Guitar Gear

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I dig writing this blog because I meet a lot of cool people; one of them is Phil Vickman of Fat Tone Guitars. I call him occasionally to hook him up with information on various gear manufacturers, and we end up talking about some kind of gear. Yesterday’s conversation ended with Phil mentioning that he just got the Eastwood Breadwinner in, and is really digging it! So I did a bit of poking around…

Since Eastwood Guitars opened their doors, they’ve created faithful reproductions of vintage guitars of yesteryear at a fraction of the cost of the actual vintage gear. That’s been their shtik from day one. Even though I have yet to purchase an Eastwood guitar, I have played a few, and the thing that I dig about that company is that their replicas aren’t of classic, mainstream guitars (can you say “Les Paul” and “Stratocaster”); rather, they’ve placed their focus on the more avant garde styles of vintage guitars.

Among them is their latest offering, the Breadwinner, introduced at the 2009 NAMM show. I’m usually not moved by avant garde guitar styles, but there’s something about this guitar that really speaks to me. The Breadwinner was originally produced by Ovation, and was their first foray into a solid body guitar. From what I’ve been able to glean about its history, this guitar’s shape was both for form and function, its ergonomic design shaped specifically for playing comfort. That’s totally cool!

This replica and update features some pretty cool things, among them switchable active/passive humbuckers, which give this guitar lots of tonal possibilities. The body is solid mahogany, with a bolt-on maple neck, and uses Gotoh hardware. Very nice.

For more information, check out the Eastwood Guitars web site! If you’re interested in buying the guitar, go to Fat Tone Guitars. Phil’s great to work with, and he’s really knowledgeable about the gear he carries!

Here’s a video demo of the guitar that I found. The guitar is played clean, and the sound quality of the demo is only okay, so I suggest you go to a local Eastwood dealer to see if you can play one of these bad boys…

[youtubehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZFoP8zQOnQ]