Rickenbacker 325

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Rickenbacker 325
Rickenbacker 325C58 JG.jpg
Rickenbacker 325C58, color: Jetglo
General
Type Electric guitar
Manufacturer Rickenbacker ; United States
production since 1958
Construction and materials
Scale length 20.75 inches (527 mm)
Body Solid body with hollow milled chambers made of maple or alder
neck Full neck made of maple or alder
Fingerboard Rosewood , 21  frets
saddle Plastic , width: 41.9 mm
Mechanics 3 × left, 3 × right; capsuled
Footbridge / bridge Two-part metal bridge: tremolo system with individual saddles and tailpiece
Weight approx. 2.3 kg
Pickups and Electronics
Pickups

3 × single coil

Tone control passive
  • 2 × volume
  • 2 × sound
  • 1 × 3-way pickup selection
Unless otherwise stated, the data come from the manufacturer's website (as of December 29, 2013)

The Rickenbacker 325 is an electric guitar model that has been manufactured by the American musical instrument manufacturer Rickenbacker since 1958 . The instrument belongs to the class of electric guitars with a milled hollow wooden body ( English : semi-solid ). At its launch, the model was one of the first industrially mass-produced electric guitars with a walking through the entire body neck (ger .: Neck-thru ). Another special feature of the model is its short scale length of 20-3 / 4 inches . The Rickenbacker 325 achieved international fame in the 1960s through John Lennon , a member of the English pop and rock band The Beatles . Lennon used the Rickenbacker model as one of his main musical instruments in the first half of the 1960s.

history

The Rickenbacker company has been producing industrially manufactured electric guitars since 1932. The first mass-produced model was the Rickenbacker Frying Pan , a lap steel - Hawaiian guitar with a single electromagnetic pickup . In addition, the company has been building electrically amplifiable archtop guitars (company name: "Electro Spanish" ) since the 1930s , but their market success fell short of expectations.

In 1954, the Rickenbacker company began producing electric guitars, the construction of which was no longer based on that of acoustic guitars . To this end, the company had hired the guitar maker Roger Rossmeisl, of German origin , who had emigrated from Berlin to the USA in 1953 and who had previously worked for a short time at the competitor Gibson Guitar Corporation . From 1954 Rossmeisl designed the new Rickenbackers product line, which consisted of solid body and semi-solid electric guitar models. The first models of this series were equipped with the pickup type Horseshoe pickup ("horseshoe pickup") manufactured since 1932 . In 1956, Rickenbacker introduced the construction principle of the instrument neck running through the entire body, which has remained a characteristic feature of the company's electric guitars and basses to the present day.

Building on these developments, Rossmeisl designed a series of electric guitars, initially called Capri , in 1958 , the first model of which was the Rickenbacker 325. A little later the model series was renamed the 300 series . The model 325, the only instrument in the series with a short scale, sold slowly in the first few years after its introduction. It was not until the success of the Beatles and John Lennons, who regularly played the instrument on stage and studio recordings, that the 325 model became one of Rickenbacker's most popular guitars in the early 1960s. Using the Beatles' success for advertising purposes, the British distributor for Rickenbacker, the company Rose, Morris, Ltd., advertised the guitar model in the mid-1960s as "Beatle backer" (in German, roughly "Beatles backbone"). The purchase price for the model in the United States at that time was US $ 269.50 (approximately € 1,700 today).

A copy of the Rickenbacker 325 was shown in 2004 as part of the German traveling exhibition Electric Guitars on the history of the electric guitar in the State Museum for Technology and Work in Mannheim and in the German Museum of Technology in Berlin .

Construction and design

A Rickenbacker 325 electric guitar with a typical black finish on the body and headstock and with Kauffman vibrato

The Rickenbacker 325 is a semi-solid electric guitar with two large hollow chambers in the body. A body wing is glued to the left and right of the one-piece neck made of solid maple wood over the entire length of the instrument . An actual frame is missing. The carcass wings are made by gluing two identical in outline, also made of solid maple wood, in the form of sawn panels per wing exactly to one another in a "sandwich" construction. The wing panels facing the front are hollowed out beforehand by means of milling . The body thickness resulting from the thickness of both wing panels is approximately two inches. Like most Rickenbacker guitars and basses, the 325 model has a body cut ( cutaway ) on the left and right of the neck , the "body horn" of which forms a point. A special design element that is characteristic of Rickenbacker guitars is the trapezoidal milling of the instrument top on the base of the body. This construction form, designed by Roger Rossmeisl, has the advantage that the tailpiece or the tremolo system attached to the top is a few millimeters lower than the bridge . This increases the pressure of the guitar strings on the bridge and thus contributes positively to their sustain . The Rickenbacker 325 was available both with a fixed tailpiece and with a tremolo system known as Kauffman vibrato and, from 1964, also with a tremolo system called accent vibrato .

The electric guitar model consists of three electromagnetic pickups in single coil design ( single coil ), two knobs ( potentiometers ) for volume and sound of the pickups and a socket for a 6.35-millimeter jack to the guitar by instrument cable with a guitar amp connect to be able to. The potentiometers and their knobs are attached to a large multi-layer plastic pickguard that almost completely covers the lower wing of the instrument. What is also striking about the Rickenbacker 325 is the size of the base plate of the jack socket located in the "frame"; this also bears the stamped serial number of the instrument. The bridge of the guitar model is multi-part, made of chrome-plated steel and aluminum and can be adjusted both in height and in octave purity .

