Fender Stratocaster HSS Shawbucker
Given the near-perfection that’s the essence of the Stratocaster design, where do you turn for improvement? Well, if you’re among the players that find regular Strat pickups too quacky and clean, you’ll appreciate this variation from Fender design guru Tim Shaw. The Shawbucker—a throaty, full, midrangy and downright classy-sounding pickup—makes this a familiar yet spectacularly different Strat.
$1,299 street
fender.com
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In the years we’ve compiled our annual list of Premier Gear Award winners, we’ve probably never seen a list more eclectic than 2015’s. From high-gain monster amps and atmospheric reverbs to mini overdrives and wahs, 2015’s award winners covered all the bases.
As always, it was a joy to see how both big-time musical instrument industry players and little shops a step removed from the garage managed to haul in Premier Guitar’s prize for gear excellence. And if anyone’s counting, we’re pretty sure we also set a record for Premier Gear Award winners. So we hope you’re comfy—this list of primo gear may take some time to cover.
Reader: Daniel Switkin
Hometown: Oakland, California
Guitar: Doublecaster
I've been using a multitrack looper with a guitar and an octave pedal, which was okay for simple bass parts, but didn’t give me thick strings and I couldn’t slap with it. So I decided to build a double-neck prototype specifically for looping, with a 6-string guitar and a 4-string bass.
Since building the necks would be the hardest part, I looked around for instruments with bolt-on necks I could reuse. Squier makes an Affinity Stratocaster and a Mini Precision Bass which were affordable and had matching fretboards, so I bought those. It was also cheaper to reuse the electronics and hardware that came with them, rather than buying everything separately.
Using two precut instrument bodies saved the burden of having to route cavities for the electronics.
My plan was to design my own body from scratch. As I debated which neck should go on top, how far apart they should be, and whether to line up the nuts or the saddles, I realized there was actually enough wood there to make a double neck body, which saved me the work of recreating the neck pockets, etc. Putting the guitar on top made barre chords much more comfortable, and the 28.6" bass scale meant I could still reach the first fret easily.
After stripping the paint with a heat gun, I ran both bodies through a table saw, glued them together, and thinned them to 1 3/8". Then I created an offset body shape, a new arm bevel, and reshaped the three cutaways. The pickguards are both original, with the guitar side cut down to make a yin and yang shape. The controls are volume and tone for each neck, using the original knobs. I moved the jack to the back and upgraded it to stereo so the guitar and bass signals can run through separate effects chains.
Note the location of the jack on the back of the extended-shape body. It’s unconventional but practical.
My top concerns were weight and ergonomics. Many doublenecks are around 12 to 13 pounds and 18" wide. I knew I would never play something that big, no matter how good it sounded. To that end, I saved weight everywhere and tracked everything to the gram in a spreadsheet. (That’s also the reason I chose a fixed bridge instead of a vibrato.) I ultimately used a wipe-on gel stain to keep the weight down further. Stripping the paint from the factory saved 5 ounces! The final playable weight is 9 pounds, 5 ounces, and 15 1/4" wide at the lower bout. This has been pretty manageable, however, there is some neck dive because of the tuners. I’m taking everything I’ve learned from this prototype and designing a new doubleneck, which will be headless. I believe I can shed another pound and eliminate the neck dive that way. You can watch my entire build on YouTube.
Robillard has made more than 40 albums fronting his own band and with Roomful of Blues.
One of today’s most notable DeArmond players is the revered blues and jazz guitar virtuoso Duke Robillard, a deep student of vintage tone who has learned how to recreate many historic guitar sounds. We asked Robillard to share his expertise and experience with DeArmond pickups, which goes back to the mid-1950s, when he and his father built his first guitar for a school science fair. They took the neck from an old, acoustic Kay Kraftsman and cut a Tele-shaped body from two pieces of 3/4" plywood, inspired by the guitar James Burton played on TV’s The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. Then, they recycled the Kay’s bridge and tailpiece, and ordered a DeArmond. “A week after that, I was in a band,” Robillard says.
DeArmond originally referred to its pickups as “guitar microphones,” as they were designed to amplify acoustic guitars without altering their organic tone. Of course, once plugged into an amp all bets on that were off, given the breakup characteristics of the small combos that were common at the time. The RH pickups, which James and Szabó, for example, used, are held in place by clamps. The FH and Rhythm Chief models are floating pickups, mounted by what’s often called the “monkey-on-a-stick” method. Essentially, the pickups are held in place by a metal bar that’s screwed to a guitar’s body, and the pickups can slide up and down the bar, like a simian might scale a tree, to find the sweet spot.
DeArmond’s Rhythm Chief 1100.
