FTW, 4.4.2021

It's here: my "one that got away." A 1965 Harmony Silvertone 1478. For my birthday in 1972, my parents paid 50 bucks for it and a tiny solid state amp. I played it in my first band, but broke the headstock off it and was too dumb to get it repaired. (In its place, a got a somewhat distresesd '68 SG from We Buy Guitars on 48th Street.) I've seen 'em online for as much as a grand, which is ridiculous. (I've also learned that the '66 SG I paid Dan Walls $275 for in '78 and sold in '93 for the same price -- when it was worth nine times as much -- would now fetch $7K online. A 25th anniversary Les Paul like the one I paid $350 for in '76 I've seen for $18K. The mind boggles.) Found one online with a headstock that had been broken vertically, so nothing functional was affected, and managed to talk the seller down to what I thought was a reasonable price for it. Still the most I've ever paid for a guitar.

The first task was re-stringing it, since it came with rusty strings (curiously D'Addarios, but not the gauge I use). In replacing those with .013-.056s, I was reminded that the wooden bridge isn't fixed, but I was able to get them installed to where the intonation is acceptable. The vibrato arm is missing, but the one I had wouldn't lower the pitch more than a half step, so it's not a big deal. There are a couple of screws and knobs missing, and I'd forgotten how tiny the knobs on this are. One of the missing screws near the neck pickup was replaced with a ridiculously outsized one. The neck is better than I remember, although the low E string comes closer to the edge of the neck than I'd like.

The silver foil DeArmond pickups on this are apparently desirable to a certain type of collector. You can talk into them and get signal, which I used to do to amuse my numbskull buddies back in high school. Because the output on those isn't as high as either the Fender or Epiphone's pickups, I'm using more gain than usual from the H&K's tube preamp, and also adding treble where I usually take a lot out. I played some slide on the 1478 yesterday and it screamed. My original intent in getting this guitar was to use it for open tunings, but I'm going to spend some time with it and try to discover everything I can do with it. Today I was just tweaking amp tones with the different pickup selector options. Maybe tomorrow I'll get around to trying it out with some pedals.

I'm not sure if it's a coincidence or a function of my hearing loss, but every guitar that passes through my hands seems to have a weak bridge pickup (except for the Seymour Duncan on Nick Girgenti's Lone Star Strat). The same was true with the Epiphone, even after I replaced the original pickups with ones from Darrin Kobetich's SG, and it's true on this one; the bridge pickup just sounds thin to me. Due to the output issue I mentioned earlier, I also notice I need to set the volume on my looper pedal lower than I normally would when I'm playing with a loop. I shot another video of the "Neon Meate Dream of a Octafish" guitar parts so I could compare the tones of the Epi and Silvertone playing the same thing.