The headstock made of maple wood carries the six tuning mechanisms in a 3: 3 arrangement as well as the characteristic sickle-shaped cover plate for the neck tensioning rod with the Rickenbacker company logo. The 21- fret fingerboard of some early Model 325 instruments is also made of maple, while later versions have a rosewood fingerboard. The saddle of the Rickenbacker 325 is made of plastic.

The Rickenbacker 325 was standard in the body and headstock finishes black and “Hi Luster Blonde” (colorless clear lacquer) as well as in the sunburst variants “Autumnglo” (“ autumn gloss ”, a brown concentric color gradient) and “Fireglo” (“fire gloss “, Gradient in red-orange) available.

The Rickenbacker 325 and John Lennon

A Rickenbacker 325 as played by John Lennon from 1960 (left in the picture). Right a Gibson J-160E acoustic guitar. Behind it a guitar amplifier of the type Vox AC30
A Bigsby vibrato on a Rickenbacker electric guitar (here the model 330) as Lennon had mounted it on his guitar

By the mid-1960s, John Lennon owned a total of four copies of the Rickenbacker 325. He bought his first example of the guitar with a colorless, transparent body finish in 1960 while the Beatles were touring in Hamburg . The previous year he had seen guitarist Toots Thielemans play a Rickenbacker in the George Shearing quintet and was immediately interested in the guitar model. In an interview in 1964, Lennon described the Rickenbacker 325 as “the most beautiful guitar ever” and praised its “incredibly low” string action. In the same year Lennon received his second 325 from Rickenbacker, this one with a black body finish. The third was from Rickenbacker's UK distributor Rose, Morris, Ltd., and the fourth was a twelve-string, custom-made 325 for Lennon.

There are two different versions of Lennon's purchase of his first Rickenbacker with the serial number V81. According to John Hall, owner of Rickenbacker in 2001, the musician bought the instrument in the Steinway house on Hamburg's Jungfernstieg ; According to another version, Lennon bought the guitar in the Rotthoff music store on Schanzenstrasse - near the Reeperbahn , where the Beatles had their concert engagements. Installment payments were agreed for the instrument . During the early 1960s, John Lennon had some changes made to his first Rickenbacker. The gold-colored pickguard of the guitar was damaged; a guitar maker exchanged it for a white one during a restoration. The rotary knobs of the potentiometers have also been replaced, and the original Kauffman vibrato has been replaced by a more stable Bigsby vibrato and its associated bridge. In 1962, Lennon had the body and headstock of the originally colorless lacquered instrument painted black in order to adapt them to the Beatles' appearance, which has become more elegant on stage.

A Beatles recording in which the sound of the Rickenbacker 325 can be clearly identified is the studio version of the song All My Loving from the 1963 album With the Beatles . Lennon plays rhythm guitar in this recording.

Lennon's original first Rickenbacker 325 is now owned by his widow Yoko Ono .

Other prominent users of the Rickenbacker 325

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. Backbeat Books, London 2004, ISBN 1-871547-81-4 . (Guitar Encyclopedia, English)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Bacon, Hunter: Totally Guitar. P. 551 ff.
  2. ^ Carlo May: Vintage guitars and their stories. MM-Musik-Media-Verlag, Augsburg 1994, ISBN 3-927954-10-1 , p. 70.
  3. ↑ Rainer Kordus: Roger guitars - success story of a German luthier family. In: Electric Guitars. Special issue of the magazine Guitar & Bass on the history of the electric guitar. MM-Musik-Media-Verlag, Ulm 2004, pp. 112-115.
  4. ↑ a b c d History of the Model 325 on rickenbacker.com (English; accessed on September 9, 2011)
  5. ^ Bacon, Hunter: Totally Guitar. P. 553.
  6. ↑ a b c Babiuk: The Beatles Sound. P. 37 f.
  7. ↑ Electric guitars. Special issue of the magazine Guitar & Bass on the history of the electric guitar. MM-Musik-Media-Verlag, Ulm 2004, p. 15.
  8. ↑ a b Technical specifications of the Rickenbacker 325 at rickbeat.com (English) accessed on September 9, 2011
  9. ↑ Babiuk: The Beatles Sound. Pp. 42-43. (Large format illustration of a Rickenbacker 325)
  10. ↑ Björn Eriksson: John Lennon's '58 Rickenbacker 325 on rickbeat.com ; with historical photos of the guitar model and by Lennon in Hamburg with his copy of the guitar (English) accessed on September 9, 2011
  11. ↑ "[Toots Thielemans] was the only guitarist we knew exactly was playing a Rickenbacker. When John saw the guitar, he just had to have it. ” - George Harrison , quoted from Andy Babiuk: The Beatles Sound. P. 38. From an interview with Harrison in 2001
  12. ↑ John Lennon, quoted from Andy Babiuk: The Beatles Sound. P. 38. From an interview with Lennon in Beat Instrumental magazine , 1964.
  13. ↑ Babiuk: The Beatles Sound. P. 43: Image of the delivery note for the first Rickenbacker bought by Lennon
  14. ↑ Babiuk: The Beatles Sound. P. 54 f.
  15. ↑ Babiuk: The Beatles Sound. P. 73.