The design of this Kent 834 borrows from the “violin” guitar craze, propelled by the influential visibility of Paul McCartney’s Höfner bass.
When I began to research guitars, I just simply reached out to people and asked all the questions I could think of. Man, I talked to musicians, studio people, factory workers, guitar designers, and company owners. Almost all of them were a bit surprised at my interest in them and my wanting to know about mostly forgotten guitar history.
I’ve interviewed people from all over the world, from the U.S. to Italy to England to Germany. At one point, I had so much information that it was depleting my hard-drive space and my brain, to the extent that I had to take a breath and organize all this stuff! In that process, I found that I cared for all these people and felt the need to tell their stories. Like any good journalism major, I realized the historical implications and the human element. So, for this month, I wanted to highlight a guitar design by Yasuo Momose. He worked at the famous Fujigen factory in the early 1960s, and later moved to a smaller factory called Hayashi Mokko, where he let his creative notions flow. He’s responsible for all the ultra-cool late-’60s Kent guitars with the racing-striped bodies!
Japanese guitar designer and builder Yasuo Momose.
Photo by Tadashi Ito
This particular model borrows from the “violin” guitar craze, mainly perpetuated by Paul McCartney and his Höfner bass. Dubbed the 834, this Kent was only produced for two short years, from 1967–1969. Priced at $125, the 834 was described as:
“The best of both—all in one! The free-sounding acoustics of a violin-shaped body, plus the charged up excitement of Kent electronics! This semi-acoustic body has an arched top and back, two pickups, two tone and two volume controls, toggle switch for pickup selection, rhythm-solo switch, compensating damper bridge and Kent tremolo tailpiece.”
Ah, to be an ad writer back in those days! In reality, this guitar was supercharged because of those Kent pickups, which are hot as hell, and could drive a small tube amp into the red zone! This is one of the guitars I wish I had never sold, because it’s light but also over-engineered and rather sturdy. Oh well. It has a wonderful headstock and body, “Kent” inlays, and of course, the cool side binding which had a dual purpose: to cover up the wood joining and to act as rally stripes. So cool!
As I was researching my book, I could never figure out which factory made the 834, along with all the other Kents from that era. So, on one of my visits to Japan, I was encouraged to visit Momose-san, who was then working at the Deviser factory in Matsumoto City. He was still making guitars, but they were all high-end electrics and acoustics, sold under the Momose name. I was led back to his workspace and there he was, toiling away at five guitars! He made all of them from scratch and was treated with a certain reverence among the other employees. In Japan, they respect their elders!
“Almost all of them were a bit surprised at my interest in them and my wanting to know about mostly forgotten guitar history.”
We got to chatting and sat down for an interview. At the end, I showed him some pictures from my book, and when I came to the Kent guitars, he started to tear up. He said, “These were my first designs,” and went on to tell me some more history and anecdotes. I tell this story again because Momose-san passed away recently, and I wanted to highlight him once more. He was the same age as my dad, both born in 1944. It turns out there is really only one reason to write about history. Get it straight before it disappears.
I think it’s fair to say that the Fender Marauder, like Gibson’s Moderne, was ahead of its time, and neither guitar made it beyond the prototype stage—at least not as originally designed.
The Marauder’s ’60s production model came with three pickups in a Jaguar-style body, many rocker switches, German carve headstock, and some even with slanted frets. It was later offered as part of the Modern Player series as well as through the custom shop. But the original design and concept of the Marauder was quite different.
In order to see what Leo Fender cooked up in the mid ’60s, we will have to take a short journey back in time, firing up the flux capacitor in our DeLorean with 1.21 gigawatts of energy. Our destination is the Fender factory in California, somewhere between 1963 and 1964—the early beginnings of the space age. The United States worked on the Apollo program at the same time the former Soviet Union worked on the Luna program on the other end of the world. Europe was busy developing and building the Concorde, and Leo Fender, sitting on the porch of his home in Orange County, was ready for his next stroke of genius.
Today, “less is more” is a common approach, not only in the guitar industry. But back then, it was “more is more” and “the more, the merrier.” Leo Fender offered the Esquire with one bridge pickup, and the two-pickup Esquire/Telecaster followed soon after. The next step was the Stratocaster with three pickups, which was mostly influenced by Bill Carson, one of Leo’s favorite guitarist guinea pigs in the ’50s. The next logical step was a guitar with four pickups, and that was exactly the idea behind the Marauder project. There are other guitars with four pickups, like the Japanese-made Teisco/Kawai EG-4T (nicknamed the “Hertiecaster”), or the Italian-made Welson Kinton, Galanti Grand Prix V4, and Eko 500/4V. But Leo Fender went the extra mile with his Marauder concept and installed the pickups underneath the pickguard for a very sleek aesthetic.
“The next logical step was a guitar with four pickups.”
Let’s have a look under the hood: The patent for the Marauder was filed March 6, 1964, and granted December 6, 1966—US patent #3290424—so we can say that developing and prototyping probably started somewhere in 1963. In addition to the four pickups under the pickguard, the original Marauder had a 3-way switch for each of the pickups, plus a Telecaster-style master volume/master tone configuration. On the patent, you can clearly see that the guitar was planned as an offset-type like the Jazzmaster or Jaguar using the same hardware.
There was, however, a one-off prototype built around a Stratocaster that has a dedicated 3-way lever pickup selector switch from the Telecaster and Stratocaster (the 5-way switch was not yet invented then) for each pickup, which looks really weird.
