Another negative story
full of anger and rage. The motivation behind
this guitar, the new Zachary R480.
It was 1981 and I had a shiny nickel plated trumpet, which
I received as a present just a few months before. I was not using the trumpet
any more for school band. I was never good at the trumpet. It didn't come
naturally to me. I thought it was goofy for anyone to play the trumpet.
I wanted to ROCK! All the testosterone driven heavy metal of the 80s was
just starting. I began playing the trumpet and the guitar at around the
same time but unlike the trumpet the guitar just felt totally natural from
day one, while the trumpet was kind of gross to me. Spitting inside of a
brass tube was not my idea of making music. I was too much centered around
working with my hands and my touch. The piano also involves touch, so I
could always relate to that as well. Anything to do with hands was right
for me.
Regardless, I should have kept that trumpet, it was a brand
new Olds Special, one of the last trumpets made by that American company
before it went out of business in the late 70s. Also that trumpet was a
present to me from my grandmother. Mistakes are always made.
As you may have noticed years ago every city had at least
one music store owned by some cheesy guy. You know the type, with a tacky
suit and the phony smile to go with it, with unnaturally white teeth and
the gold fillings? Perfectly combed hair all greased up. The guy looked
like he would have been perfect selling you a casket at a funeral parlor,
insisting that you try it on for size and pressuring you to buy it now to
get his special discount or lose the opportunity for ever. These characters
just give me the creeps.
Somehow you felt like a victim in such a music store, the
experience nothing short of being molested. You left the store feeling you
did something dirty, like walking into some extreme hard-core sex shop or
similar moral shortcoming. Somehow you regretted, almost in shame, even
walking into such a place and promise yourself you will never go back there
again, all the while hoping that nobody discovers you were ever there. A
sense of shame comes over you after the experience. However, just as with
the sex shop, you ended up back there again for no explainable reason, other
than human weakness. The store owner was always smiling, but his salesmen
were slick, street-smart, young thugs who would watch their boss for every
sign, surreptitiously working together in supported of the "hunt",
taking their cues and carrying out the dirty work in closing the sale. While
the owner was smiling and padding you on the back, these bully sales guys
gave you the chills with their threatening looks, with the implication of
what would happen had you decided to leave the store without making a purchase.
As a kid you feel 2 inches tall in such a situation. Every city had one
or more of these music stores. Some more traumatic than others. My city
actually had two of these cheesy music stores, with a very similar vibe.
Both were scary places for a kid, not unlike dungeons of cheese and horror.
There was no such thing as chain stores back then. No big corporate, sterile
Guitar Center. ... Come to think of it, I will take those cheesy dungeons
instead.
So, I had a trumpet but had no electric guitar. I needed
and wanted an electric to compliment my cheap acoustic. I walked into this
cheesy music store and among all the generic boring late 70s "crappier
than crap" (pre CNC) Fender guitars hanging up, I spotted something
different. I liked it instantly because it was different from anything I
was tired of seeing in every music store. What was it? I knew what it was.
Being technically gifted from birth, I knew all my guitar brands and models.
It was a Rickenbacker bass... but wait a minute... with a guitar neck on
it. How cool was that? It was brand new but sitting in this cheesy store
for years I bet, because nobody wanted it. It was "new old stock"
even then, made sometime in the late 70s and the cheesy guy could not sell
it to anyone. You can understand his smile when he noticed my interest.
I guess others did not see the cool factor I did. Without any further consideration
I knew I wanted it and determined to get it. A Rickenbacker guitar with
a bass body. I thought it was a great concept actually. Very novel.
I always loved that body shape on the Rick bass. With the
matching headstock, the perfect curves of the body and head, I thought it
was nothing short of beautiful art. I will give credit where its due and
whoever drew the shape of this guitar was artistically endowed. Being young
and stupid and knowing a bit less about guitars than I do now, I never considered
anything other than its looks. I did not even consider that it mattered
how it felt, played and sounded. I figured that if a guitar looked good
to me, it was sure to also feel, play and sound great automatically. Looks
determines how good a guitar is, right? ... LOL.
