OK. A little bit of a long post. Many, many years ago after a career reversal I had to sell a Les Paul to make a house payment. After recovery, I wanted a similar instrument, but a little lighter. At that time Epiphone had just introduced their Kat series of guitars. The local music store had an Alley Kat that played really well. I purchased it. And like all of my guitars, I modified it to suit my playing:
1) The bridge pickup is a good Alnico V magnet, @8.5 kohms' worth of wire, but didn't have the bite. I measured it, and it had been installed 1/8 inch too far away from the bridge. So I took the pickup off, dremeled 1/8 inch out of the top on the bridge side and re-mounted the pickup. Bite restored. There were two small braces glued underneath the top at this position. The slight dremeling helped free up the top for better tone and resonance without compromising the structural integrity of the top, which is essentially 335-style or ES175-style laminate.
2) The neck pickup was too weak. So I ordered a bridge version of the mini-humbucker, which has more wire on it. Nice, full sound; a better match to the bridge humbucker.
3) Push-Pull on the bridge pickup volume control with a Rickenbacker-style in-line capacitor to give it a little jangle when desired.
4) Push-Pull on the tone control to switch between the standard .022 tone capacitor and a .033 to give a little more mellowness/darkness when desired.
5) No pickguard, so I took a pickguard, slightly trimmed it to fit, and installed it.
At the time, Alley Kat guitars were advertised with a rosewood fingerboard and a 1.69 inch wide nut. I think this is a prototype for a series of specials that were never issued. The nut is 1.72 wide and the fretboard is ebony. Oh, it feels good! I installed DR Legend flats in 11's to get a great jazz guitar tone. I played it for several years as my primary guitar until I went to playing bass almost exclusively.
Fast forward to this season. I live in the Springfield, Missouri area. So as you can imagine,
EVERYTHING is Route 66 this year for the centenary of the naming of the highway, the telegram to Washington naming the highway coming from the Committee which met here downtown. I grew up in a little town on Route 66 east of Springfield, so what is nostalgia to others is simply the way life was then for my family and me. But I digress.
I play brass in the regional University Community Band. One of the pieces for the upcoming concert is a fantasy composition called, of course,
Sixty-Six. It incorporates snippets of familiar songs, but only in style, not as a medley or anything. That said, it has a guitar part. The director of bands for the university found out I played guitar, which I had started reading charts, both guitar and bass, in their summer band camp fifty years ago. So I volunteered to play the part. WHEW! It had been decades since I played what is essentially classical guitar. But I took my Epiphone and jumped back into it. This will be fun. Pix of the guitar and the guitar part attached.