The Pickups
The pickups in the Marauder were designed by a man named Quilla “Porky” Freeman, a Western-swing musician and tinkerer based in Missouri. These large, slightly offset experimental pickups featured a dozen pole pieces and deep armatures, which helped give it a percussive tone. To compensate for the distance from the strings, the pickups were overwound. The patent document clearly states that all four pickups had the same winding direction (phase), but different magnetic polarity. The first (bridge) and the third pickup had south polarity, while the second and fourth (neck) pickup had north polarity, which was a clever move. This was the start of what is known as a “stealth pickup” today, often used as the hidden neck pickup on an Esquire. For such a construction, it’s important that the pickguard material is non-magnetic.
The Switching Matrix
Each of the pickups is connected to its own 3-way on-off-on switch, allowing the corresponding pickup to be on, off, or on with reversed phase, resulting in a total of 48 different sounds between the four. If the idea of these 3-way pickup selector switches sounds familiar, that’s because this is the basic design of Brian May’s “Red Special” guitar that he built with his father Harold in 1963. While that’s the same time frame, it’s close to impossible that Leo Fender knew what Brian May was doing in the U.K., so two geniuses simply had the same idea at the same time.
Here we go with the wiring: The four toggle switches are double-pole on-off-on types, volume and tone are 250k audio, and the tone cap is a 0.05 uF type. To keep the diagram clean, I substituted all ground connections with the international symbol for ground.
Illustration courtesy of Singlecoil
That’s it! Next month, we will talk about a very cool and clever way to integrate a variable dummy-coil into a guitar, so stay tuned.
Until then… keep on modding!
Now priced at $15,319, this 2-pickup variant on the 1968 Gibson Johnny Smith Double would have sold for $1,145 in the year of its release.
Smith played a lead role in the development of his guitars. Though there are several versions from various brands, they are essentially one model, made and remade to Smith’s liking or disliking. Like a great jazz tune, it was never played quite the same way twice.
In the mid ’50s, Smith first sketched out the theme of his signature model with Guild, not Gibson, having secured an endorsement deal from the then-NYC-based company. He had been playing a Guild X-500 (aka the Stuart), which was a 17″ archtop with two single-coil pickups screwed into the body. But Smith’s heart lay with a custom D’Angelico New Yorker, one with a solid spruce top and precise X-bracing that allowed it to boom like a speaker. He hung out at D’Angelico’s workshop and learned all he could about guitar design.
Unsatisfied with the signature model that Guild produced for him, Smith took his ideas over to Gibson, where he was given nearly complete control over a new design.
Photos courtesy of Reverb/Gitarren Total
Despite the detailed designs Smith handed to Guild’s founding president Al Dronge, what he got was something like a D’Angelico translated through the Guild X-500. Smith was after resonance and tone. He didn’t want anything interfering with the body. He requested that a single DeArmond pickup float above it, with the control knob and output jack affixed to the pickguard rather than the body. This, Guild granted him. But he also had ideas for the carved top and internal construction that he thought would increase balance and sustain, which Guild ignored. Like the X-500, Smith’s top was made with laminated spruce rather than solid wood.
Thus, 1956’s Guild Johnny Smith Award does represent the first record of his signature model—it had the 17″ body and floating pickup that would become a repeating chorus—but it didn’t live up to Smith’s standards. Only 20 or so were made, and soon, Guild and Smith annulled their partnership.
By 1961, Smith was working with Gibson’s Ted McCarty to realize his vision, while Guild had cut Smith’s name and re-released its guitar as the Artist Award. Smith, talking about his first Gibson in 2008, said he was given nearly complete control: “I designed everything myself. I designed how the guitar would be braced, how the top would be carved, the dimensions, the binding, and you name it. The only aspects the company did were some of the cosmetic touches which really did not matter to me.”
“Like a great jazz tune, it was never played quite the same way twice.”
The 17″ Gibson Johnny Smith was introduced with a slightly shallow depth (3 1/8″). Compared to his Guild, it had a 25″ scale (vs. 24.75″), a mini-humbucker rather than the DeArmond, and maybe most importantly to Smith, an X-braced top of carved solid spruce, just like his beloved D’Angelico.
The 2-pickup 1968 Johnny Smith Double variant you see here was first released in 1963. In 1968, a sunburst Johnny Smith Double—with two volume knobs, two tone controls, and a rotary selector—would have retailed for $1,145. Today, you could pay between $8,000–$16,000, depending on condition. This particular guitar, in very good, all-original condition aside from a replacement guard, is listed at $15,319 by the Switzerland-based Reverb seller Gitarren Total.
The guitar has a 17″ body made of flamed maple, with two floating humbuckers.
Photos courtesy of Reverb/Gitarren Total
With Gibson, Smith made the guitar of his dreams, but only for a time. In 1989, he transferred his artist model to Heritage, the company founded by former Gibson luthiers when Gibson moved from Kalamazoo. (Taking a cue from Guild, Gibson re-released its own Johnny Smith model by a different name, Le Grand, in 1993.)
When asked later to explain all his jumping around, Smith said, “Let’s just say I am very particular about instruments with my name on them,”—perhaps, fans of his music might say, as particular with the instruments as the notes he chose to play on them.
In a final twist, his signature model would have one last coda at the place where it all began. In 2002, Smith and Guild reunited, this time with renowned guitar maker Bob Benedetto at the helm of the archtop’s construction. The last Guild Smith signature stayed in production until 2007, while Smith himself passed away in 2013.
Sources: Reverb listings and Price Guide data, Gibson June 1968 price list, Gruhn’s Guide to Vintage Guitars, American Guitars: An Illustrated History by Tom Wheeler, “Johnny Smith Goes Full Circle” by Charles H. Chapman for Fender Players Club, “‘Just the Essential Thing’: Bill Frisell and Mary Halvorson Honor Johnny Smith’s Jazz Legacy” by Nick Millevoi for Reverb.