The Fender XII

Folk Music purists almost rioted when Bob Dylan played electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival. Pete Seeger even says he was so angry he wanted to cut the cord to the sound systems amplifier.

The people that attend the event overlooked an important event in rock music history. This was the birth of Folk Rock.

The Byrds, Barry McQuire, the Mamas and the Papas and others took on the mantle. For a few years Folk Rock was the the thing.

The sound for many of the artists was an electric twelve string guitar with it’s jangly, chimey, almost harpsicord-like sound.

The Beatles were the first to use the Rickenbacker twelve string. They influenced Roger McQuinn to purchase a Rick 360/12.





McQuinn played banjo and he transferred his finger-picking style straight over to the twelve string guitar.

Everyone I know loves the way the Rickenbacker looks and sounds, but there are also those that have some complaints.

It is difficult to change strings on this guitar. Even McQuinn states it is a bear to restring, because the strings hold the tailpiece in place on the guitar. I have also heard complaints regarding tuning the Rickenbacker and keeping it in tune.

The older model Rick twelve strings came with six adjustable bridge saddles with two strings per saddle.

It would make sense this could make intonation difficult to achieve.

I’ve also heard guitarists complain because of the close spacing of the strings. This is because Rickenbacker uses the same neck for it’s six string and twelve string guitars. Then there are some that love this feature.

Due to the sudden interest in electric twelve string guitars, most all of the manufacturers came out with there version for sale.

Gibson and Epiphone each had a 12string model. Danelectro intoduced a Vinnie Bell creation that was named the Bellzouki. Hagstrom guitars also came out with a twelve string model.


Fender's concept for a 12 string model was simply known as the Fender Electric XII.

The body design was similar to the Jaguar, Jazzmaster shape but the lower bout had a slightly deeper carve.

The neck was a bolt-on Fender style neck. The guitars headstock was quite unique. It had a downward pitched carve on the neck’s distal end which made it resemble a hockey stick.


The Fender neck was wider than their six string models, which eliminated that cramped feeling guitarists complaint about on other models. It was an electric guitar purposefully designed to be a 12 string guitar.

The guitar also had tunable bridge saddles for each string, so compensation adjustment was a breeze. The strings went through the body and were held in place by string grommets, similar to the Telecaster design. This increased sustain.

The guitar was strung like most 12 string guitars with the lower string being an octave higher than the next string. Rickenbacker uses a reverse process with the lowest string first and the octave second.

Another unique feature was the pickup design. The placement is comparable to split pickup placement on a Fender Precision Bass guitar, which staggered the pickups. Essentially the twelve string had four staggered pickups in two sections. The player could get four different and distinctive sounds allowing for neck, neck and bridge in series, neck and bridge in parallel and bridge only options.

Fender XII Bridge/Saddles

Where most other 12 string electric guitars were built to accommodated two strings per saddle, Fender designed a special saddle for each string with a string-through-body design for extra sustain. The 1965 model came with a fairly wide neck, with dot inlays. The original model came with a three colour nitrocellulose sunburst finish and later models came with colour options as well as pickguard options.

The earliest models had a natural wood headstock. Models from late 1965 through 1968 underwent some changes. The head stock was painted the same colour as the guitar, the neck was bound and the dot markers were changed to block markers.

The Electric XII was designed by Leo Fender and introduced in late 1965. Most were produced in 1966. The guitar stayed in the Fender catalog through 1969 when it was discontinued.

Fender wound up with overstock on the necks and bodies.

The always thrifty Mr. Fender turned the extra stock into a unique six string guitar that was originally called The Fender Custom. The name was replaced and the guitar was then called The Fender Maverick.

Because of the guitars adjustable bridge saddle compensation, the Fender Electric XII was a favorite with studio players of the day (1965-70). Recording companies were interested in turning out songs as quickly as possible, so most bands recorded only the vocals and left the playing up to the studio guys and gals.

The band’s guitarist may be holding a Rickenbacker on the album’s cover, but chances are the sound you are hearing quite possibly came from a Fender Electric XII.
©UniqueGuitar Publications (text only)









 

The Maestro Fuzztone - The Granddaddy of All Guitar Pedals

I recall hearing (I Can’t Get No, Satisfaction) on the radio for the first time when I was around 14 years old. I was already playing guitar.



