenbacker’s first production run to feature humbucker pickups. Here, you can see each humbucker’s 12 pole pieces dotting through the chrome cover, a variant casing only available from 1975 to 1976. (Interestingly enough, the pickups had first been developed for the 490, a prototype that never made it to public release, which would’ve allowed players to substitute different pickups by swapping loaded pickguards in and out of the body.)
The new pickups were also treated with novel electronics. The standard 3-way pickup-selector switch is here, but so is a second small switch that reverses the pickups’ phase when engaged.
The inventive minds at Rickenbacker didn’t stop there: The 481 features slant frets—pointing ever-so-slightly toward the body of the guitar—and the eight-degree tilt of the frets is matched by an eight-degree tilt of the nut, pickups, and bridge.
Long before the fanned fret phenomenon caught on in the modern, progressive guitar landscape, Rickenbacker had been toying around with the slant-fret concept. Originally available from 1970 forward as a custom order on other models, slant frets were all but standard on the 481 (only a small minority of straight-fret 481s were built).
The 481 was the deluxe version of the 480, which preceded it and marked the first time the company used a bolt-on neck.
Dick Burke, speaking separately to writer Tony Bacon in an interview published on Reverb, only half-recalls the genesis and doesn’t remember them selling particularly well: “Some musicians said that’s the way when you hold the neck in your left hand—your hand is slanted. So, we put the slanted frets in a few guitars. I don’t know how many, maybe a hundred or two—I don’t recall.”
Even proponents of the 481 do not necessarily sing the praises of the slanted fretboard. Kasabian’s Serge Pizzorno, a 481 superfan, told Rickenbacker Guitars author Martin Kelly, “I don’t just love the 481, it’s part of me.... The 481’s slanted frets have made my fingers crooked for life, but I don’t care, I’ll take that for it’s given me riff after riff after riff."
Initial 480-series sales were promising, but the models never really took off. Though they were built as late as 1984, the slant-fret experiment of the 481 was called off by 1979. And these slanted models have not, in the minds of most players or collectors, become anywhere near as sought-after as the classic 330s and 360s, or, for that matter, the 4001s.
For that reason, 481s—despite their novelty and their lists of firsts for Rickenbacker—can still be found for relatively cheap. Our Vintage Vault pick, which is being sold by the Leicester, England-based Jordan Guitars Ltd, has an asking price of 3,350 British pounds (or about 4,300 U.S. dollars), which is still well under half the going-rate of early 360s, 660s, and other more famous Ricks. Some lucky buyers have even found 481s on Reverb for less than $2,000, which is unheard of for other vintage models.
With its idiosyncratic charms, the 481 remains more within reach than many other guitars of a similar vintage.
Sources: Martin Kelly’s Rickenbacker Guitars: Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fireglo, Tony Bacon’s"Interview: Dick Burke on the Creation of the Rickenbacker 12-String | Bacon’s Archive" on Reverb, Reverb Price Guide sales data.
