New pots, switches, bridge, etc and a few days locked in a room. Then I had a custom pickguard made at WD Products in Florida. Next I selected some wild vintage EKO screamer pickups that were extracted from a deceased EKO 700 4V. It started with as Silvertone shell, just the body and neck.
I wanted to put together a guitar that had the Mosrite look but was built for repeated abuse as a stage guitar. This allows for a wide variety of tone setups because you can dial in as much or as little of each pickup you want.Ĭool.Somewhere along the way I decided to build my own Custom Mosrite Copy. This guitar is pretty cool because a) it has a wicked flame fiish and b) it has an individual slider volume for each pickup. Next to that are a pair of Univox Hi-Flyers and a Silvertone Slider. On the left, a nearly perfect 1972 Mosrite Ventures Model. Here are some of the 1970’s acquisitions. Scattered across the 1960’s through the 2002’s guitar pages you will find almost two dozen different attempts. Vintage 1970’s Yamaha Burns Copy Electric GuitarĪ few years back I wrote up a piece about my pursuit for the perfect Mosrite copy. These were all imported from Japan under different brand names. Here is a typical selection of 1970’s Fender and Gibson copies. To avoid the same problem happening again, Gibson bought Epiphone and started building some very nice Imported Copy Guitars! Fender opened facilities outside North America under different brand names like Squier. This allowed some elbowroom for Gibson and Fender to rethink and retool their operations to fortify their position in the market. Late in the seventies, Gibson Guitars won a legal battle for patent infringements, which over time, shut down all but a few “copy” guitar manufacturers worldwide. That is why we hear so much about the “Lawsuit ERA” guitars.
Towards the end of the 1970’s, Fender and Gibson were loosing market share. The lawyers at Gibson started to get restless, and young guitar players like myself were also getting restless… I could not wait to go out and buy a UNIVOX Les Paul for 1/5th the price of the real thing! Damn, it was so inexpensive that I could almost afford to smash it on stage! Cool! But as the saying goes, all good things must come to an end. Not only was the manufacturing quality improving, but the quality of the REPLICATION was reaching new highs. Univox, Kawai, Silvertone and Domino were starting to deliver guitars that – from a price / quality point of view – were beginning to eat into the markets that Fender and Gibson dominated. 1) Companies outside North America vastly improved the quality of their guitar manufacturing and 2) Companies inside North America – namely Fender and Gibson – took their eye off the ball and did exactly the opposite.īy this time, many guitar manufacturers from the Far East had 10+ years experience under their belts, and the improvement in quality began to shine through. Two major issues defined the progress of electric guitars for most of the seventies. Led Zeppelin helped to popularise the Les Paul in the 70’s, when many great copies were made
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