I could not figure how The Rolling Stones achieved that trombone-like lead guitar line. My guitar sounded way to clean to achieve such a tone.

Later I heard The Yardbirds playing I’m A Man and Beck’s Boogie, with a sustained and dirty sound.


The Kinks came out with a couple of songs that sounded similar to each other.

One of their hit record was called You Really Got Me and the other song was All of the Day and All of the Night. Both songs used a distorted, fuzzy guitar sound to get that power riff.


No matter what I did to my 1965 Fender Deluxe Reverb, I could not figure how Keith Richards, Jeff Beck and Ray Davies got that sound.

I was told by a friend they were all using the latest invention for guitars and it was called The Fuzztone.

I did not have a clue what a fuzztone was, how it worked or even what it looked like. I even went so far as to get 6 of Mom’s bobby pins and attach them to the strings to get a fuzzy sound. (Don't laugh Philip Glass was doing this with his piano concertos.)


The sound I produced sounded exactly like a guitar with 6 bobby pins on the strings.


At the local dance a band was playing and the guitar player had a small brown box plugged into his guitar. The cord was coming out of this box. I asked him what sort of device he was and he told me it was a Jordan Bosstone.

I sure wanted one of those. I never got a Jordan Bosstone. But I did obtain a Fuzztone.

During a class trip to New York City I had some free time, so along with some friends, we headed to the music shop district. Our destination was Manny’s Music.

Manny's was guitar Mecca. THE guitar store!

All the instruments seemed to be less expensive than what Cincinnati music stores prices were for the same products. Manny’s had all the latest guitars, basses, combo organs and drum sets. It was better than Disneyland.

We walked back to the Hotel Edison where we were staying and I spotted Rudy’s Music. I had to stop there.

Rudy’s had an off brand Fuzztone of unknown origin for only $20.


It was not a Bosstone and it did not plug directly into a guitar. It was a floor unit with a volume and tone knob on either side and a push-push switch on it’s face. I plunked down my $20 and took it home.

My unit, simply called a Fuzztone, ran on 1 AA battery. An input and an output cord was built into the unit. These were the cheap, gray cords that were prone to shorting out. So I was continually cutting the plugs off the end and re-attaching new plugs.

About a year later, I purchased a Maestro Fuzztone.

The Maestro is the granddaddy of all fuzztones. There were other methods of achieving a distorted guitar sound before the Maestro unit.



But the Maestro Unit was the first commercially produced distortion device. This is what Keith Richards used on Satisfaction, along with a lot of studio reverb.

The Maestro Fuzztone was produced by Gibson/Norlin. It had a tone and fuzz potentiometer on the units top as well as a push on-push off footswitch. The unit had a grey output cord that went to the input of your amplifier, however it also had a female input plug.

This way you could use your own cord to the guitar. This was great, since I only had to repair one cord. The cheesy gray cord from the Maestro kept shorting out.

The instructions that came with the Maestro congratulated me on purchasing this fine guitar synthesizer which would enable me to achieve trombone and trumpet like sustained sounds from my guitar.

Maybe P.T. Barnum was running the advertising department at the time since I never did achieve the promised horn sounds. However the unit did distort my guitar’s signal by clipping it and changing it from a sine wave to a square wave. In that respect it was a synthesizer.

The Maestro Fuzztone was a Fuzztone, but to me the sound was closer to distortion than fuzz.


The Jordan Bosstone produced a sound that I will describe as being similar to an electric circular saw.








Vox had a floor unit called The Tone Bender. It’s sound can be described as an electric razor sound. If I had a need for a fuzztone the Vox sounds better.


In looking at a brief history of guitars and related products, fuzz guitar sound had been used early than the mid 1960’s.

In fact in 1961 (a year you can write right-side up or upside down and get the same result) a Nashville studio guitar player named Martin Grady recorded a solo for a Marty Robbin’s recording. The songs playback yielded a fuzzy guitar sound due to a loose tube in the recording console preamplifier. Robbin’s liked the sound and it was left in the mix.

The Ventures also picked up on this song's unique guitar sound and asked steel player and inventor Red Rhodes to come up with a device to get that sound. This was possibly the very first fuzzbox.





