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Awesome! Enjoy it!

i've been making tiny adjustments to the Falcon to make it even better. i replaced the stock 1" Bigsby spring with a 3/4" spring which brings the handle into a good position for my hand while picking. i also tweaked with the polepieces on both pickups to get the top 2 strings sounding good...the E was a bit thin and quiet even after i previously adjusted the pickups, which i noticed when trying to dial in my new Micro-Tron IV envelope filter. yes, i play the Falcon through an envelope filter. i'm funny that way. Filtertrons are tricky because there's two rows of adjustable polepieces, and the balance between the two coils is pivotal to get things sounding right.

i've never really played archtops before other than other people's guitars in passing, and i'm getting addicted to the THUNK you get when you hit the bass strings hard. i'm looking forward to being able to play loud enough to get feedback. this thing is going to sing like a bird.

sorry for the weird coloration...the original photo was quite dark and all i could do in Paint was play with color filters.

dubkitty wrote:i've never really played archtops before other than other people's guitars in passing, and i'm getting addicted to the THUNK you get when you hit the bass strings hard. i'm looking forward to being able to play loud enough to get feedback. this thing is going to sing like a bird.

Fantastic! That's exactly what good instruments are made for!

seriously, i wish i'd tried playing archtops decades ago. now i want to get one of those Grote L5 copies and put proper pickups in and nice it up in general, but i think i'd go for one of the non-cutaway copies of the Guild T-60. i don't see why it took so long to get to archtops considering my love for the Buffalo Springfield/CSNY axis other than that i wanted a White Falcon.

is that not as cute as a button?

i ordered an adorable little parlor guitar off eBay. as some of y'all know i'm into doing project guitars/guitar projects, and so i spend a fair amount of time trawling the internet for parts i need/want for a particular purpose. i have a Kalamazoo Bass 30 amplifier that's missing the metal name plate from the upper left corner of the grille, so i was hunting on eBay and came across this little guy. apparently someone in Florida had a batch of Kalamazoo KG-11 and KGN-12 "Oriole" parlor guitars. from what i can ascertain three of each went up on eBay; this is the last KGN-12 Oriole; there's still a KG-11 left if you're interested.

it seems nicely specced for a cheap copy ($350) of a cheap guitar from the 1930s that now sells for $5000 in good condition. solid red spruce top, laminated maple back and sides, maple neck, Indian rosewood fingerboard, bone nut and saddle, 18-1 no-name openback Grover Sta-Tite clone tuners. if all goes well the only thing that will need to be done is replacing the plastic bridge pins with buffalo horn as i do with all my acoustics. it'd been sitting in my Watched Items for a few weeks and the seller put it on 10% off today; since there were 64 people watching it i figured i'd better move now. i've been wanting a parlor guitar for a long time, but availability, interest, and funding never coincided till now. hopefully it'll fit a standard parlor guitar case. i think its butt is too chonky to fit a classical guitar case, which apropos of nothing is perfect for a dobro. i like big bouts and i cannot lie.

more photos:

yes, the bridge is slightly askew, but if you look at photos of vintage KG-11/12s they're all like that to one degree or another.

Nice score, dubs!

the guitar i received is not the same as the photos which were from eBay...it's nicer, with better grain in the top and nicer figuring on the maple. what's really amazing are the tuners. they're high-ratio open-backs similar to high-ratio Grover Sta-Tites, but unlike them have replaceable tuner buttons. i seriously might order a couple of sets for my Gretsch Pro Jets.

it really is a great little guitar. loud as heck with a surprising amount of BOOM for the tiny body which is deeper than typical. this was enhanced by the buffalo horn bridge pins--a Larry Cragg/Neil Young joint--i use for all my acoustics except galalith on the 12-string.

Very nice!!! I've been thinking heavily about getting a parlour or other smaller sized acoustic for a while now for fun, portability and a different sound to my big dreadnought style. What do you think about it?


I got this in recently:
Funny way it happened, I was round at a friend's house and I picked this up and noodled on it a bit. I've been looking for a tele idly for a while but wasn't thinking about this specific one. They then mentioned they were thinking of selling it, so I took it home for a test drive, cleaned it up, put a fresh set of 9s on it and it has that magic quality of somehow just feeling right so I took it.

Got to do some fret work and setup, there's some really flatted out frets and a decent amount of buzz up the neck. It doesn't really come through an amp I've tested it at a gig now, but it'll feel nicer without. But I'm already very happy, planning for it to be my new workhorse gigging guitar - previously this was my jaguar which is great and similarly fender style bombproof but has more switches and stuff Plus while a nice guitar this is obviously a cheap squier so very replaceable if the worst happens.

I've read terrible things online about the pickups but they sound OK to me so far thinking about putting some new ones in just out of curiosity rather than I'm really missing a lot. The bridge sounds like a tele, the neck is thicker and a bit more heft, so it does the trick for cheap.

Nice one!
Don't know if it's the same pickups, but I have a tele deluxe with those "wide range humbuckers" (hey, the look the same! right?) in both neck and bridge and I really like them. That said, I'm mostly a bridge player and have never tried any others in, so might be the guitar (which obviously too) I like but yeah, never understood why the got such a bad rep. While not classic twangy they still sound tele to my ears, but also humbuckery, which is perfect for what I do. It's all very subjective though, I guess. Had mine set up a week ago and it's just great!

you can improve almost any pickup by adjusting it. i try to get the high E on the treble pickup as good as possible and then adjusting everything else to that level. i don’t know if that’s a real WRHB or one of the cosmetically similar conventional ‘buckers FMIC has used in the Squier line. might as well crank it up.

Pretty sure it's not a real one (it's all stock). First thing I did was adjust the balance of the pickups yeah, it sounded a bit meh (and hugely out of balance with the bridge) too close to the strings tbh so I backed it off.

Not super exciting but I changed my telecaster from an esquire back to a telecaster (replaced pickguard, added neck pickup, and redid the controls). It's got a more dad rock vibe now lol, but I like it. It's a 94 MIM.