Talk me out of it

[mirth]

For some reason I've been greatly desiring an SG lately....Zappa, Derek Trucks, McLaughlin...etc...

[Infinite Ego]

oh, god, no....ugliest guitars ever....neck heavy like crazy

[sonicdeviant]

Jul 30, 2017 5:29:10 GMT -5 Infinite Ego said:

oh, god, no....ugliest guitars ever....neck heavy like crazy

Truth. SG be like:

[mirth]

No way they're ugly (that's most shred guitars that are super ugly)...neck heavy is a bummer though...

[mirth]

I also grew up playing a Gretsch Corevtte and always loved the look of it. And it's a lot like an SG.

[asb]

My buddy from years back Jim who doesn't really play guitar recently acquired these two guitars for his 'studio' such as it is, a vox floor pedal with usb port to a computer and some studio monitors and some daw software:



Like all good analysis processes, one must know thy enemy and I triedit out and the thing certainly is super light and since he really doesn't play yet (at age 54 better late than never I guess) it has that robotic tuning feature which is a bit off putting in my opinion and makes the headstock dive issue possibly more pronounced than necessary but he hasn't mounted any kind of strap or straplocks on it yet (he has the strap but has yet to do anything with it).

The acoustic he bought because it was pretty and it is. When I visit, I make sure the darned things are in tune because they just sit there looking new and spotless mostly.

Now SG wise - McLaughlin, in my mind had his best experience with the Rex Bogue doubleneck which had a better shape in my mind than the SG (and the design is better).
Zappa's SG was a hand-made copy by the aforementioned Rex Bogue I believe.

The other famous players who have them probably never experienced the joys of a superstrat. I don't really know.

[Infinite Ego]

superstrats rule for a reason

[mirth]

Wow, didn't know anything about the Rex Bogue guitar.... interesting article I found.


John McLaughlin & Rex Bogue
Creating the 'Double Rainbow'
By Leonard Ferris

(Reprinted from Guitar Player magazine: May 1974)


The word was out, "McLaughlin's got a new guitar!" It obviously wasn't the familiar Gibson double-neck. In fact, it wasn't a familiar anything. But its beauty and sound were turning heads wherever Mahavishnu John McLaughlin performed.
Rex Bogue of San Gabriel, California is the luthier who created the breathtakingly beautiful guitar. "I brought McLaughlin one of my other guitars when he was at the Whisky," Bogue recalls. "He looked it over, then tried it and asked me to build him a new double-neck. It was as simple as that."
The decision may have been simple, but the construction of this "Double Rainbow" was anything but easy. The project pulled Bogue away from all other guitar construction for exactly one year, July 18, 1972 to July I 8, 1973. Bogue says, "Building a double-neck takes about two-and-a-half times as much effort as a standard guitar." The inlay work alone took more than eighty hours, cutting meticulously with carbide dental drills and hairline jeweler's saws.
The three-way matched body was handcarved from the finest available aged eastern fiddleback maple. Mirror-image symmetry formed the basic design concept for the matching of woods as well as the pairing of the inlaid fingerboard design. The nine-piece laminated necks are constructed from Brazillian rosewood and maple, while the fingerboards, at McLaughlin's request, are Gaboon ebony instead of rosewood. There are two truss rods in the 12-string neck and one in the six.
To place the frets with precision on the 24-3/4 inch scale fingerboards, Bogue turned to a friend who wrote a computer program at U.C.L.A. for each fret position at various lengths. And when the placements were established, a special jig was built to saw the fret slots.
The elaborate matching inlay on the fingerboards is perhaps the guitar's most striking visual effect, with its various colored abalone leaves and flowers for position markers. "McLaughlin and I discussed the design," Bogue says, "but he gave me a free hand. I'd say I was primarily inspired by the banjo inlay work of the late S. S. Stewart, and by the art of [Frenchart noveau painter] Alphonse Mucha." To Bogue, the flowing mother-of-pearl vines represent the musician's "tree of life," symbolizing his progress in striving to achieve his ideals.
Similar philosophical considerations led McLaughlin to want the words "Guru Alo" inscribed at the base of the fingerboards. They mean "He who leads from darkness into lightness."
There were a few other special requests McLaughlin had, though he did leave most of the artistic decisions to Bogue. "He wanted the neck to go to high D instead of C#," according to Rex. "And he asked for Gibson-style humbucking pickups." Bogue rewound each pick-up, adding coil divider taps, inter-coil phasing and adjustable quad-coil phasing. He used some Gibson parts, others were specially machined. The output signals of the four pickups are routed to a switching network and then to a hybrid integrated circuit pre-amp. The luthier framed the pickups in rosewood, then glued the units to the back of the body. He claims, "That way, they're not adjustable at all. That's so no repairman can mess with them. My guitars come with lifetime guarantees, so if anything goes wrong I'll travel to the musician and fix things free for as long as I Iive."
The instrument has various volume, bass, and treble controls, a power bypass switch, and more. The bypass switch gives the output signal a variable 20 db boost or the standard output. A built-in integrated circuit pre-amp provides for a higher signal-to-noise ratio and increased frequency response, and allows the guitar an enormous amount of gain and sustain. An extra side effect can be created by the sympathetic vibrations produced when one neck is played while the other's pickups are turned off. (McLaughlin plugs his guitar into a volume pedal, a wah-wah, a power booster, and a phase shifter, running it all into two modified 200-watt Marshall tops with four cabinets.)
Bogue claims that the guitarist is still experimenting string sets and gauges, but since he "uses the lightest he can find," Bogue installed a Darco custom set ranging from .008 to .038.
An interesting problem was created by the fact that Bogue wanted the guitar's two halves to appear virtually identical, but one head had to hold twelve tuning machines while the other would hold six. The solution was found in reversing the position of every other one on the 12-string head so that only six are visible from the front. Custom gold-plated Klusons are utilized on the 12-string, and re-plated (for additional durability) Grover Imperials are used on the 6-string.
One would think that all of this plating, inlay, and wood would make the guitar a bit heavy. "A bit!," Bogue exclaims, It's the heaviest guitar I've ever felt. It weighs about thirty pounds; and with the heavy-duty case the total is close to 130."
The Double Rainbow, with a value in excess of $5,000, is anything but a traditional guitar-either electronically or artistically. "I approach every guitar as a conceptual art piece," says Bogue, who was with the Ren Ferguson guitar company in Venice, California when the instrument was built. "There are no plastic inlays or other cheap imitations. I hand build every part expressly for each guitar."
The current project of Rex Bogue Guitars (125 N. Del Mar, San Gabriel, CA) is an equally valuable double-neck for ex-Weather Report bassist Miraslav Vitous. "It'll look a lot like McLaughlin's instrument," Rex explains, "but with a 4-string bass and 6-string guitar. Each string will have its own transducer for bass and treble, making a total of twenty pickups."
So it's clear that there's a design revolution brewing, and Rex Bogue is right in the middle of it.

