Epiphone Casino
| Epiphone Casino | |
|---|---|
 Epiphone Casino, color: cherry |
|
| General | |
| Type | Semi-resonant guitar |
| Manufacturer | Epiphones ; USA , China , Japan , Korea |
| production | since 1961 |
| Construction and materials | |
| Scale length | 24.75 inches (629 mm) |
| Body | Sound box with f-holes made of maple , with early models top made of spruce or birch |
| neck | Set-in neck made of mahogany |
| Fingerboard | Rosewood , 22 frets |
| Mechanics | 3 × left, 3 × right; capsuled |
| Footbridge / bridge | Two-part made of metal: bridge with individual saddles ( Tune-O-Matic ) and tailpiece |
| Pickups and Electronics | |
| Pickups |
• 2 × P-90 - single coil |
| Tone control | passive • 2 × volume • 2 × tone • 1 × 3-way pickup selection |
| Unless otherwise stated, the data come from the manufacturer's website (as of December 30, 2013) | |
The Epiphone Casino (also Epiphone Casino ES-230T and Epiphone Casino ES-230TD ) is an electric guitar model that was presented in 1961 by Epiphone , a subsidiary of the American musical instrument manufacturer Gibson . The Casino is a thinline guitar with a flat, hollow body . The guitar model Gibson ES-330 from 1959, which the Casino largely resembles, served as a template . The casino gained particular fame through John Lennon , Paul McCartney and George Harrison . The three members of the English pop and rock band The Beatles bought a copy of the model each in 1964 and 1966. The musicians played the casino when the band was recording in the recording studio as well as during stage appearances. The Epiphone Casino is manufactured to the present day; Most of the editions have been made in Asian countries since the 1990s - mainly in China , Japan and South Korea .
Construction form
Body and neck
The Epiphone Casino is a Halbresonanzgitarre with fully hollow body ( english : Hollow Body ) as a sound box . The components of the body, top , sides and back of younger instruments are made of laminated maple wood . The first generation instruments (additional model name ES-230T - the T stands for Thinline ) had a top made of spruce wood ; until 1970 a laminate made of maple and birch wood was used for the top . Before assembling the body parts, the top and bottom are pressed into a curved shape ( archtop ) under hot steam . Due to the narrow, about four centimeters wide frames, the body is flat; a construction that bears the Gibson name Thinline . This design was introduced by Gibson in 1955 with the Gibson Byrdland and Gibson ES-350T models. The surrounding body edges are bordered on the front and back of the instrument with a narrow white stripe made of plastic (binding) , which, in addition to its decorative effect, is intended to protect the edges from minor impacts. In the ceiling of the casino there is a sound hole on the left and right , which has the f- shape typical for guitars of this construction . The axially symmetrical body of the Casino has an incision ( cutaway ) in the upper bout on both sides of the neck to make it easier to grip the strings on the high positions of the fingerboard .
The neck of the guitar model is made of mahogany and has a glued-on rosewood fingerboard . The fingerboard has 22 frets . In the first edition of the model , dot- shaped inlays were used as collar markers; from around 1964 these were replaced by celluloid inlays in the form of parallelograms . An adjustable metal neck rod is embedded in the neck . This is used to adjust the curvature of the neck, which is caused by the tension of the tensioned steel guitar strings . At the upper end of the neck, the neck tensioning rod is provided with a hexagon socket screw ; The tension of the neck tension rod and thus the neck curvature can be adjusted using an Allen key.
To ensure the stability of the connection between the neck and the hollow body, the neck of the Epiphone Casino is glued deeper into the body than on semi-resonance guitars with a stabilizing wooden block ( center block or sustain block ) in the middle of the body - such as the Gibson ES-335 . The neck-body connection starts at the 16th fret at the Casino ; for semi-resonance models with a center block , it is the 19th fret for Gibson and Epiphone guitars. Due to the deeper glued-in neck, the Casino is five centimeters shorter overall than models with a center block.
