A reader gets the lowdown on a Les Paul copy he acquired in a gear exchange.
Dear Zach,
I recently acquired an old Cort guitar as part of a gear exchange. I was told this guitar was made in the late 1970s, but I couldn’t find any information about it, and there’s no serial number. The pickguard is missing, and the brass nut is not original either. Could you give me some more information on this guitar? Does it have any monetary value at all?
Thanks,
Michael in the Netherlands
Hi Michael,
It’s always interesting what you might end up receiving in a gear exchange, right? What you have is clearly a Les Paul copy, which won’t seem unusual once we peer into Cort’s history and see who they’ve made guitars for in the past. I can tell you now that your guitar was made in South Korea, which is one of the higher-regarded Asian countries for guitar manufacturing.
Back in the 1960s, importer Jack Westheimer was distributing guitars from Japan in the U.S. Some of these trademark/brand names included Cortez, Kingston, Pearl, Teisco, and Silvertone. In 1973, Westheimer founded the Yoo-Ah company in South Korea along with Yung H. Park. The Yoo-Ah name later changed to Cor-Tek, Park bought the company from Westheimer, and Westheimer went on to found Westheimer Corporation, which distributed Cort guitars in the U.S. for 40 years. (Along the line, Cor-Tek began using the Cort name on their own instruments while keeping the Cor-Tek name for the company and factory. Since then, Cort and Cor-Tek have been used interchangeably, but in the U.S., we typically refer to the company as “Cort.”)
Cort quickly became one of the largest, overseas house-brand manufacturers in the 1970s, when so much production shifted away from the U.S. They currently build guitars for numerous manufacturers and trademarks including Epiphone, Ibanez, G&L Tribute Series, Parkwood, and Schecter. Since Cort has produced Les Paul guitars for Epiphone, it’s no surprise they’ve manufactured Cort-branded Les Paul copies.
Your guitar appears to be a GE27V model that was produced in the early to mid ’80s as part of Cort’s Traditional Series (found in both the 1984 and 1986 Cort catalogs). According to the 1984 catalog, specifications included a flame-maple top (though it looks more like a walnut top in your photos), set neck, triple-ply celluloid top and back binding, a bound neck and headstock, abalone headstock inlay, a pair of Powersound exposed humbuckers, and a “violin” finish. You’re correct that it should have a pickguard. Without a serial number, it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact year of manufacture, but you could always try removing the rear control cover and inspect the potentiometers for any date codes.
Though Cort has produced thousands and thousands of guitars, I don’t see a lot of them for sale in the U.S. vintage-guitar market. Currently, a Cort GE27V in very good condition is valued between $400 and $600—not bad for a Korean-made Les Paul copy from the 1980s.
Cort has evolved from mainly producing copies to introducing several of their own original designs. Well-known luthiers, including archtop builder Jim Triggs and bass builder Gary Curbow, have designed instruments for Cort as well. The Cort-branded line of guitars is unique in that it’s one of the few brand names that owns its manufacturing facility overseas. Today, Cort offers a full line of acoustic, electric, and bass instruments that includes a wide range of signature models for such notable musicians as Larry Coryell, Matt “Guitar” Murphy, Hiram Bullock, Neil Zaza, Matthias Jabs, and Gene Simmons.
Many interesting historical stories contain some controversy, and Cort’s story is not excluded. Beginning in the late ’90s, a number of grievances were filed against Cort for alleged mistreatment of their employees in South Korea. And every year at NAMM, protestors flank the entrances of the show holding signs about Cort’s alleged abuses.
Just recently, after a 40-year distribution relationship with Cort, the Westheimer Corporation announced it was ending the distribution agreement. Cort guitars are now distributed in the U.S. by Davitt & Hanser.
If your new “grab-bag” guitar sounds good, has good action, and doesn’t weigh 20 pounds, I think you may have found a treasure in your gear exchange—provided you didn’t trade a real Les Paul first!
AC/DC return to the road in the United States for the first time in nine years on the 2025 Power Up North American Tour.
This run kicks off on April 10, 2025, in Minneapolis, MN at US Bank Stadium, canvases the continent, and concludes on May 28, 2025, in Cleveland, OH at Huntington Bank Field. Along the way, they will play some of the most iconic and historic stadiums in the world, including the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, CA on April 18 and Soldier Field in Chicago, IL on May 24.
Tickets go on sale December 6 at 12pm local time HERE.
