The Herd Mentality, Part 1: the First Dozen

So, I have quite a few guitars now. Most of them have come from eBay, and most of them were bargains. I have a little problem, though; I can't actually tell you exactly how many I have, because I don't know. It's time to take inventory. Here are the first dozen.

I don't have enough space to keep them all at home, so at any given time, a rotating selection of instruments is in a climate-controlled storage unit. I try to keep them all in hard cases wherever possible, which protects them from getting knocked around, but also helps protect them from sudden humidity or temperature shifts. That's the theory, anyway. The guitars in storage look like this:


I recently pulled them out to check on them, photograph them for insurance purposes, and record the serial numbers. Here are the cases lined up:


That's a dozen, plus a couple of gig bags that I wanted to save. Here's a roll call:

1. Squier Super-Sonic, silver sparkle. I actually have three Super-Sonics; this one is A016447. Two of the Super-Sonics, were featured in Guitar Pron 5. This one is in excellent condition with no issues, as is the blue one; the other silver ones has some electronics issues and currently has its guts hanging out waiting for me to finish fixing it.

2. Squier Venus, black. Set up with 10s. Featured in Guitar Pron 10. No issues; this guitar is in excellent shape. It is one of the best-sounding guitars in my collection, especially with the single-coil pickup.

3. Squier Venus, sunburst. Set up with 10s. This one has some minor electronics issues and is waiting to go up to Elderly. I need to take some outdoor photos of both the Venus guitars; they just don't photograph well with a flash.

4. Godin LG. Featured in Guitar Pron 9. I have a new bridge for this guitar, to replace the chewed-up bridge height screw. I think I can do that repair by myself without any trouble; I just haven't gotten to it yet. (Are you sensing a recurring theme here?)

5. Peavey Firenza, USA model, with two P-90 pickups. Set up with 11s. This is an amazing guitar. It's built like a tank, and the pickups sound absolutely fantastic. I'd put it up against any Gibson with P-90s. I'll have to do a write-up about it, and record it. I'm keeping an eye out for another one of these, preferably a minty tobacco sunburst model. This one needs some minor fret work; it's been played heavily, but has no serious damage at all. It's a gorgeous guitar, although this photo doesn't really do it justice:


6. Peavey Limited HB, natural flame maple top. This guitar was featured in Guitar Pron 6. It is probably the prettiest instrument I've got, and it sounds great too.

7. Peavey T-60, natural ash body with rosewood neck. This one is a somewhat battered player, but it is an earlier T-60, built incredibly well, and has been beautifully maintained, and sounds and feels great. In fact, the action and "play feel" is the best of any guitar in my collection, with the possible exception of the Parker Fly. With scratches and buckle rash, though, it isn't all that photogenic. Here is a shot:


It needs a new output jack. It's one of the long through-the-body types, and the wiring on these is elaborate and delicate, so it is going up to Elderly.

8. Peavey T-60, natural ash body, maple neck. This is the most common kind of T-60. This one is in pretty good condition, but I'm just not a big fan of the maple-necked T-60s. They don't feel quite as nice to me as the models with the rosewood fretboards. I'd consider selling this one (via eBay) at some point. The glue holding the interior velvet-colored panels in the case has deteriorated and so it needs some kind of restoration work on the case. I might try to hot-glue it. I still watch T-60s go by, but I'm also keeping an eye out for just the right T-15, or T-27, or even a T-40 bass.

9. Squier Jagmaster. I have a love-hate relationship with this guitar. It has a neck pocket issue; the fit and finish just isn't quite up to the standards of the other members of the Vista series. Some of the Jagmasters have the truss rod adjustment at the headstock, like the Super-Sonics, but this one has one of those traditional Fender necks where you must partially remove the neck to get to the truss rod. I really don't like that. When I removed the neck, a big chunk of finish alongside the neck pocket came with it. It's also got an overly heavy body. However, it sounds really good, and I love short-scale instruments. Like I said, a love-hate relationship. I'm keeping my eyes out for another one, with the truss rod adjustment at the headstock. I've seen several go by on eBay, but they are either very damaged, have been heavily modified, or are priced far too high for me.


10. Godin Freeway 4-string bass. I'll have to write this one up too; they are real bargains. It would be a great first bass for a student. This one is set up with flat-wound strings and has a very nice mellow tone.


11. Peavey Limited ST, tiger's eye flame. This guitar was featured in Guitar Pron 1.

12. Peavey T-60, Iced Tea Burst. This guitar was featured in Guitar Pron 4.

That's it for now. More later!

