hammered
Well-known member
After you mentioned about them being an Edwards I was wondering if those are Edwards and they weren’t fessing up to it in the article . Just trippy that there’s no Gibson logo on the headstock
Michael Schenker has been playing a Gibson this past week
- Thread starter JohnnyGtar
- Start date
hammered
Well-known member
That’s a beauty , what Duncans do you have in there ?
Techdeth
RESIDENT ROCK PROFESSOR
Lyrica helps my nerve damage. Really helps tennis elbow for me
Thanks-I really do have it -- the Michael Schenker part might have been a lie.
I saw him with UFO in 95 at the Stone Palo Alto and he was using these channel switchers back then.
Amazing tone and amazing show.
hammered
Well-known member
Possibly we were at the same show . I saw the show at the The Edge in Palo Alto in August 1995. It was indeed awesome
Yup. I thought it was the Stone before the Edge?
Anyhow, it was many years and many brain cells ago. They opened with Mother Mary and it was incredible.
hammered
Well-known member
I’m remember The Stone in SF , went to many shows there back in the day
There was Keystone Berkeley and Palo Alto too.
Keystone SF was great back in the day. Lots of great bands went through that place.
As far as Schenker is concerned, the guy has kept his chops up better than most guys his age. He still has it.
I’ll always think of him with the Gibson V. That Dean was ugly as hell to me.
Kapo_Polenton
Well-known member
Sh-5 just like his Gibsons had.. Great sounding pickup. It's hot but the note separation is still there. It sounds great in VH1 shootouts too. Some people believe a prototype is the VH1 sound but not sure i buy it ( or care ) .
Hell yeah. So glad he sobered up and now he is looking and sounding light years better than in the mid 2000's there.
His influence on my playing is HUGE even though i'm not like a super fan or anything. just that european sense of melody is right up my ally. i listened to a lot of my grandparents german and swiss traditional music when i super young and i think that stuff led me to really liking guitarists like him, and Wolf Hoffman. Hoffman is like Schenker lite.
Hello, newbie here and huge MS fan.
I just noticed the Gibson's appearing after years of Dean. @Kapo_Polenton I spotted too the backdrop where the Dean headstock has been taped off!
I think the split black and white Vs start from the time he re-joined the Scorpions after UFO in the late 70's. There are photos/videos of him in UFO playing a white and a black Flying V, and I read somewhere that he couldn't decide if the black or the white was his favourite and he had them both painted both colours. One may have been his original medallion from the early UFO era. There are photos of a dot and a block one in the "One Night At Budokan" live LP gatefold. These are the guitars used in the Barden/Bonnet era MSG and are Gibsons!
He broke his guitars often and had Hamer fix them up. This Jol Dantzig page on the Wayback Machine explains a bit - https://web.archive.org/web/2010060...ntzig.com/hamerhist/artistpages/schenker.html
There is a really long YouTube video where one of the Hamer techs explains fixing his guitars, but I cannot find it right now. I will post it later when I locate it.
Edwards and other companies may have made a very accurate copy of them of course. There was an Aria model with the paint job too which did not look like a Gibson.
@hammered that Guitar World article showing the EMG and Shift 2000 equipped guitar from the later-80's era is fascinating! Shift 2000 was also known as the Washburn Wonderbar and had no springs, so did not need any routing to fit it. There is a photo of his rig from that era where the Marshalls are modded to fit into racks and it was all very late 1980's.
Times change but Michael remains an amazing guitarist!
I just noticed the Gibson's appearing after years of Dean. @Kapo_Polenton I spotted too the backdrop where the Dean headstock has been taped off!
I think the split black and white Vs start from the time he re-joined the Scorpions after UFO in the late 70's. There are photos/videos of him in UFO playing a white and a black Flying V, and I read somewhere that he couldn't decide if the black or the white was his favourite and he had them both painted both colours. One may have been his original medallion from the early UFO era. There are photos of a dot and a block one in the "One Night At Budokan" live LP gatefold. These are the guitars used in the Barden/Bonnet era MSG and are Gibsons!
