NEVILLE’S ADVOCATE ...
Neville Marten casts his mind back to star products that have made an impression during his decades of writing about them
One criticism that we occasionally get at Guitarist is, “You never give anything a bad review.” Well, that’s true to an extent, but only because we rarely see anything that falls below par. But we also like to sort the wheat from the chaff so we can point you in the direction of the good stuff. Having given Patrick Eggle’s brilliant Macon Single-Cut a Guitarist Gold Award this month, I started thinking about other products that left a mark, due to pushing boundaries of quality, innovation, or just plain, “God, I want it!”
The first was an early PRS Custom 24. Remember the poster and full-page ad with three of them together, in red, blue and the famous vintage yellow? Well, it was just like the yellow one and we’d never seen guitar craftsmanship like it. On the back of my review Paul offered to build me one, so Geoff Whitehorn and I sat down and ordered essentially the same instrument, on the same day, at one of our Guitarist shows. That was 1989 and I kept mine until only recently.
Another one that bowled us over was a sonic blue, ‘Made in Japan’ Fender Strat. We opened the box in the office, back then in Ely, Cambridgeshire, and were astonished. We put it on the cover with a Vox AC30, in case that jogs your memory.
Then there was our first Taylor. I mentioned in last month’s 724ce Koa review that Martyn Booth had done the story; he was staggered at how an acoustic guitar builder could make something so darned perfect. It was a revelation, and caused (as did PRS) an industry resting on past glories, to sit up and take notice.
And the first Collings. Oh dear. Another ‘bloody hell’ moment. This thing roared like a cannon, but again looked like it had been milled out of stainless steel, such was the accuracy of build, inside and