The headstock of the Casino , like several other Epiphone models, is similar in outline to the typical shape of the Gibson headstock, but is more elongated than this and has a more pronounced waist (the instruments of the first model generation had a standard Gibson headstock). The axially symmetrical, black lacquered head plate carries the six metal tuning mechanisms in a "3: 3" arrangement, the inlaid Epiphone company logo and a screwed-on bell-shaped plastic cover plate on the lower edge for the screw for adjusting the neck tension rod. The cover plate is decorated with the company logo. The saddle between the headstock and fingerboard of the Casino is made of white plastic.
Hardware and electrical equipment
The first edition of the Epiphone Casino is equipped with a single electromagnetic pickup in a single coil design. This pickup, the model P-90 developed by Gibson in 1948 with a black plastic cap, is mounted in the middle of the body under the strings. Since the second generation of models introduced at the beginning of the 1960s, the casino guitars have had two P-90 pickups - one each directly at the lower end of the fingerboard (“neck position”) and one on the bridge (“bridge position”). These pickups have caps made of nickel-plated metal as a cover (see adjacent photo). The model name was changed to ES-230TD - Thinline Double (Pickup) . The single-coil P-90 pickups produce a “brighter” tone with a greater proportion of higher frequencies than the double- coil humbucker pickups that are most commonly used on electric guitars with a center block . In addition to the pickups of the casino a pickguard (ger .: is pickguard ) mounted on the instrument cover, which protects the body paint from damage while playing the guitar. In the first edition this was made of tortoiseshell imitation, all subsequent generations of the Casino have a pickguard made of white plastic and bear the Epiphone “E” logo.
The electrical signal of the two pickups can be regulated with a total of four rotary knobs ( potentiometers ) mounted in the instrument ceiling on the right lower bout ; A tone control and a volume control with a hat-shaped rotary knob are available for each pickup . A three-stage toggle switch next to the rotary controls enables the pickups to be selected; these can be switched on individually or together. A socket on the lower edge of the ceiling is used to accept the jack plug of a guitar cable - for connecting the instrument to an electric guitar amplifier . Through the hollow body which is Epiphone Casino at higher volumes the amplifier susceptible to acoustic feedback (ger .: feedback ) as electric guitars with some solid or fully solid ( solidbody ) corpus.
The metal, also nickel-plated bridge of the Casino is of the Gibson type Tune-o-Matic; This enables the string height to be set and the octave purity to be set individually for each of the six strings. The lower ends of the strings are in a trapezoidal tailpiece (engl .: Trapeze tailpiece mounted). This tailpiece, made of a nickel-plated metal bracket, is attached to the lower edge of the frame with a screw. A partial edition of the Epiphone Casino is equipped with a vibrato system from the manufacturer Bigsby Guitars instead of the trapezoid tailpiece .
The Epiphone Casino and the Beatles
Some of the most famous musicians who used the Epiphone Casino include John Lennon, George Harrison, and Paul McCartney. The three Beatles members bought a copy of the model each in 1964 and 1966; McCartney first in December 1964; he bought a right-handed model, made in 1962, with the Epiphone serial number 84075. McCartney and Harrison's examples of the guitar are equipped with a Bigsby vibrato system, Lennons Casino has the standard trapezoid tailpiece. McCartney made a few changes to his guitar so that it could be played left-handed - adjusting the saddle and bridge, removing the pickguard, moving the button for a guitar strap from the left to the frame of the right cutaway .
Lennon and Harrison, who bought their Epiphone Casinos in the spring of 1966, played the model on the Beatles 'last tour appearances in 1966. These included the BRAVO Beatles' blitz tour through three German cities in June of that year and the last official live performance of the Beatles on August 29, 1966 at Candlestick Park Stadium in San Francisco . The Beatles also used their casino guitars on the studio album Revolver , released in the same year . Beatles titles that have used Paul McCartney's Casino in the recording studio include Ticket to Ride (song) (on Help! 1965 album ), Paperback Writer and Taxman ( Revolver album , 1966) and Good Morning Good Morning (album Sgt.Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band , 1967).