[mirth]

[Infinite Ego]

you need a double neck guitar

[mirth]

I do love heavy music.....they do seem like they'd be very heavy. Lol.

I'd consider a double neck, but not sure what I would want for each neck? Some kind of strat/super strat...but I don't think I'd want a 12 string, so maybe a fretless...or maybe like a jazz box and and a super strat, or a like a 6 string bass and a 6 string guitar...but I don't really want to play bass...so maybe just 2 super strats...or like one with a 8 string guitar (one low string and 1 high) with an extreme fanned fret, haha.

Yeah...not so sure...maybe I would like a 12 string... Actually it'd be pretty sweet to tear up some shit with a 12 string now that I think about it. Soaring distortion and fast picking/tapping etc... What if there were a whammy bar too? That'd be pretty dope.

[mirth]

Actually what is the difference in the McLaughlin double neck...aside from the tuners?

[mirth]

Here we go.... www.rondomusic.com/valkdoublewhiteleft.html

[asb]

The Bogue doubleneck guitar had very versatile for the time electronics.
I remember the "Rex Bogue Guitars Ballz Deluxe" ads in Guitar Player at the time where you could get internal preamps, internal parametric EQ, internal boosters, etc.

That guitar had coil taps, phase switching, both necks could be on at the same time for interesting sympathetic resonances you name it.
The thing was a total BEAST to wield though.
Rumors were it was in the 30 pound range.
That's without it's blue and silver Anvil road case to store it.

Contrary to many rumors on the internet the guitar still exists, it was not totally destroyed. Yes it suffered major damage that was repaired.

I believe (and this is strictly my belief based on circumstantial evidence) that McLaughlin was running short on money and that last Mahavishnu record was contractual obligation and he turned the guitar in as unrepairable to the insurers to get operating capital for that last record and tour and some left over to get that acoustic guitar with the drone strings for Shakti.

Timeline: Inner Worlds came out in '75 where he used a totally new and different main guitar which was a custom Gibson L5-S with a hex pickup, an EM-U custom pitch to voltage converter and six mini-moog modules.  Shakti came out in '76 and the rest is history..

I believe he turned it into the insurers to get operating capital - I recall he said he "didn't know what happened after he turned it over to the insurers" in one interview.

I know it was repaired because guitarist Doug Doppeler got to play it some years later at a guitar show in Dallas I believe and being a huge Mahavishnu fan just HAD to play it - whoever repaired it did a stellar job because he said he saw no obvious signs of major damage.

Then, a few years later the guitar was sold by Sotheby's at auction. For a STUPIDLY LOW price. I saw the page in the auction book. I was totally unaware of this until several years after it sold. There was a very long thread at Ibanez Collectors World about this guitar where one user there was trying to track down the new owner many years later to confirm it still exists. The letter was received by the new owner but declined to answer.

And justifiably so: my facebook friend Bob Dullam was commissioned to build as exact replica as possible (and the new owner had it for a couple of days and it was stolen almost immediately and word is it may be in the hands of another european collector).

Dullam, for those curious is the guy who invented the "Tumbler" batmobile for the Michael Keaton Batman films as well as the Batman armor and costuming. He just happens to not only be a hollywood prop maker but a guitarist who can build his own axes.  Dullam is saying recently that he may build and even closer replica and he'll keep that one.  

Pics of the Dullam guitar (before it was ripped off):





Then another guy in Japan I can barely communicate with at all made some replicas of his own:



Of course, Ibanez made some superficially similar replicas of their own but I think this guitar is so iconic it's kind of crazy that people are trying to replicate it.

Not to mention that the Japanese guy in question has used 3d CAD software to more closely duplicate the original guitar and he's doing another replica.

[mirth]

Crazy story, haha. It did seem a little fishy that the guitar was destroyed by falling off a work bench, or whatever they said...then again, maybe it was mahogany?

Also interesting to me is just how cheap Gibson was back in the day. To think that he could claim insurance on that guitar, but still have enough for Gibson is amazing really. I keep hearing about guitarists first guitars back then being Gibsons, for like 200 bucks or whatever. They definitely outpaced inflation. Also, maybe the guitar wasn't that nice to play? So it was his kind way of ditching it?

Anyone here ever own a double neck?