Yamaha Hollow Body
My wife bought this guitar for me as a surprise birthday gift. It's a Yamaha but I'm not sure about what model this guitar is except that it may be from the late '70's or early 80's and could be even older than that. While I had originally thought
it was a semi-hollow it's actually a full hollow body guitar. If you have any idea of the model number, I'd appreciate you passing this on to me.
The two single coil pickups have sort of a DeArmond or Burns thing going on. Kind of raucous, but not too awfully cheap sounding. The rest of the electronics consist of a master volume and tone knob and on/off switches for the pickups. The pots were scratchy and the switches didn't work consistantly so I rewired the guitar with new pots and switches from WD Music.
The bridge is a fixed metal and wood bridge with only a slight amount of adjustment available. There is a zero fret so this seems to help with intonation a little.
The neck is a bolt-on and 24 3/4" scale. The frets are amazingly low, in fact almost non-existent. They don't show signs of excessive wear and are, for the most part, even, so I assume this is close to the original condition of the guitar or perhaps the results of a clean, but overzealous, fret leveling job.
The original tuners on it were open gear and were in bad shape when I got the guitar. Two of them wouldn't even turn. I replaced them with modern sealed tuners. The tuning stability still wasn't that good so I also made some adjustments to the nut and bridge which helped to some degree.
Right now I have it setup for slide in open D. Because of the very low frets, it's easier to play slide without accidental fret buzz.
Here's what the guitar looked like stripped down when I was rewiring it and a picture of what the pickups looked like by themselves.
Discuss this guitar on my blog
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