MyRareGuitars.com

I count myself among the many of you who have discovered just how good guitars made by the Matsumoku factory in Matsumoto City, Japan, really are. Or were. They still exist as artifacts but have not been made more than two decades now.

Scott Baxendale has been building custom hand made guitars since 1974. Recently he settled in Athens Georgia where he is currently building custom guitars, restoring vintage guitars and teaching the art of lutherie to aspiring craftsman. Scott Baxendale’s legacy of building custom instruments began in 1974, when he arrived in Winfield, Kansas to work for [...]

Imagine someone telling you about an old-time music store that had a huge stash of unsold guitars from the 1960s, plus some guitar effects from the ‘70s lying around in its upper floors in Newark, NJ. Well, you can bet it didn’t take long for me to beat a path to the door of Newark Music City (calm down; this was a long time ago and, while the company still exists, it’s long gone from Newark). Even though I was late in the game, there were still unmined treasures to be had. A real Temple of Doom!

In the early days of My Rare Guitars I collected TEISCO guitars at a freakish pace. Look at the vintage 60′s guitar photos and you will see just about every TEISCO model ever produced from Japan in the 1960’s.

Late 1960′s and early 1970′s Tokai guitars are very well crafted instruments. Eventually they drifted into the more profitable Les Paul copies and developed a great reputation – which probably sparked the lawsuits from that era. However, before that, they were making some crazy guitars, and perhaps the Hummingbird was one of the craziest.

Wandre guitars are coveted by a very small group of people, but those who do are crazy about them. In 2002 I was not one of those people Now, almost ten years later, I can certainly raise my hand and be counted in the crowd. How big is the crowd? That is an interesting question.

Recently I discovered a file folder on my backup drive with tons of photos containing just about every guitar I’d ever bought and sold over the years. Looking at these photos have stirred up some memories.

One of our customers – Buddha from Buddha and the Pests – sent in this video link to his recent Guitar Rescue. It’s nice to see this old Harmony guitar come back to life, and I wanted to share it with you.

Behind every guitar there’s some sort of story, but they usually aren’t as rich as the one behind the Kramer Gorky Park seen here! Not only was this guitar associated with one of the big flash-in-the-pan pop metal bands of the late 1980s, it symbolically and almost literally marked the end of Kramer, as the largest guitar company in the world was crumbling just like the Iron Curtain!

Well, well, well. What have we here? On the surface, of course, it’s a 1968 Guyatone LG-350T Sharp 5. A sight little seen in North America, but not uncommon in Japan, at least once upon a time. And if it makes you think of a little bit of a Mosrite on drugs, well then you’re not too far off the mark! Welcome to a bit about the Ventures and the early world of copy guitars!