Guitar Pron 6: the Blonde Limited

So, my collecting has slowed down a bit, but I'm still scanning eBay listings for guitars I believe in at great prices. That means I watch quite a few auctions, and when the price becomes too high, drop out. Sometimes if a listing has a "Buy it Now" option, I'll make a lowball offer near the end of the auction -- the worst the seller can do is say no, or ignore my offer. That's what usually happens. But sometimes they say yes.


In this particular case, the seller's asking price was pretty high compared to the selling price of other Limiteds. I made an lowball offer. The seller made a counter-offer, which was still a little high for my taste, so I split the difference and made a counter-counter offer just before the end of the auction. The seller accepted my offer.


I have a couple of Peavey Limited guitars. Every Limited that I've seen has had a flame maple or quilted maple top stained with a dye: Tiger's Eye, Margarita, dark blue, or rasberry red. I came across this one on eBay. I believe it must be a fairly rare bird -- it may have been made for a NAMM show or originated as a custom order. Or, maybe the luthiers in Leakesville just happened to have some wood that they thought would look prettier without a colored stain.


The flame maple top isn't as flashy as some of the PRS "ten tops," but then I consider some of those to be too flashy for my taste. This one is just a subtly gorgeous piece of wood, with a rippling 3-dimensional quality.


It has all the basic attributes of the other Limited models. This is a dual humbucker "HB" model. I'm still keeping an eye out for a "VT" model, with 3 hand-wound single-coil pickups, but those seem to be as rare as hen's teeth.


The "zebra" cream-and-black humbuckers go particularly well with this top.


The back shows off the mahogany body.


There's a little bit of corrosion on a couple of the neck screws. This kind of corrosion is probably caused by someone sweating against it -- the salt corroded the screws the same way it does a car. But it's nothing serious. I had to do a bit of adjustment to the neck position; it was slightly off-kilter, indicating that maybe the guitar took a knock in shipping, even though it was well-packed. The other possibility is that it may have spent too much time in a dry environment, allowing the wood of the neck pocket to shrink slightly, so that it was no longer making firm contact with the neck. In any case, this was not a difficult adjustment -- I just loosened the neck screws a bit and applied a little force to shift it into the right position, then held it there while I re-tightened the neck screws. It does require a certain degree of experience to know how much force you can apply without risking damage to the neck or neck pocket. It shifted back into place nicely and now the instrument is perfectly playable and the tuning is stable again.

The frets need a little bit of light touch-up work, so I'll take it up to Elderly the next time I go. But besides that, it doesn't need much of anything. It has that nice light weight, body contour, and woody, hollow tone that is characteristic of this series. I'll very likely be using this one to record.

If you're wondering what the difference is between "flame" maple -- this guitar's top -- and "qulited" maple, check out my earlier pictures of another Peavey Limited, which has a "quilted" top:

Guitar Pron 1 (a link to another entry in this blog).

My understanding is that "quilted" maple looks more wavy and irregular, like ripples in water, and the pattern may be larger. But don't quote me; I'm not an expert.

Guitar Pron 4: Peavey T-60 Sunburst

I have several T-60s. This is the one that is in the finest condition. The exact date of manufacture is difficult to ascertain, but it may be from 1981. Whatever the exact date, this instrument is almost 30 years old, and when I received it I was very impressed that the eBay seller had not been exaggerating when he called it a "closet classic" and claimed it had scarcely been played.

The Peavey T-60 was an attempt to capture some of the best design elements of the Stratocaster and the Les Paul and blend them together, along with a few special touches dreamed up by Chip Todd and Hartley Peavey. The weight is in between the two, and it has a flatter, more comfortable body like a Gibson SG. The price was considerably lower as well.

Take a look at the superb solid steel bridge with string-through design. Those saddles give you an enormous amount of leeway in adjusting intonation, and the bridge feels totally bomb-proof.

The T-60 has a 3-way pickup selector, a pickup switch (which, of course, only changes the sound when both pickups are active), and separate volume and tone controls for each humbucker. The tone controls have an unusual feature -- when you bring them all the way up, they disable the humbucking wiring and the pickups get brighter (and slightly noisier), acting as single coils. This gives you an even wider range of tones. The T-60 can do a very good impression of a classic strat, and the neck pickup with the tone control rolled down gives a nice jazz tone. I've got mine set up with 10s, but you could use 11s or perhaps even 12s with no trouble, especially if you down-tune.