John Lennon, in particular, had been using his casino with the Beatles since around 1966 and during his solo career from 1969 onwards, following the group's gradual breakup . In 1968 he had his guitar modified according to his own needs. Among other things, he removed the pickguard and (like Harrison) had the original, orange-brownish sunburst paintwork stripped off the body and replaced with a thinly applied colorless matt paintwork. The repainting should improve the sound and bring out the wood of the guitar. Quote George Harrison: "As soon as you remove the paint and varnish down to the wood, they suddenly seem to breathe." An important document of the times in which Lennon can be seen and heard with his casino are the film recordings from the last live performance of the Beatles on January 30, 1969 on the roof of the building of their company Apple Corps , later known under the name Rooftop Concert (German: " Roof Concert ").
At the end of the 1990s, Epiphone Lennon dedicated a special model, the Casino Revolution; so named after the Beatles piece Revolution 1 on the 1968 album The Beatles , on which the guitar can be heard in an outstanding way. The Epiphone Casino Revolution is modeled on Lennon's modified guitar in every detail. The Beatles Museum, The Beatles Story in Liverpool , England, shows a detailed replica of Lennon's Casino in its permanent exhibition , exhibited in the Imagine Room of the house (see photo on the right). The original of John Lennon's Epiphone Casino is owned by his widow Yoko Ono and is on loan at the John Lennon Museum in Tokyo .
Paul McCartney plays the Epiphone Casino , which he bought in 1964, to the present day in live performances and recordings in the studio. In a 1996 interview for the BBC , McCartney said, "If I had to choose an electric guitar, it would be this one."
literature
- Andy Babiuk: The Beatles sound. The Fab Four and its instruments - on stage and in the studio . PPV Presse Project Verlag, Bergkirchen 2002, ISBN 3-932275-36-5 .
- Tony Bacon, Dave Hunter: Totally Guitar - the Definitive Guide (Guitar Encyclopedia, English). Backbeat Books, London 2004. ISBN 1-871547-81-4
- Neville Martin: Guitar Heaven. Legendary guitarists - fascinating instruments . German-language edition, Heel Verlag, Königswinter 2008. ISBN 978-3-86852-002-6
Web links
- The Epiphone Casino on the official Epiphone company website (accessed October 21, 2012)
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Andy Babiuk: The Beatles Sound . P. 152
- ↑ a b c d Article about the history of the Epiphone Casino ( Memento from January 9, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) on blogspot.de
- ↑ a b c d e f Neville Marten: Guitar Heaven . P. 28 ff.
- ↑ Carlo May: Vintage Guitars and Their Stories . MM-Musik-Media-Verlag, Ulm 1994. ISBN 3-927954-10-1 , chapter Die Schlankheitskur from 1955 - Gibsons Thin-Line-Modelle , p. 20 ff.
- ↑ a b c d Tony Bacon, Dave Hunter: Totally Guitar . P. 338. With a large-format image of an Epiphone Casino
- ^ Neville Marten: Guitar Heaven . P. 32
- ↑ Andy Babiuk: The Beatles Sound . P. 150
- ^ Tony Bacon, Dave Hunter: Totally Guitar . P. 337 ff.
- ↑ Andy Babiuk: The Beatles Sound . P. 186 f.
- ↑ Andy Babiuk: The Beatles Sound . P. 192 f.
- ↑ Dave Hunter, Deirdre Cartwright: Guitar Facts - The Essential Reference Guide . Outline Press, Backbeat UK 2006, ISBN 978-1-871547-78-8 , p. 16 (English)
- ↑ a b Andy Babiuk: The Beatles Sound . P. 217 ff. With a large-format image of Lennon's Epiphone Casino .
- ↑ George Harrison in an interview with the journal Guitar Player , November 1987 edition. Quoted from Andy Babiuk, translated from English by Gerhard J. Oldiges: The Beatles Sound . P. 217
- ^ Dave Hunter, Deirdre Cartwright: Guitar Facts - The Essential Reference Guide (English), p. 17. Backbeat UK / Outline Press 2006, ISBN 978-1-871547-78-8
- ^ Tony Bacon, Dave Hunter: Totally Guitar . P. 339
- ↑ Paul McCartney, quoted from Andy Babiuk, translated from English by Gerhard J. Oldiges: The Beatles Sound . P. 152