Guitar Indentification

[CleverPun]

Hey everybody.

I was browsing videos on Youtube again, and I ran into the video for Ball of Confusion by Love and Rockets: (

). Anyways, one of the many things that really stuck out when I watched that video was his guitar. I don't think there is ever a very clear view of it, but the guitar is definitely Telecaster-esque. The biggest thing I noticed about it though was the tailpiece. It has a tailpiece similar to the one used by The Kills in the video for Love Is A Deserter (as far as I remember at least). I was wondering if anyone could tell me what this guitar was, or even what type of tailpiece it was, as I love the look of it.

Any help is appreciated.

Thank you!

[GGW]

It's pretty hard to see all right; lots of jumping around, but I think it is a Bigsby vibrato.

StewMac link

[Mickguard]

Look like it's hanging on a wall at a Hard Rock Cafe in Germany...hard to tell....

you might try writing to the guy who runs the site (it's not the Hard Rock Cafe, it's some guy who's 'hobby' is visiting the HRC's of the world...uh huh)

[j. pierce]

Downloaded the video, played through frame by frame, and grabbed a couple of shots from the beginning:

Guitar just seems to be a beat-to-heck tele. I can't tell if those are stickers coming half-off, a funky paint job, a beat up paint job, or what, but judging from the headstock and such, I'd a assume it's a pretty normal tele, with the addition of the trem.

As far as that trem, sure looks like a bigsby to me, just with the arm swung around back, and using a normal Tele bridge plate as opposed to the additional, after-market plate you see that comes with a bigbsy kit for a tele.

Depending on the height of your saddles and how far the thing is moved back from the bridge, you may or may not need to alter your bridge plate on a tele like this. Although, to get a decent break angle at the saddles coming from the trem, I'd imagine you'd want to raise the saddles and then shim the neck to compensate, although this guitar has the trem a lot closer to the bridge than I've normally seen these things mounted.

[Bryan316]

That is one unmercifully bludgeoned victim. That poor guitar looks like the Nick Nolte of rock n roll! But I bet it plays like buttah for that guy....

[CleverPun]

Downloaded the video, played through frame by frame, and grabbed a couple of shots from the beginning:

Guitar just seems to be a beat-to-heck tele. I can't tell if those are stickers coming half-off, a funky paint job, a beat up paint job, or what, but judging from the headstock and such, I'd a assume it's a pretty normal tele, with the addition of the trem.

Whoa, that was a lot of work for that. But thank you. I guess I never really got a clear look at it, I thought it was something more uncommon. I'll have to look into that tremolo.

[Prostheta]

Yep - the one in the video still looks like it has the ashtray though.

[Mickguard]

Yep - the one in the video still looks like it has the ashtray though.

The LnR guitar is definitely a telecaster with standard bridge, modded with a B5 .... I did it to mine a couple of years back (the same guitar has now morphed into the Stratobastard). I filed a set of gaps in the back plate so the strings could pass through to the Bigsby. Worked great. Hard to tell in this photo how he did it -- some of the original teles/esquires had top-mounted bridges, so he might have fed the strings through those holes.

I love a nice beat up tele like that. Too bad the newer models are sealed in polyester

[zyonsdream]

The B5 has a smaller base than the one Fender uses on thier facory guitars. The Fender that I worked on had obvious tuning issues with the floating bridge and a lower than high quality bigsby clone. If I were going to do this to a guitar on my own I'd use roller saddles on a standard tele bridge and a B5 Bigsby bridge. I'd also throw on a graphite nut or even an LSR roller. The bigsby is great but if you are always going out of tune then is it really worth it.

I have a first generation Les Trem that I did all of this with and it really stays in tune nicely.

[Mickguard]

For me, Graphtech nuts and saddles and locking tuners are standard equipment, trem or no. I don't like rollers because the ones I had tended to freeze up too much. My main gripe with the Bigsby was that it's a bitch to string up.

I've had an authentic Bigsby, a licensed Bigsby and a knockoff Bigsby, and they're all pretty much the same. The real Bigsby uses a different type of metal, the licensed Bigsby had a smoother action. The knockoff was closer to the licensed version (which makes sense, since it was probably made in the same factory).

The authentic Bigsby cost me more than a $100, the licensed Bigsby cost me $65 and the knockoff cost me $40. You do the math.