Ray Davies and Jeff Beck both took small amplifiers and cut the speaker with a razor blade. They then fed the signal to a large amplifier. This is basically what a fuzztone does, but the signal is smaller than what comes out of a 4 or 5 watt amplifier.


Maestro’s Fuzztone was the first commercially available unit. This lead to a myriad of other Fuzz boxes manufactured by many other companies.

In fact the invention of the fuzztone started a whole industry of pedals that modified a guitars sound. Before the fuzztone, we had reverb, tremolo or vibrato and echo if you could afford to buy an expensive Echoplex tape unit.

The first available fuzzboxes used germanium transistors. Starting in the 1970's the manufactures of floor pedals used cheaper and more durable silicon transistors, which could withstand heat and cold temperatures.


Germanium transistors are preferred by some purists that say these transistors provide a purer and superior tone. However germanium do not work well with other pedals. In the days before pedal boards, when a guitarist used only a fuzztone and tube amplifier distortion, this was not an issue. Because germanium transistors drop the guitars’ signal from high to low impedence the signal is deminished. Most pedals today do not drop the signal to low impedence.

I had two Maestro pedals back in the day. Unfortunately both were stolen.

I never did own a Bosstone, but came across a plug in fuzztone called a Frizzy-Fuzz. The circuitry in this unit is amazingly simple. There are no wires. The transistors, capacitors and resistors are all soldered together by their wires.

The housing on the Frizzy-Fuzz is aluminum which is superior to the Jordan Unit.

I've been told many Jordan units broke because during those days coiled cords were popular and if you strayed to far from your amplifier the Jordan Bosstone would be pulled out of your guitar by the spring action of the guitar cord.










You can hardly hear it, but look close Keith has his Maestro Fuzz

Tiple

1925 Regal Tiple

Though technically not a guitar, the Tiple is a guitar-like instrument that ranges in size from about as large as a soprano ukulele to slightly larger than the size of a tenor uke.

Kanile Tiple

You might see a Tiple on eBay for sale or pictured in a vintage guitar book. Tiples were very popular in the 1920’s through the 1930’s during an era when the ukulele was all the rage. Tiples are still utilized somewhat in Hawaiian music.

For the most part the Tiple has been replaced by the eight string Taropatch, a stringed instrument is larger than the ukulele and is tuned to an open G chord. The Taropatch has four courses of strings tuned in unison or in octaves.

Starting in 1920, Martin made some Tiples during the time period that ukuleles were popular. Production started in the 1920’s and continued for 50 years. The last Martin Tiple was in the 2000 Martin catalogue.

You can also find older Tiples made by the original Washburn company and other domestic manufacturers.

Martin’s styles included the T-15, T-17, T-18 and T-28. The size was always the same, but like Martin guitars the embellishments became fancier. The early Tiples had gut strings. As guitar evolved into steel string models, so did the Tiple. Tiple, which is pronounced “Tea – plee” is the Spanish word for soprano. The type of Tiple that is common to the United States is related to the Ukulele family.

It is replete with 10 strings that are made up of four courses. The North American and Hawaiian Tiple are tuned with the same tuning as a Soprano Uke. The first string has two strings of the same size. .

The second and third course has three strings each. Of those three strings, the center string is thicker and tuned an octave below the two outer strings, which are the same diameter. The fourth course of two strings are tuned an octave apart.

Brazilian Viola Capira

Tiples are indigenous to many South American countries. Depending on which country you are in you will find them to have a variety of tunings and sizes ranging anywhere from 12 to 15 inches in length. The can have from 3 to ten strings.

Tiples date back to the 18th century and possibly have evolved from the Spanish gutarrillo or vihuela. 

guitarron

There are several other Tiple-like instruments used in Hispanic music such as the Cuatro, the Bordonua and the requinto. Though the Tiples popularity has dwindled through the year, they are definitely unusual and unique stringed instruments.

KAPA Guitars

KAPA Guitars was founded in 1963 by a Dutch immigrant named Koob Veneman.

Mr. Veneman was the owner of Veneman's Music Emporium, a musical instrument store in Silver Spring Maryland.