I don't generally like the "classic" sunburst finishes very much, but this one is a very restrained burst that is almost an iced tea color, and less reddish or orangish than many burst guitars. I'd call it "iced tea burst" instead of tobacco sunburst. In any case, it's a gorgeous spray job, and the finish over top of the dye is in fantastic condition.

The body wood of this guitar is Ash -- not the light swamp ash tonewood a lot of recent instruments are built from, but a dense and heavy northern ash with a lovely grain.




The neck is maple -- a very nice, fast neck, with wide jumbo "schoolbus" profile frets with almost no fret wear. It even has a little flame of its own that you can see in the picture. You might notice that the neck is glued together from two pieces. That's how they installed the truss rods. The T-60 had some (for the time) amazing advances in guitar manufacturing, including CNC machining of the bodies. Necks were carved with a machine originally designed to carve gunstocks.

The nut is aluminum, and perfectly cut. This one has a rosewood fretboard. Having played a T-60 with a plain maple neck -- literally, with frets driven directly into the wood with no separate fingerboard unlike some maple necks -- I believe the less common T-60s built with the rosewood freboard give the neck additional tuning stability. My maple-necked T-60 with the always feels to me like the neck is slightly too flimsy, and when you apply any pressure at all to it while playing you can hear the pitch shift. But perhaps they aren't all like that; mine may just need some work. The rosewood also seems to darken the tone up a bit, which is a matter of taste and the style of music you like to play.

The inlays are not very attractive on this instrument (they are "mother of toilet seat"), but you can't have everything. Another one of my T-60s has real mother-of-pearl on a rosewood fingerboard, and while much more battered, the inlays are prettier.


The tuners are among the finest I've used on any guitar -- very tight and stable. I left this guitar in a climate-controlled storage unit for six months, and when I pulled it out to play, it was still in almost perfect tune. The only instrument I've got that has even more tuning stability is my Parker Fly, and that guitar's neck isn't just wood, but has a shell of fiberglass and other exotic reinforcing materials.


I really like the Peavey Limiteds, and some of the other Peavey designs, but for sheer quality of craftsmanship, playability, and durability, the T-60s are tanks. I like to say that T-60s are the guitars that, quite literally, could smash the competition.

While a bit heavy by modern standards -- back in the day players equated weight with tone and sustain -- these instruments still sound great and and very well-suited for blues, classic rock tones, or country. They won't give you that overloaded DiMarzio metal tone with octaves of squealing harmonics, and of course they are hardtails so if you love to dive-bomb, you'll be out of luck. But they are still very versatile, and it would take a lot to pry this instrument out of my hands!


If you'd like to find one of your own, start looking now. Peavey made a lot of them, and there are quite a few on eBay every week. But collectors are starting to realize just how nice these instruments really are, so prices are going up, especially for the instruments in the nicer finishes (including the somewhat rare white) and those built with rosewood fingerboards.

Guitar Pron 1: Peavey Limited ST

Peavey Limited ST, 91026549. This is one is one of my absolute favorites. It has the prettiest finish of any of my instruments. It isn't quite as gorgeous as some of the PRS "10 tops," but I'd say it is at least a 9. And the "binding" -- which is really an un-stained routed edge -- adds a very attractive line of contrast between the face and back of the guitar.

My to-do list of things to fix or adjust on this guitar is blank -- it is perfect. It is currently set up with Ernie Ball 10s and it is a joy to play.

The Limiteds are solid-body electrics, but they are much lighter than similar designs like the T-60. I think they have hollowed-out cavities in the body, under the maple top, that make them quite light and add to their resonance.

It has a 25.5-inch scale length, quilted maple top in Tiger's Eye finish, Grover self-locking tuners, hipshot bridge, tremolo, and oversized strap pegs; shielded electronics cavity, and five-way switch. I recently had the frets leveled and dressed at Elderly Instruments in Lansing.

I got this one at my local Music-Go-Round for a very low price. These are fantastic guitars, built in the Peavey USA custom shop in Mississippi. It isn't widely appreciated what fine instruments they are. The attention to detail in the finish and fret work is amazing. They have extremely tight and well-crafted neck pockets and a smooth, rounded heel with five bolts. It's among the best-built bolt-on neck guitar I've seen, with the exception of some extremely expensive boutique instruments.

Because they are not considered collectible, very nice examples can be found on eBay at excellent prices. I own one more, an HB with two humbuckers and a blue quilt finish, that I will feature later. I'm also on the lookout for the third type, the VT, with three single-coil pickups.








UPDATE: I have a new Peavey Limited with a blonde flame maple top. It's a much subtler look, but still very pretty. Check it out (the link jumps to another entry in this blog).