vintage egmond acoustic guitar tuning machine

George was a big Chet Atkins fan and soon he indulged his Gretsch passion some more, buying a new Gretsch Chet Atkins Country Gentleman model in London in 1963.

The Jet had two DynaSonic single coils, hump-block markers and arrow-through-G knobs, and it remained his favoured stage and studio guitar into 1962. George snapped up the guitar to replace his Futurama. George Harrison’s opportunity to join John as the owner of a real American guitar came in 1961, when he heard about a ’57 Duo Jet that a merchant seaman had for sale in Liverpool. “In our minds, it would be at an amazing gig where Dhani Harrison plays it…,” says Phil.įor more information, see Seven Decades (opens in new tab).

Plans are afoot for the guitar to feature in a film detailing its recommissioning, culminating in it being played live. The manufacturers were classical instrument manufacturers and it’s quite over-engineered.” It’s stood up incredibly well, it was an incredibly well-made guitar. “It was used on the very first Beatles recording, Cry For A Shadow, on the infamous Hamburg tapes. “If you look at pretty much any picture from that era, George is holding this guitar,” Phil tells us. Seven Decades’ Phil Hylander subsequently negotiated directly with Mahoney’s family and bought the guitar. The guitar spent the next few decades in the care of Beat Instrumental’s editor Sean Mahoney and was put up for auction at Bonhams in June 2019 but didn’t make its reserve price. The guitar was initially given to the magazine Beat Instrumental as a competition prize, but, surprisingly, when the winner was drawn, he didn’t play guitar and opted to take a cash alternative. George Harrison bought his Futurama from Hessy’s Music Centre in Liverpool in the late 1950s and used it for the next few years until it was retired and replaced with a Gretsch Duo Jet in 1961. This was the guitar which I played right through the Cavern and German Night Club days…” John gave the stopgap 1996 to Ringo, who auctioned it in 2015 for $910,000. Rickenbacker also gave him a one-off 325-style Jetglo 12-string in ’64, but he didn’t use it much. Rose-Morris, which for a while distributed Rickenbackers in the UK, gave John a 325-like 1996 in Fireglo (red sunburst) to use briefly in late ’64 when he damaged his 325. It remained his main guitar on stage and in the studio through 1964 and into 1965, and it’s the guitar most associated with John on stage with The Beatles. The new Rick arrived in time for the band’s second appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. A gift from Rickenbacker provided a replacement for the road-weary original, a new Jetglo (black) 325 presented during The Beatles’ first American visit early in 1964. Later, he had the guitar refinished black. The Kauffman he replaced with a better Bigsby unit. The knobs he replaced quickly with smaller Hofner types. It had the cooker knobs that Rickenbacker fitted at the time and it had a Kauffman vibrato, neither apparently to John’s liking. He told an interviewer at the time that his semi-solid three‑pickup short-scale ’58 325 – which evidently had been on the shop wall for some time – was “the most beautiful guitar”.

Vintage egmond acoustic guitar tuning machine