Anyone a fan of Burns/Baldwin guitars?
- PorkyPrimeCut
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Re: Anyone a fan of Burns/Baldwin guitars?
Are you guy some kind of tag team? This is golden!!
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- mgeek
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Re: Anyone a fan of Burns/Baldwin guitars?
Joining in the zzombie thread with some rambling thoughts!
Burns were *great* at making really complicated, overthought guitars that just sort of missed the point in some way or another. In terms of build quality they were up there with Fender, it's all really well executed, it's just ... odd
I had an original double six, which looked amazing but:
1/ It weighed like 12,13 pounds. Huge body made out of solid sycamore(ie, maple) with a modest belly carve and normal individual pickup routing rather than a swimming pool, which might have helped. They dngaf about the weight of their guitars.
2/ The 3 chrome covered single coils were 14k each, they didn't really have any of the brightness you'd want from a 12 string. Even with a treble boost getting a good jangle out of it was impossible.
All their guitars are like that in one way or another, trem systems with 482726 moving parts, split coil low impedance pickups that basically just sound tinny, loads of guitars that are 23 3/8s scale because they spoke to a bunch of jazzers who told them about how hard it was to stretch to make weird chord shapes. The Marvin is a decent guitar though the necks are often impossibly skinny, the pickups are strattish, but it has the Hank Marvin association which is mostly only cool if you're 70+ years old. Aside from that the best things are the budget models like the Sonic and Nu Sonic. Just simple well made guitars with nice sounding pickups. Still... the former especially is ridiculously small, so again falls into the 'what were they thinking' category
Anyway I'm a glutton for punishment, just bought a Vista Sonic bass from 62-64 that I'm planning to rebuild. It's gonna be heavy
Burns were *great* at making really complicated, overthought guitars that just sort of missed the point in some way or another. In terms of build quality they were up there with Fender, it's all really well executed, it's just ... odd
I had an original double six, which looked amazing but:
1/ It weighed like 12,13 pounds. Huge body made out of solid sycamore(ie, maple) with a modest belly carve and normal individual pickup routing rather than a swimming pool, which might have helped. They dngaf about the weight of their guitars.
2/ The 3 chrome covered single coils were 14k each, they didn't really have any of the brightness you'd want from a 12 string. Even with a treble boost getting a good jangle out of it was impossible.
All their guitars are like that in one way or another, trem systems with 482726 moving parts, split coil low impedance pickups that basically just sound tinny, loads of guitars that are 23 3/8s scale because they spoke to a bunch of jazzers who told them about how hard it was to stretch to make weird chord shapes. The Marvin is a decent guitar though the necks are often impossibly skinny, the pickups are strattish, but it has the Hank Marvin association which is mostly only cool if you're 70+ years old. Aside from that the best things are the budget models like the Sonic and Nu Sonic. Just simple well made guitars with nice sounding pickups. Still... the former especially is ridiculously small, so again falls into the 'what were they thinking' category
Anyway I'm a glutton for punishment, just bought a Vista Sonic bass from 62-64 that I'm planning to rebuild. It's gonna be heavy
- hansbrinker
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Re: Anyone a fan of Burns/Baldwin guitars?
I've dug them ever since I saw Edwyn Collins' Nu-Sonic on the cover of Orange Juice's Rip It Up album in 1982.
Here's a better shot of it... and he still owns it to this day!
Here's a better shot of it... and he still owns it to this day!
- Tele295
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Re: Anyone a fan of Burns/Baldwin guitars?
Does anyone know what size screw attached the vibrato arm?
Jill Martini & The Shrunken Heads - all aloha, all the time
- UlricvonCatalyst
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Re: Anyone a fan of Burns/Baldwin guitars?
I have to confess to kind of wanting one of those because of the Trish Keenan connection, but that said the Split Sound seems like it might be their most interesting guitar.hansbrinker wrote: ↑Mon Nov 28, 2022 9:33 pmI've dug them ever since I saw Edwyn Collins' Nu-Sonic on the cover of Orange Juice's Rip It Up album in 1982.