Name: Darren Morley Smith
Hometown: Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada
Guitar: Marigold Yellow Flying V
I never wanted to be “that guy playing the Flying V.”
I went into my local music store fully intending to buy an Explorer. I spent some time, tried one out, liked it, and thought that it was possibly “the one.” Next to it was a Flying V. I saw that no one was watching, so I figured, what the heck, I’ll try one out. Instantly I knew it was mine. It fit me like a glove, and it sounded like I’d been playing it my whole life. Always a mod man, it wasn’t long before I started personalizing this Flying V. I love the sound and tone of Allen Collins from Lynyrd Skynyrd and am a fan of classic rock, so I modified the stock V into my own personal guitar. It took over a year, but here’s what I did:
I stripped off all the original polyurethane. It took a lot of sandpaper and a heat gun. I found out the body isn’t solid Korina—it was only a veneer. So, I peeled off the veneer and started the process of dying the body. I wanted to be as authentic to vintage guitars as it could be. I sourced an aniline dye like was used in the 1950s. This color is yellow marigold. I did several treatments to get it to the honey yellow that you see. Instead of paint, I used charcoal to color the edges and the tail piece. Next, it was time for the finish. No poly, no nitro: This is eight very thin coats of Tung oil. It took six months for it to off-gas and completely harden. Now it buffs out to a beautiful semi-gloss/matte finish.
The pickguard and jack plate are handmade by me, out of a thin 1/8" sliced piece of solid maple. You can see around the knobs that it transitions from a beautiful bird’s-eye maple to an amazing flame as you look towards the neck. It was a very slow and delicate process. Because the maple pickguard is so thin and brittle, I had to go very slowly using a hacksaw and sanding block to get it to the right shape and sand it smooth. I made a thin black outline with a paint pen. My own little nod to the Randy Rhoads Concorde.
The hardware and electronics were gutted. The only remaining original parts are the tuning pegs and frets. All pots have been upgraded to CTS. The tone pot is equipped with a paper-in-oil capacitor, just like from the ’50s. The bridge pickup is a Seymour Duncan Antiquity P-90, and the neck pickup is a mysterious DiMarzio that I’ve been carrying around in a toolbox for 35 years. The center knob was changed to a gold one simply because I lost the original. I think it adds a bit of flair and uniqueness. The bridge is a gold-plated roller bridge, giving it incredible sustain and tone.
Once assembled, it’s now my beautiful Marigold Yellow Flying V. It rocks just as hard as anything from the classic ’70s and is as smooth as any blues guitar player could ever want. Now I have my perfect guitar, and am proud to be “that guy playing the Flying V.”
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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.
