ShortScale.org

Between the Telecaster and the Stratocaster?

I posted about this guitar before. It is an Esquire with a neck date from 1950 owned by my friend Jim Harms at My Music Store. I think Jim paid $250 for it about 20 years ago.You can see that it is not a prodution model but rather an R&D test bed used for testing pickups and tremelo

What is most interesting is the tremolo which has a three brass barrel saddles on the front. I think my friend once told me that it is a three spring tremolo which means it could be one of the first that Leo built. It is definitively a historic guitar. Maybe Phil O'Keefe knows something about it?

almost as ugly as this:

Haha,I posted about the Esquire on the Telecaster forum and and one of the members there shared this info about the guitar:

"That guitar originally belonged to a popular country player in the 50s (don't know his name). Thru some dumb luck, some relative of his ended up with it, didn't know what the heck he had and just wanted to get rid of it. At first sight, anyone would probably have guessed he had what WAS a great vintage piece, before someone destroyed it. Good thing someone eventually took a deeper look and figured out exactly what it is. It is 100% a legit prototype from Leo's workbench.

In the 50s, Leo was getting input from players about features that they wanted to (famously the Strat came from that input). At that time the Les Paul and some Gretsch designs were getting around to players and Leo was trying to make the guitar everyone wanted from the designs that were going around. The trem (his answer to Fred's Bigsby wiggle stick) and the toggle on the upper bout, all seem like likely responses to those other designs.

This piece is all legit, each piece has been properly checked for date stamps, etc. The owner has taken everything apart to verify things and then started figuring out the back-story so there was no question. The owner of this particular piece is also one of the absolute nicest, most respected and knowledgeable guitar people I have ever met in my life and his shop is great. If you are ever in our neck of the woods, stop in and just start a conversation with him and you will inevitably end up in the back workshop and he'll just pull out crazy awesome guitars, one after another."

It's legit but it's legitly ugly.

honeyiscool wrote:It's legit but it's legitly ugly.

Haha,well,it was just built for testing components in the workshop not to sell.Also it was probably in use before the Stratocaster body had been designed so Leo only had one design to work off of.

Any pics of the back?

cooterfinger wrote:Any pics of the back?

I don't have any.