LR Friday May 9, 2014 - Big Red

Hi gang,

Lunch still needs to happen. But during this Hack Week at my new job I'll be having lunch at the Virginia Inn with the guys from my old job. That place has a wonderful Cobb salad.

As promised last week when I showed off the recently acquired Will Ray Signature in my collection, here's the tail to that tale. I had just closed the deal with Craig on the WR when I received a email from Dean Coy with an offer to take over the guitar shown at the bottom of this post. All of a sudden, there was the potential of an even larger influx of Z-coil ASATs after years of only owning a Buffalo Brother Special Edition Z-2 and this was not the time to stem the tide.




The guitar is one of only 4 Z-12, and the only one with mahogany body. Dean sent it to me in a G&L tweed case but Marjon (my wife) did not like the color combination of the Clear Red and the orange lining. I swapped it with the rolex case of my ASAT Bluesboy Semi-Hollow and both show off much better now.




The body if from a 2005 ASAT Deluxe and, beyond drilling new 4 holes to attach the neck, has not been modified. All hardware on the body is gold, including the 6 ferules on the back for 6 of the 12 strings.




The bridge is a Saddle-Lock bridge but with the saddles as found on the Gotoh GTC-12. This allows you to intonate each of the strings independently. Great improvement! You might notice that the pair of G-strings are interchanged compared to the usual order, about which more later. The guitar has 2 volume controls, no tone controls. The latter are not necessary according to Dean and having played the guitar now quite a bit he is correct. You just dial in the 2 pups and off you go. Means you play most of the time in the center position for the pickup selector of course. And that mini-toggle you a ask? Just there to fill the pre-existing hole!




The pickups are really Z-coil pups but they have been completely housed in a humbucker. Note that any holes for pole piece screws are missing, giving it the appearance of EMGs (at least to me).




The neck is one of 4 produced by G&L in 2004 for Dean's dcskunkworks Z-12 project and has no model decal on the headstock, nor (initially) any holes for tuning machines. This allowed him to play around with the spacing and kind of tuners to use. The machines on the front is a set of LSR B6 Precision Tuners. The nuts on the back of headstock needed to fasten these tuners are hidden by a mounting plate. The machines on the back are your standard variety of black anodized, G&L stamped, closed Schaller tuners. The G-strings are interchanged because the string tuned an octave higher all go to the LSR tuners but in the case of this (very thin) G-string it was not capable of getting it up to pitch. Maybe if you pre-tension them more before locking the strings; I'll do that experiment later. The guitar even has an S/N CLF33119 and was already registered by Dean in the 'One-Off' section.

Have a fun Friday folks!

- Jos

Hey Jos,

Another super grab You are definitely on a roll. As a fan of the Z coil look, I'm not sure about the covers in general, but that is one cool cat! Post clips, we need to hear that beauty.

Nice score! Beautiful looking body/finish on that.
And I for one like the looks of the fuax-humbucker covers on the z-coils. I had that idea bouncing around in my head and am glad to see that someone has done it.

Jeff

I thought the pu's were EMG's too ..... cool 12 string !!..... that's a real beauty

Jos, That is a strong guitar. I dig it. Love the Cobb salad too. So, you hackin' this week? I'm going to be taking part in a iBeacons Hackathon with Estimotes. Android and iOS. I've got a few ideas and we'll see how it goes...

Have a great weekend!


Cheers,

Will

There's more than one way to skin a cat. BTW, the absence of cream Z's and small MFD's needs attention. I am happy to see another experiment going to the Jos G&L museum. It is sort of like it has been inducted in the R&R Hall of Fame but this is something like the G&L Collection of Honor and Adoration.

Glad you are happy with it.

Hey Jos,

Another super grab You are definitely on a roll. As a fan of the Z coil look, I'm not sure about the covers in general, but that is one cool cat! Post clips, we need to hear that beauty.

Sam,

One of the draw backs pf having the Z-coils under a cover is that you no longer can adjust the pole pieces. Now, since each pole piece deals with 2 strings, I am not entirely sure what the effect will be. All I know, is that for this guitar each pair balances really well.

You have to wait for a sound clip but this sound clip of Dean's test bed Z-12 (played by Dean) is very representative of the overall sound.

- Jos

Jos, That is a strong guitar. I dig it. Love the Cobb salad too. So, you hackin' this week? I'm going to be taking part in a iBeacons Hackathon with Estimotes. Android and iOS. I've got a few ideas and we'll see how it goes...

Have a great weekend!