I just described a modern day PRS owner. I was very much like a PRS shopper
back then. In fact, had PRS been around at that time, I would have surely
bought one, without even thinking what matters about a guitar. That is how
stupid I was as a kid. The sad part is, many get old never advancing from
that high level of ignorance.
The cheesy music store owner gave me a $300 trade value
for my trumpet, which was worth $500 and then I paid the difference of $500
for the Rickenbacker 480. It was a lot of money back then for a kid. It
was a done deal and he had a huge smile on his face, his white teeth blinded
me and I could not take my eyes of his gold fillings. He padded me on the
back and shook my hand. What had I done? I somehow knew I would never be
the same again. Somehow I felt I just took part in some immoral act.
I learned quickly from my mistake. Even with my limited
guitar knowledge at the time, I soon realized after making the purchase
that this guitar was the worse piece of shit in the history of the guitar.
I still liked the look of it though, which made the whole experience with
the guitar even more bitter. The artistic shape of the thin body and matching
headstock, with all the chrome and the fancy cast metal tailpiece with the
"R" logo - it was about as practical, high performance and as
usable as a 50s car with those large fins, thin whitewall tires and the
huge chrome bumpers. What I found out is that this thing was virtually unplayable.
The neck was so narrow I could not fit my fingers on the strings, they were
so cramped. A Fender would be considered "wide" compared to this
thing. It must have been made specifically for toddlers or maybe Tom Petty.
Despite having a Rosewood fretboard, it was still covered over with thick
gloss paint. I don't even think the finish was traditional lacquer. It felt
all plastic to me. The combination of thick paint on a very narrow fingerboard
with super tiny frets, does not exactly inspire great playing for anyone.
Nothing but a struggle and frustration. It also had binding on the neck,
which made the effective use of the narrow fingerboard even more narrow.
The headstock did not have enough of a break angle for proper string vibration.
The neck moved sideways in the neck pocket, no matter how hard I tightened
the neck screws. The pickups were nonadjustable for height and were terribly
weak and wimpy. The sound of the guitar was totally lame, with no sustain,
it sounded like a tin can. That bridge was hideous, sitting on 4 screws
and I believe it was even mounted in the wrong position, making it impossible
to get proper intonation from it. To top it all off, this thing would just
not stay in tune no matter what I did. It was obviously not made to be played
but to look like a guitar wall ornament. What company would do this, I wondered?
Already my anger was brewing and I was heading to do what I was borne to
do.
I tried everything. After paying to have it professionally
set up a few times, I realized it was pointless and no improvement resulted.
I even got so desperate as to glue the neck in myself, even though it was
a bolt-on neck. I made this thing into both a bolt-on and a set neck, all
at the same time. I just wanted it to stop moving in the neck cavity. Each
time the neck moved the Rickenbacker lost its tuning completely. I then
took it to the best repair tech in town and had him replace the bridge pickup
with a super powerful Schaller pickup and he also added a mini-switch as
a coil selector. All this housed in a brand new black pickguard. He did
a nice job I remember. If I remembered his name, I would credit him here.
Well, I still did not like it. It now had this powerful
pickup but the guitar itself was not functional. It was not producing a
healthy sound to begin with, so the pickup was just picking up a junky tone.
Now the junky tone was just a lot louder. By this time I was so frustrated
and had wasted so much money on it, that I just wanted to get rid of it.
I did not want to ever see it again. It was making me hate playing the guitar.
I then went around to every music store seeing what I could trade it in
for. Do all you eBay rats even remember a day before eBay? Probably not.
I was ready to take anything for it before I threw it in the garbage somewhere.
Had there been eBay at that time, idiots around the world would have gladly
paid a lot of money for it. Idiots tend to do that.
