The speaker baffle featured a classical guitar design (!) with “Tempo” written in little circles on the bridge! Substitute a lyre for the classical guitar and you’d swear this was a Premier, made by Manhattan neighbor Multivox, so that might, indeed, be the story there. The picture is in black-and-white, but the look is remarkably like Premier amps of the time, so a tan and brown color would not be a bad guess.
The cabinet was covered in two-tone leatherette. This was a tube amp with two instrument and one microphone input, heavy-duty 8″ Alnico 5 speaker, volume and tone controls, and a pilot light. One Super-Sensitive pickup sat nestled under the fingerboard, and volume and tone controls were “built-in.”Īccompanying the Tempo guitar was the Merson Tempo Guitar-Amp. This had a typical moveable/adjustable compensated bridge, elevated pickguard and cheap trapeze tailpiece. The fingerboard was probably rosewood with four dots (beginning at the fifth fret). Available source material is hard to see, but these appear not to have any soundholes. The guitar was finished in a shaded mahogany with a pair of widely separated white lines around the edges.
The Merson Tempo was an auditorium-sized archtop with a glued-in neck, a harrow center-peaked head which looks almost Kay.
#WHAT WOOD WAS 1970 EKO RANGER GUITAR MADE FROM PLUS#
This was the Tempo Electric Spanish Guitar which listed at $59.50 plus $11.50 for a Dura-bilt case. The first Merson guitar advertised in The Music Trades appeared in the December, 1948, issue. Little more is known of the origins of Merson, but it was already marketing Merson-brand archtop electric guitars and amplifiers in the late ’40s, when the company was located in New York City. At some point, Merson was taken over by Ernie Briefel. Merson was a distribution organization founded by a man named Bernie Mersky. If you have catalogs, ads or pictures of guitars that can help fill in some of the blanks, please let me know (Michael Wright, PO Box 60207, Philadelphia, PA 19102). Unfortunately, not many reference materials are available to document in complete detail, but we can hit some of the highlights, and illuminate a number of relationships along the way. And in this context, Univox is a part of the much larger story that included names you probably see everywhere but know little about, since they’re off the beaten path, names such as Tempo, Giannini, Westbury, Korg and much more! You’re going to have to pay attention here, because a whole bunch of familiar and not-so-familiar names crisscross through this story. Univox was not, as you might guess, just another isolated Japanese import, but was part of a much larger story of its importer, the Merson company.
Univox was one of the first brands to make copies, and the brand achieved a fair amount of national visibility and distribution. One name that comes to the mind of anyone who has looked at guitars hanging on racks is Univox, a name generally associated with the “copy era” of the ’70s. While we tend to think of the automobile industry in ethnocentric terms, it’s impossible to think of “cars in America” without considering Volks-wagen Beetles, Toyota Corollas or Datsun Zs (Yugos and Renaults deliberately ignored). Among the major players in the American market were the many importers and distributors who enriched the guitar landscape with instruments – usually at the lower ends of the market brought in from other countries, primarily from Europe, Asia, and to a lesser extent, Latin America. While most think of the history of American guitars in terms of American manufacturers, if you’ve followed this column you know the tradition is much richer. 1974 or ’75 Univox Hi Flyer Mosrite copy with the later Univox see- through humbuckers.
0 kommentar(er)