The tour shares its name with their 2020 album, Power Up, which bowed at #1 in 21 countries. In 2024, AC/DC completed a European leg of the Power Up tour, packing the biggest stadiums on the continent in the process. Power Up notably notched their third #1 debut on the Billboard 200 and exploded as one of the best-selling albums of 2020 worldwide,” . It closed out the year on Rolling Stone’s “Top 50 Albums of 2020” and Consequence of Sound’s “Top 50 Albums of 2020.” Plus, it garnered Grammy Award nominations in the categories of “Best Rock Album” and “Best Rock Performance” and “Best Music Video” for “Shot In The Dark.” Power Up is available HERE.
AC/DC played their very first show on the 31st December 1973 at Chequers Nightclub in Sydney, Australia. The band’s Back In Black LP is the “bestselling album by any band ever” and the “third bestselling album by any artist” with global sales of 50 million and counting. AC/DC was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2003. The band continue selling out stadiums on multiple continents, sell millions of albums annually and generate streams in the billions.
TOUR DATES
4/10 Minneapolis, MN US Bank Stadium
4/14 Arlington, TX AT&T Stadium
4/18 Pasadena, CA Rose Bowl
4/22 Vancouver, BC BC Place
4/26 Las Vegas, NV Allegiant Stadium
4/30 Detroit, MI Ford Field
5/4 Foxborough, MA Gillette Stadium
5/8 Pittsburgh, PA Acrisure Stadium
5/12 Landover, MD Northwest Stadium
5/16 Tampa, FL Raymond James Stadium
5/20 Nashville, TN Nissan Stadium
5/24 Chicago, IL Soldier Field
5/28 Cleveland, OH Huntington Bank Field
Hand-built in the USA, this pedal features original potentiometer values, True Bypass, and three unique modes for versatile distortion options. Commemorative extras included.
This limited-edition pedal is limited to a 1,974-piece run to commemorate the year of DOD’s start, 1974. The original OD250 put DOD on the map as “America’s Pedal” and continues to be an industry favorite today. Each pedal will have a serial-numbered Certificate of Authenticity, a commemorative laser-etched pedal topper, several commemorative guitar picks, and multiple commemorative stickers.
Hand-built in the USA, the DOD OD250 – 50th Anniversary Edition pedal boasts Gain and Level controls using the original potentiometer values and tapers giving the control knob the feel and range that DOD enthusiasts love. A three-position toggle switch features the OD250’s classic “SILICON” mode replicating that original sound. The “Ge/ASYM” mode uses a vintage Germanium diode for asymmetrical even-harmonic distortion. “LIFT” mode cuts the diode clipping from the signal path allowing for a clean boost or even a dirty boost when the vintage LM741 op-amp is clipped at higher gain settings. The DOD 250 also features True Bypass to maintain the integrity of your guitar tone.
This limited edition OD250 is outfitted in a stunning metal flake gray finish with classic yellow screenprint in a callback to the original OD250 of the 1970s. An etched aluminum badge on each unit commemorates this occasion. The DOD OD 250 – 50th Anniversary is ready to take its place among the historic DOD pedal lineup.
When John Johnson and “Mr. DOD” himself, David O. DiFrancesco set out to make DOD Electronics in Salt Lake City, Utah 50 years ago, they had no idea how enduring their legacy would be. Now 50 years later, DOD Electronics continues to be at the forefront of pedal technology. The DOD OD 250 – 50th Anniversary Pedal is an exceptional testament to DOD Electronics’ long–standing success.
Retail Price: $250.00
For more information, please visit digitech.com.
Dynamic and pitch control of delay textures pave roads to new compositional and playing approaches in another unusual effect from Latvia’s foremost stompbox provocateurs.
Impressive control over parameters. Coaxes new playing and compositional approaches for players in a rut. High build quality.
Interrelationships between controls will be hard to grasp for many.
$329
Gamechanger Audio Auto Delay
gamechangeraudio.com
From the outset, it must be said there are easier ways to get a delay sound than using Gamechanger’s Auto Delay. But if simple echoes were the sole objective of this pedal, I doubtGamechanger would have bothered. As you may have gleaned from a listen to the company’sBigsby Pedal,PLASMA Pedal fuzz, orLIGHT Pedal reverb, the Riga, Latvia-based company rarely takes a conventional approach to anything they design or release. But what is “conventional” from a guitarist’s point of view, may be something quite different for musicians determined to bend notions of what sound and music are, how it’s made, and by what means.