He broke his guitars often and had Hamer fix them up. This Jol Dantzig page on the Wayback Machine explains a bit - https://web.archive.org/web/2010060...ntzig.com/hamerhist/artistpages/schenker.html
There is a really long YouTube video where one of the Hamer techs explains fixing his guitars, but I cannot find it right now. I will post it later when I locate it.
Edwards and other companies may have made a very accurate copy of them of course. There was an Aria model with the paint job too which did not look like a Gibson.
@hammered that Guitar World article showing the EMG and Shift 2000 equipped guitar from the later-80's era is fascinating! Shift 2000 was also known as the Washburn Wonderbar and had no springs, so did not need any routing to fit it. There is a photo of his rig from that era where the Marshalls are modded to fit into racks and it was all very late 1980's.
Times change but Michael remains an amazing guitarist!
Great video - I notice this has the standard 60's/70's "triangle" control layout that the latest Gibson 80's ebony Flying V's do not have.
I noticed when MS moved to Dean that their new guitars made for him had the same triangle control layout - Dean V's traditionally had the three-in-a-row 50's style layout. I guess he likes to have access to everything just where his fingers want it to be!
Hello,
Okay, here's the Hamer talk video. It's very long but here is a time stamp for the Schenker content.
That confirms the dot-inlay half-black, half-white V was created at the very end of his time in UFO in the 70's.
Lots of interesting stories on that big discussion. If you keep watching Curtis pulls out the Hamer V he made with a black and white paintjob after having owned the original for a while (listen to the story!).
I guess the Budokan-era block inlay one came later and he got another guitar shop to refinish it in the same way. In the 90's 00's before the Deans there were various other black and white finished Gibsons, some with pickup rings and some without.
If you watch this video of MSG live in 1983 towards the end of the Gary Barden era you can see the headstock of V he is playing has been repaired very...dramatically...with metal plates covering the front and back and presumably bolts all the way through.
Visually it's pretty murky to start with but the lighting gets better and you can see the headstock "repair" quite clearly in places as he is soloing.
Stellar playing from him though - he would have been about 28 years old there I think.
Okay, here's the Hamer talk video. It's very long but here is a time stamp for the Schenker content.
That confirms the dot-inlay half-black, half-white V was created at the very end of his time in UFO in the 70's.
Lots of interesting stories on that big discussion. If you keep watching Curtis pulls out the Hamer V he made with a black and white paintjob after having owned the original for a while (listen to the story!).
I guess the Budokan-era block inlay one came later and he got another guitar shop to refinish it in the same way. In the 90's 00's before the Deans there were various other black and white finished Gibsons, some with pickup rings and some without.
If you watch this video of MSG live in 1983 towards the end of the Gary Barden era you can see the headstock of V he is playing has been repaired very...dramatically...with metal plates covering the front and back and presumably bolts all the way through.
Visually it's pretty murky to start with but the lighting gets better and you can see the headstock "repair" quite clearly in places as he is soloing.
Stellar playing from him though - he would have been about 28 years old there I think.
turboblues
Active member
In 1954 we Gibson already had block inlays on the Les Paul Custom, so dot inlays are not typical of that era...
Blocks on Vs were 75-79 in terms of production I think, and then quite small unlike the LP Custom. I don't know what the rationale for issuing them was.
But I think the Flying V is an interesting case regarding Gibson design aesthetics anyway. Both the 50's, 60's and 70's models all had the controls on the scratchplate, a decision that on any other Gibson would be deemed cost-cutting, or a departure at least from the classic through-body-control-cavity arrangement.
Both the early Vs and the 67s-onwards were dots as standard too (until the 75 option), and though there were short-runs like Bolan's walnut model, there appear to have been no student/standard/deluxe type catalogue/production options like P90s, binding, crown inlays, ebony fretboard, gold plating that you see on the variants of Les Paul, SG, Firebird etc?
Now over 60 years later we have seen so many copies, variants, custom models, user-modifications and evolution of styles and requirements, meaning the true intent of the designer and manufacturer may well have been lost or misunderstood. But with our passion for guitars and all their variety, perhaps we are the winners if for the most part we can still get to look at them!