Cheers,

Will

Will,

We had presentations yesterday afternoon of results of Hack Week. Some were very interesting, some were long overdue, some were an attempt to add another (sub)system to the pipeline instead of actually fixing some of its deficiencies. But pretty good overall. Have fun with yours! Just keep your Objective C, Java, and JNI straight have heard some good things about Haxe if you want to do multi-platform stuff.

- Jos

There's more than one way to skin a cat. BTW, the absence of cream Z's and small MFD's needs attention. I am happy to see another experiment going to the Jos G&L museum. It is sort of like it has been inducted in the R&R Hall of Fame but this is something like the G&L Collection of Honor and Adoration.

Salmon,

Should start writing a proposal to the NEA to get funding for a space

- Jos

Jos, I just found this post. Nice 12 string by the way and guaranteed to be rare. Very cool guitar with GOld hardware. I can assure you the end is not in sight! I hope that you have all of them on display. I enjoy looking at mine every time I walk into the house. Keep it up! -- Darwin

Your mention of the Buffalo Brother Special Edition Z-2 brings up a question for me.
I've never played a Z coil equipped guitar. Do the Z coils sound more like the large MFDs in the ASAT Special or the small MFDs in the ASAT Classic? Or are they so much different that you cannot really compare them to either? The idea of a noiseless ASAT Classic intrigues me.

It would seem so easy to me for G&L to produce an ASAT Z-2. They could use the same body blanks as the ASAT Z-3. All they would need is a different pickguard and a 3 way switch instead of the 5 way. Or am I being naive and missing something?

Your mention of the Buffalo Brother Special Edition Z-2 brings up a question for me.
I've never played a Z coil equipped guitar. Do the Z coils sound more like the large MFDs in the ASAT Special or the small MFDs in the ASAT Classic? Or are they so much different that you cannot really compare them to either? The idea of a noiseless ASAT Classic intrigues me.

Of course this is just my own personal opinion but I think Z-coils sound like none of the above. They're like the Hi-Fi version of single coil pups, while still bucking hum. If you have set up your amp to jibe well with your large and/or small MFDs, usually you'll need some adjustment of the tone control of the Z-coil equipped guitar to get the right balance between bass and treble to get a similar sound. Or you use the extended sonic options provided by the Z-coils to take you in unchartered territory of course

It would seem so easy to me for G&L to produce an ASAT Z-2. They could use the same body blanks as the ASAT Z-3. All they would need is a different pickguard and a 3 way switch instead of the 5 way. Or am I being naive and missing something?

One of the cool things of the Z-2 was the tortoise binding which gave G&L a royal headache and could only be solved after consulting the people at Taylor guitars. Of course you are right that it would not take a lot to change the 5-way pickup selector to a 3-way and remove the middle pup. But then again, the Z-3 with a push-pull volume or tone control gives you the same pup combinations and more. So I think it is just not a very sound business decision to go for the smaller subset.

- Jos

Your mention of the Buffalo Brother Special Edition Z-2 brings up a question for me.
I've never played a Z coil equipped guitar. Do the Z coils sound more like the large MFDs in the ASAT Special or the small MFDs in the ASAT Classic? Or are they so much different that you cannot really compare them to either? The idea of a noiseless ASAT Classic intrigues me.

Of course this is just my own personal opinion but I think Z-coils sound like none of the above. They're like the Hi-Fi version of single coil pups, while still bucking hum. If you have set up your amp to jibe well with your large and/or small MFDs, usually you'll need some adjustment of the tone control of the Z-coil equipped guitar to get the right balance between bass and treble to get a similar sound. Or you use the extended sonic options provided by the Z-coils to take you in unchartered territory of course

It would seem so easy to me for G&L to produce an ASAT Z-2. They could use the same body blanks as the ASAT Z-3. All they would need is a different pickguard and a 3 way switch instead of the 5 way. Or am I being naive and missing something?

One of the cool things of the Z-2 was the tortoise binding which gave G&L a royal headache and could only be solved after consulting the people at Taylor guitars. Of course you are right that it would not take a lot to change the 5-way pickup selector to a 3-way and remove the middle pup. But then again, the Z-3 with a push-pull volume or tone control gives you the same pup combinations and more. So I think it is just not a very sound business decision to go for the smaller subset.

- Jos

I'll have to locate an ASAT Z-3 in a store sometime to listen to it.
I hear what you're saying about redundancy in producing a Z-2, but I have a prejudice against 3 pickup guitars--just can't get into them.