During the early 1960’s Veneman made the decision to build his own unique line of guitars. This was the years of the British Invasion and the Guitar Boom and Mr. Veneman wanted his piece of the pie.

Hofner with Watkins Amplifier

Many of the guitars in stock at the Veneman store consisted of guitars that were imported from Germany and Italy.

The connections with these companies provided him with an excellent opportunity to purchase supplies from overseas manufacturers. His plan was to order guitar parts from European suppliers, assemble them in Edsmonston Maryland where the guitars bodies were created. I understand that since he was unable to obtain a Fender franchise, he decided to create his own solid body guitars.

The necks, pickups and electronics originally came from German manufacturer Hofner. The guitars generally were equipped with two slider switches to control on/off function of the pickups, which is typical of Hofner's design of the 1960’s. In the company's later years they made their own pickups, which looked similar to Hofner units.

The tuners were made by Schaller. Kapa made his own bridges and tremolo assemblies. Most KAPA guitars are equipped with the tremolo.

Veneman named the company after himself, wife and children by using an anagram of their first names. Of course his name is Koob, his son’s name, Albert, his daughters name, Patricia and his wife’s name Adeline. Later Koob’s brother joined the family business.


KAPA necks are ultra thin, which was sort of a ’60 thing. Guitarists wanted to play fast and for some odd reason, manufacturers equated this with skinny necks instead of low action. In fact, some Gibson ES-335’s of this era had thin necks.

The bodies also were thin in comparison to Fender and Gibson bodies.

KAPA was able to sell it's instruments at a price well below the competitors.

It was rumored that the Fender Corporation theatened to file a lawsuit against Kapa in the 1960's.

I cannot seen to find anything to verify a suit. If anyone knows about this, email me.


It is also interesting that KAPA 12 string guitars came out around the same time that Fender released the Fender XII.

The cost of the KAPA was almost half of the Fender instrument.

To the unfamiliar, one could mistake a KAPA for a Fender guitar, based on it's Jaguar and Stratocaster-like shapes and the shape of the headstock. The KAPA logo used script on the headstock was very similar to what we call the Fender Spaghetti script. However the KAPA logo had a circle with a crest in the middle that was similar to the Veneman family crest.


KAPA guitars were founded on some great principals set up by the Venemans. The instruments were well made, playable and affordable. Plus they were made in the USA.

The guitar boom eventually wound down. Competition was fierce. And Asian made instruments were getting better all the time.



During the companies final years some of the production was outsourced to Japan, no doubt due to the high cost of labor.

Kapa Series 500 and Kapa Challenger

Finally in 1970 KAPA ceased production and sold it's assets to Mosrite and Microfret Guitar Companies. Mosrite also outsourced the KAPA instruments production to Japan.

One of the earliest models produced by KAPA was called The Challenger which had a Strat-like body. In 1966 the name was changed to The Continental, which had a slightly different shape.

The Continental was probably KAPA's most popular model. The Challenger had two pickups. The Continental was available with one or two pickups. The Challenger was available in six and twelve string models. One unusual feature on KAPA twelve string guitars was the fact that many of them came with a tremolo bar.

The Cobra was a slightly smaller instrument with just one pickup. The Wildcat was another instrument that slightly resembled a Stratocaster and it had three pickups.

One of the more well known KAPA guitars was called The Minstrel.

This was a 12 string guitar that had a tear drop shaped body sort of resembling an electric lute.

These instruments were also being produced during the same time Vox was selling guitars and the Vox Teardrop was one of their most popular models.

KAPA also made a hollow body model called the 506. It resembled a Gibson ES-335. The headstock on this guitar was three-on-a-side. The KAPA script was engraved, instead of being placed as a decal.



The metal trapeze tailpiece was also engraved with the KAPA name and was similar to one Hofner used on their guitars. This guitar was built in Japan with German parts. There were other guitars in the KAPA 500 series, all were made in Japan.

KAPA guitars are still available through collectors and sellers. If set up properly they are nice and affordable players.

It is also wonderful that KAPA guitars were a product of the United States.

I have recently learned of the passing of Koob Veneman.  May God bless him and his family. He left his mark in the history as a luthier and enteprenuer.
©UniqueGuitar Publications (text only)