This Valco “mutt” guitar was built with leftover parts at a Japanese factory, including an old tremolo, random pickups and switches, and a bridge that makes it difficult to intonate.
When you’ve built your entire life around guitars, our columnist says, it’s shockingly easy to connect their history with just about anything—including dogs.
I was talking to my wife the other day about selling guitars. My daughter wants a car, so I’ve been unloading a few nice electrics on fellow collectors with the hope that I can get my girl something safe to drive. My wife and daughter were joking about how much guitars are a part of our lives, and how I can connect anything to guitars, design, and music.
Seriously, you can present me with just about any topic and I can probably wrap some guitar lore around it. My wife asked if I had ever connected guitars and animals, and I got to thinking about it. Maybe I had? But, just to show her I can tell a tale, this month I’ll be writing about our dogs and “mutt” guitars!
So, back in 2015, I was searching a pet-finder website, looking to add a dog to our family. The kids wanted a dog, and even my wife, who has awful allergies, accepted the fact that we all had a lot of love to give to a pet. I was searching adoption agencies, primarily looking for a dog that didn’t shed, when I happed upon the cutest little puppy! His name was Bucky, and the story went that he and his littermates were born in a barn in Ohio. The mom had passed away shortly after giving birth, so the litter was being rescued by a local adoption group. I started to fill out the forms and do all the paperwork to get little Bucky, but then I saw he also had a brother that hadn’t been adopted! So along with Bucky came his brother Brody, and that spring, we welcomed two of the sweetest little boys into the family.
These two were trouble from the get-go, but we loved them, and I have to say that the year we got them was one of the best years of my life. The boys looked pretty similar, each having a light tan color; almost vanilla. But no one could figure out what breeds they were. Like, they were total mutts! Some terrier, some poodle, some hound? We heard it all. In the end, it really didn’t matter, because these mutts were ours, and we were gonna love them, no matter what.
Okay, so back to guitar land. This topic got me thinking about “mutt” guitars. See, back in the day, a lot of guitar factories all over the world would try to use up parts. The CBS Fender era was a notorious time for strange designs that were meant to use up stock. The Japanese makers did the same, with similar results, but a little more extreme. All the time, I see guitars that had left a factory with a mixup of parts, and sometimes I’ll see something that I’ve never seen before. These “mutts” can perplex and bewilder collectors because it seems like some of these were one-offs.
“The CBS Fender era was a notorious time for strange designs that were meant to use up stock.”
Take, for instance, the mutt I’m presenting here. The body and neck are from the late-’60s Valco run of guitars, known as Lexingtons. I’ve written about Lexington guitars before and how much I like them, but this guitar is a total weirdo. Why? Because the pickups, electronics, and tremolo are all Japanese sourced. Which begs the question, why are we seeing a factory stock guitar with a mix of such disjointed parts? Well, these were the mutts!
The Valco company, located in Chicago, was in the final years of production, and started sourcing out bodies and necks to Japan. In other words, those parts were made in Japan, shipped to the U.S., and Valco would then put on their U.S. parts and pickups. But this strange bird was finished off in Japan—which is where I found this guitar—using a super old tremolo, the odd switches, rando pickups, and a really basic bridge that didn’t allow for any intonation. How did it sound? Meh. How did it play? Meh. It was simply a hastily made guitar, using up leftover parts.
Mutt guitars are a real mixed bag. Some are okay, some are amazing, and some are real stinkers. But there is some fun in finding these rarities. If you have the time, the search is the greatest thrill, just like finding two good dogs. This one is for my mutts, Bucky and Brody!
Wicked slider Michelle Malone at home with some dear friends: her Supro Super and Dual-Tone amps, and her Dual-Tone guitar.
The veteran singer, songwriter, and guitarist’s favorite sound crunchers are a pair of vintage oddballs from the vaults of Valco.
Like a lot of slide players, Michelle Malone enjoys some grit in her tone. And when it comes to grit—along with glorious midrange, trippin’ out reverb, and a blend of snappy response with just a ladle full of sponginess to temper brittleness—vintage Supro amps deliver better than UPS. So, her favorite amps are a pair of old Supros: a 1959 Dual-Tone and a 1961 Super.
