The ShadowMusic Web Community

Hi All

Following on from a post on here about first drum kit i thought it would be cool to see members first guitars?

Mine was one of these



Came from Argos in about 1996, no trem etc really slim body. Came with a little headphone amp etc. Sadly i sold it to a school friend and it got messed around with. Not sure where it ended up.

Then in 1997 i upgraded to what i thought was a Fender! But it was actually a Squier Strat really basic model in red of course. £129 brand new from a shop in Walthamstow. Still got it at my parents place currently in bits from when i messed around with it.



We all had to start somewhere......

Funnily enough, my brother actually had a Burns guitar - this is about 1980/1981. I have no idea which model it was. It was in pretty bad condition and I remember him stripping it down, repainting it, sorting out the pickups and electrics, etc. I remember it so clearly as it had one of those wide, flat tremolo arm/vibrato bars that I had only ever seen on the Shads' Burns Marvins. I am hoping that there might be some photos of it lying around somewhere...

My first guitar was a Futurama from a local second-hand shop. A few months after buying it, I saw Argent on OGWT. I thought Russ Ballards Strat looked ultra cool with the holes in it, so took a jigsaw to mine. It stayed like that for a year until I saw Andy Powell's Flying V, so off came the neck and down the local timber merchants for some wood and I made myself one. I still have some pictures of it somewhere, along with homemade fuzz and wah pedals.

Futurama II Deluxe for me in blue with Perspex front and cloth back!

Vox Duotone

My Hoyer (about 1963) which I unfortunately sold at that time (I was young and needed the money).

My first guitar was a Rosetti Airstream 2, which I got from my elder brother for a nominal price.



When he bought it, it was, in his words 'running black' - i.e., someone had painted it, then stood it up against a wall! He resprayed it red, but while I had it, it was every colour under the sun. It went through white, blue, metallic green and several others I now forget, and by the time the dustman got it, it was a sort of Morris Marina beige.



The photos are not of mine, as it predated my interest in photography. This one appeared on eBay a year or so ago.



I replaced it with a Zenta, a very poor copy of a Strat. I bought it from my Mum's Kays catalogue - £72.50 at £2 a week!



Again these photos are from eBay not of my actual guitar. Mine had a slightly different tremolo and white Strat-type knobs. (I've still got them! I'd swapped them for the black ones on a little amplifier I had, which I scrapped a couple of years back.) And the colour was even worse than this, a sort of red-to-black burst.



The trem was useless and the selector switch was a Les Paul-type 3-way toggle, which switched between the bridge pickup and the other two, so at least you could have all three on if you wanted.

Reached the 6 photo limit so here's the last one. It's a photo my girlfriend took of me with the Zenta in my first band in 1975.



I'm pleased to say I'm still in touch with the other two. The band was called ARC - wonder where we got that name from?

...Could have been worse. George Cowley's car in The Professionals had the number plate MOO 229R...

As a more recent girlfriend pointed out, 657B would have been a VERY silly name for a band ...