The first thing which was available for a trade was a really
low end Ibanez, with very poor balance, totally neck heavy. However, at
least the neck of the Ibanez was playable and it stayed in tune much better,
so I basically grabbed it and straight-traded the music store sales guy
for it. I was desperate to get rid of that Rickenbacker any way I could
before throwing it into the river in anger. The Ibanez was only worth $300,
so the sales guy thought he really ripped me off but I knew who really got
ripped off in the end... whoever ended up with that Rickenbacker.
Ever since this experience I found out the hard way how
crappy and what an embarrassment Rickenbacker is. What a total disgrace
for anyone to make this level of guitar atrocity and in the USA for that
matter. I met the owner of Rickenbacker at a NAMM show and he came across
to me like he should be doing something else, not involving anything to
do with guitars. Here is a good example of someone being in the guitar business
when they shouldn't be. In my experience when someone inherits a company,
it really shows. They concentrate on fancy finishes, while the guitars cannot
even function as guitars. Usually these people are not players so they cannot
really relate to it. I suppose this is what their customers want. Any improvement
would mean the end of the company. Its a sad scenario for sure. If there
was any improvement to the old crap they had made for decades, the typical
Rickenbacker customer would not want it. I couldn't live in that world.
The next question is, what kind of an idiot would buy or play this crap?
It makes me angry just thinking about it. Its disrespectful on every level
to create such crap, even if you can sell it. Its just ethically wrong.
I am convinced that had John Lennon been given a real guitar, he would have
become a world class shredder instead of "Love, Love me Do" and
the rest of that liberal crap.
This experience has left a profound influence on me, negative
as it was. The whole bad taste in my mouth just lingered on ever since;
the memory of the strange music store where I bought it from and the embarrassing
excuse of a Rickenbacker guitar. My goal was to make this situation right!
To correct my bad experience. I still had the desire however to own a Rickenbacker
480 because I still loved the shape. It was so unfortunate because this
guitar had so much potential if done by the right builder. Rickenbacker
should not be building this guitar. It should be made by someone who actually
knows and cares about guitars. Years later, after God spoke to me, asked
that I climb to the top of the mountain and made me into a guitar builder,
it gave me the chance to finally correct my whole disgusting Rickenbacker
experience and make it right once and for all. Also to make the Rickenbacker
480 right. The guitar deserved it. I had to save it. Make it into an actual
and real guitar for the first time, not just a wall ornament.
It was always in the back of my mind to do this project.
So here it is! The shape of a Rickenbacker 480 but that is where the Rick
stops. Its of course a Zachary all the way. Those who own a Zachary, can
easily imagine what this guitar is like, what it feels and sounds like.
Those who have never played a Zachary can just pick up any Rickenbacker
and they will know what a Zachary is NOT.
Since the body is so thin, I can get away with using heavier
wood, however the wood I chose is exceptionally heavy and very hard, almost
like Ebony. This wood was actually used as a stair step in its previous
life. In fact, one side of this board was rounded off when I got it, so
I am sure it was a stair step. I don't know what type of wood it is but
its the same wood which is used for fancy hardwood floors as well. The body
wood was the stair step and the hardwood floor boards were what I used for
the neck of this guitar: 061008 Its the same
type of wood, whatever it is. Even with the thin body of the R480, the guitar
still weighs in at 9.7 lbs (Les Paul territory) due to this very heavy wood.
The result is tremendous sustain and the whole guitar responds like a harp.
Its like the body is made of concrete. The pickups I chose are very powerful
and add to the huge sound. The scale is a long 26", adding even more
to the huge sound, (the original Rickenbacker 480 is only a 24.75"
scale). With 10s on, it sounded like a harp, so I changed to ZOG 9s to tame
it a bit and make it sound more like a guitar. I would hate to think what
it would be like with ZOG 11s. With its low action, I can see this being
perfect as a Stanley Jordan tapping guitar.
Do something Green today ... don't buy anything made in
China.
YES WE CAN! Shame on you America.
Players Wanted !