By the way, is there anything cooler in gearland than naming a one-knob amp a “Super”? It seems audacious until you plug into one and hear the way it breaks up. These amps, with their cute, little stock 8" speakers, bite like baby sharks. But alas, I digress.
On her new album, 1977, named for the year she started playing guitar, Malone really flies her songwriter’s flag with tunes that delve into the personal. “Not Who I Used to Be” chronicles her growth as a human, “Buck Knife Man” is a tribute to her father, and “Georgia Made” is her grandfather’s life story—all powered by her clear-toned honey-and-biscuits singing and smartly textured arrangements.
The soaring leads on this release, her 17th studio album, are played by her band’s other guitarist, Doug Kees. But for her brass-knuckled live performances and on her previous albums—which started with 1988’s New Experience and her 1990 major-label debut, Relentless,and have continued through more than three decades—whenever a slide comes out of a pocket, it’s Malone’s. (You can hear her dig in on the video for “Just Getting Started” that accompanies this story.)
The Atlanta-based artist already had a rough-talking electric guitar voice when she committed to slide while recording her 2003 album, Stompin’ Ground. “I was working on the song ‘Lafayette’ in the studio when I realized it needed a slide part, and no one else was there to put it down, so I did it myself,” she says. Thus hooked, she developed a notable approach that blends the terse and the languid as she uses her signature Rocky Mountain Slides ceramic model with her Fender guitars or her white Supro Dual-Tone 6-string.
“It sounds so good—a little trashy, with awesome mids and just the right break-up—but you can’t turn it up all the way or it craps out.”
The latter was purchased as a package with her Dual-Tone amp, likely via eBay, in about 2007. The Super came from now-gone Atlanta gear store Midtown Music, which had a reputation among local musicians for its used and vintage equipment. Both amps have quirks. The Super has a 6"speaker, rather than its stock 8". “I blew out the one it came with in the ’90s,” Malone says. “Having one knob on this amp is a beautiful thing. It sounds so good—a little trashy, with awesome mids and just the right break-up—but you can’t turn it up all the way or it craps out.” The rest of the 5-watt blast box is stock simplicity, with one 12AX7 for the preamp and a 6V6 on the power side.
The Dual-Tone is an oddball. A stock example of this 24-watt, 12"-speaker growler typically has two channels with two inputs each, 12AX7-driven tremolo, 6973 power tubes (which were also used in 1960s juke boxes), a 12AX7 phase inverter tube, and two more 12AX7s for the channel 1 and channel 2 preamps. There are volume and tone controls for each channel, plus the usual speed and intensity for tremolo. Malone’s weirdo example, which she extracted from an “Alabama road case,” aka a cardboard box, to eyeball during our conversation, has three inputs and volume and tone dials, plus an 8" speaker—although it’s likely a replacement, since Malone remarks that the cabinet has room for a much larger speaker. It also has just three tubes: a 12AX7, a 6V6, and a 5Y3GT rectifier tube. In that respect, it resembles a Supro Reverb model, but … no reverb. This isn’t as strange as it may seem, given original Supro builder Valco’s penchant for using whatever was around the shop at any given time to fulfill orders, sometimes causing variations in products sharing the same model name. And recently, a Dual-Tone with the same setup was listed on Reverb.
Malone teams her amps and guitars with a few basic pedals. She uses a Keeley Compressor and a Seymour Duncan Pickup Booster when she plays slide. Her Ibanez Soundtank Delay stays on all the time, and it reminds her of the slightly compressed and enhanced character of the Echoplex she used to carry on the road from the late ’80s to early ’90s. And she also uses an MXR Carbon Copy for a cleaner echo vibe, and an EHX Holy Grail when spring reverb needs to join the game.
“I normally take both of those amps on an average gig,” she says. “For larger rooms, or when I need more volume, I'll take along one of my black-panel Deluxes. But as long as you have a good sound engineer, you can turn up these little Supros and you’re golden.”
Michelle Malone - Just Getting Started [Official Video]
See Michelle Malone make her vintage Supro amps, and her Dual-Tone guitar, howl on slide as she performs “Just Getting Started” from her 2018 album, Slings & Arrows.