By Gamechanger standards, the digital Auto Delay (along with its stablemates the Auto Reverb and Auto Chorus) is almost straightforward in concept. It utilizes existing concepts of dynamic delay, control voltage, and modular synthesis as essential parts of its functional underpinnings—which are not exactly unusual in stompbox design. Yet the way the Auto Delay’s functions interact make it feel and sound unique. And while not every player will want to take the time to explore the sometimes complex interplay between its functions, at its best, the Auto Delay prompts unorthodox thinking about the ways touch dynamics or pitch relate to the delay colors you can create, prompting unexpected compositional vectors and a kind of extra-dimensional relationship to the fretboard.
Beat of a Different Drum
Gamechanger’s path to building such unusual sound manipulation machines might seem a curious one when you consider that founder Ilja Krumins and his fellow founders Mārtiņš Meļķis and Kristaps Kalva are rockabilly heads with tastes that include the soulful earthiness of J.J. Cale. But the more accessible side of the Gamechanger design team’s musical interests likely informs the most approachable aspects of the Auto Delay. You can use it like you would any ordinary stompbox echo and take advantage of its three very distinct voices (tape, analog, and digital), copious 2-second delay time, and rangy tone control in order to fashion many compelling delay sounds. This is, needless to say, a vast underutilization of the Auto Delay’s powers.
Routing, Rearranging, and Raging Like a Lunatic
Though you can get lost in the Auto Delay (in good ways and bad), it isn’t necessarily the headache that its patch bay, LEDs, and many switches and knobs suggest. The idea behind the patch bay is simple: Routing a cable from one of the two dynamics or pitch automation input sockets to the level, tone, repeat, or time input sockets means that a change in, say, your picking intensity (dynamics) or where you play on the fretboard (pitch) increases or reduces the value for the parameter you linked to the dynamics or pitch socket. Even if you’ve not been indoctrinated in these methods via modular synthesis, it’s not as complicated as it sounds, and trial-and-error experimentation yields intuitive understanding of these interactions quickly.
The tape, analog, or digital voice can drastically reshape the tone and response of interactions. But so will the fast, rise, and gate dynamics modes, which determine the nature of the dynamic response. Setting thresholds for the dynamic and pitch response is easy. You simply hold down the “auto” footswitch or the bypass footswitch and twist the respective knobs until you reach the desired threshold, which is indicated by the adjacent LED. Like the other functions, getting a feel for how these thresholds work within your playing style takes time. As you might guess, we’ve really only discussed the most fundamental functions here. But in addition to these, you can use alt mode to assign different values to the secondary knobs and toggle between primary and secondary knobs using the auto switch. You can also manipulate the stereo spread or control the clock via MIDI.
The Verdict
The Auto Delay is not for the faint of heart or impatient. Grasping the interrelationships between the controls takes time. In fact, understanding how those interrelationships feel and respond musically will be more challenging for some than understanding how they work conceptually— which, while not elementary, can be sussed out with a careful read of the manual. But when you do find a rhythm and flow with the Auto Delay it can be richly rewarding and even meditative.
Because it can reshape your relationship with the fretboard and your sense of touch, this is a great tool for extracting yourself from ruts, whether in technique or mood. And if you’re a musical tinkerer, the Auto Delay can provide much of the same satisfaction and sense of discovery you experience working with a synthesizer—particularly if you enjoy working in the hardware realm rather than on a computer screen. One should consider the scores here as especially subjective and on a sliding scale. The Auto Delay’s many sonic and functional idiosyncrasies will be nectar to some and poison to others. And more than most pedals, you should probably have a firsthand experience with the thing before you decide how and if it fits your musical objectives. For many restless players, though, the Auto Delay will be a deep well of musical provocation and ideas.
Gator Cases offers custom cases for Flying V and Explorer style guitars in their Traditional Deluxe Series.
Constructed from plywood with a black Tolex exterior, both cases offer protection against bumps and dings during transit.
Each case features a custom-molded interior tailored to fit the unique contours of its specific guitar. The inside is lined with thick plush padding to gently cushion the instrument, ensuring its angular body shape is supported at every point. The precise fit prevents movement during transport, reducing the risk of damage.
For added convenience, the cases include an internal storage compartment for accessories, keeping essential items stored alongside the instrument. Both cases feature chrome-plated hardware with three latches, including one that locks for added security.
In addition to the Traditional Deluxe Series cases, Gator offers a wide selection of guitar solutions, including gig bags, instrument and patch cables, molded cases, guitar stands, and pedalboards.
For more information, please visit gatorco.com.