By the time Robillard founded the swing and jump blues band Roomful of Blues in 1967, he was playing a Gretsch Synchromatic archtop fitted with a DeArmond, in quest of the authentic vintage tones he heard on records from the ’30s, ’40s and early ’50s. “Then I went to a Gibson ES-125, where I ended up finding a way to make a Rhythm Chief 1100 work in the neck position,” he recounts. “Then I added a P-90 for the bridge. I didn’t want to use a guitar with a cutaway because I wanted every setback that the guitar players in 1940 had. That stopped me from going high on the neck all the time, which I think was a discipline that made me a better musician.”
“The cheapest model [the 1000] is really the best sounding one.”
Today, he uses a variety of DeArmond pickups on his guitars, but his favorite is the Rhythm Chief 1100, which has screwdriver-adjustable pole pieces. And he applies the tricks he’s learned over the years, like placing stick-on felt pads under DeArmonds positioned near the bridge, to raise the floating pickup to the correct height. He also notes there is an alternative to attaching the monkey stick behind the bridge. “A lot of jazz players would shorten the bar and have it flattened out, so you could screw it to the side of the neck. That became popular with guitarists who played Strombergs, D’Angelicos, and L-5s, for example.
“The cheapest model [the 1000] is really the best-sounding one,” he continues. “And you need to use a wound G string on an archtop, or it’s going to howl like crazy. It isless of a pickup than a microphone. You can actually talk into it, and I’ve done gigs where something went wrong with the PA and I’ve sung through the pickup.”
Robillard’s latest album, Roll With Me, includes “You Got Money,” played on his DeArmond-outfitted J.W. Murphy archtop.
These days his favorite archtop is a J.W. Murphy with an 1100 with a shortened bar attached to the side of the neck. He puts stick-on felt pads under the treble side to keep the pickup height as he likes, and to preserve the natural sound of the guitar. You can hear Robillard play his DeArmond-outfitted Murphy on “You Got Money,” a track from his new album, Roll with Me, on Bandcamp.
One more recommendation: “Use a small amp because that’s what they sound best with,” he says. “Small tube amps are what these pickups were made for, but if you’ve got a closed-back cabinet they tend to feed back on the low end. Keeping the bass side of the pickup lower helps with that. When you’re setting up the pickup, press down on the last fret and get the treble side high and the base side low, and then just balance it out till you get the right sound.”
The body shape of this 6-string seems surprisingly ergonomic, but that perception changes when you hold its neck!
And so it goes that I pondered this proliferation of Virgos and Libras, and my hypothesis came into focus. Were we all the result of our parents’ Christmas and New Year’s celebrations?! I have to say, there was a camaraderie discovered among my fellow party babies when I presented my findings to them. Now, being born in the early ’70s also had me thinking of the culture of the times. Hippie life was fading as young people started to realize they had to get a job, and alas, long hair and beards were being replaced by staid 9-to-5 gigs that could slowly suck the life out of you. So, given the cultural mores of that era, I thought that this month I should write about the Sorrento Swinger.
“Hippie life was fading as young people started to realize they had to get a job.”
Born around 1967—maybe in September—these Swingers hailed from the “crazy” design period of the Kawai Co. Kawai produced some of the coolest guitar designs from 1967 to ’69, and there were some very creative guitar designers there on the job. Kawai had poached some of the finest employees from the wreckage of the Shinko Gakki factory (Pleasant, Intermark, etc.) and through the purchase of the Teisco brand. In this era, Kawai usually used three different standard pickups and they all sound great, plus the units are always wired in series, which is just awesome.
For a 25-buck, Japan-made guitar from the ’70s, the Swinger has an elite-looking headstock—and, on this example, most of its tuners.
Now, the Swinger (and similar Kawai-made guitars) came from an era where U.S. importers would order small batches of instruments that were often unique and extremely gonzo. The guitars might have been destined for medium-sized music stores or direct-order catalogs, but whatever the case, the importer usually gave the guitars names. In this instance, it was Jack Westheimer who featured this model as an “exclusive” design. In Westheimer Corporation catalogs from the time, the Swinger carried the A-2T model name (there was another one-pickup model called the A-1) and sold wholesale for $25 in 1967! As the catalog mentioned, these were “priced for the teenaged trade.” This particular guitar featured the Sorrento badge, and was sold through some sort of music store that’s probably long out of business, but all the Swingers were the same.
The Swinger’s large mahogany neck (sans truss rod) is robust and beefy in all the nicest ways. Like, when I was a kid, I was considered a “husky” fit. That’s this neck: husky! The striped pickguard is a Teisco holdover and the controls are as simple as it gets. Two knobs (volume, tone) and two pickup selectors is all there is, but the beauty is in the body. That lower bout is shaped like some sort of 1969 lounge chair. The strap pin is totally in the wrong place, but the big bottom swoop is worth it. Yep, the Swinger was ready to bring in the dawn of the 1970s, but alas, the guitar came and went in a blink.