New Guitar Day: Guild Bluesbird

Back in 2006 I saw my first Guild Bluesbird.  Even though it was on a blowout sale, there was no way I could afford even 1/20th of it back then.  However, it never stopped me from wanting one.  My decision to acquire a Bluesbird ended up becoming pretty easy as of late.

Ever since Gibson came under new management they have become even bigger jack-holes than they have been in the past.  When they decided to sue my hometown Dean Guitars I knew that was it.  I had it with Gibson and thus Epiphone guitars.  I decided to sell off a number of guitars, two of them being Epiphones.

So I decided to sell off four guitars to purchase a Guild Bluesbird.  It just so happened that a really nice one came across Reverb.com a month ago.  I made the choice to pull the trigger, and it purchase it.  There were a few good things about it, and a few not so great things.

Now, the Guild Bluesbird has changed designs over the years.  I wanted one that was made in the Rhode Island plant between the late 90's and early 2000's.  This model is built like a Les Paul, but is completely hollow in places.  It's actually a pretty lightweight model.  It also came stock with Seymour Duncan 59' pickups.

I really liked the flame top, thinner style neck (for a Les Paul style guitar), and overall sound and feel of the guitar.  One thing the seller didn't disclose to me was that the guitar was a 2nd.  I looked it over and couldn't find anything wrong at first.

But once I set the guitar up I saw what the problem was.  The guitar neck was back-bowed at the lower register.  That means no matter how low I set the action the strings would be a hair high from the 12th to 22nd frets.  If this was an overseas guitar it would have passed inspection, but for a higher quality company like Guild, the back-bow made it a 2nd.

I know a lot of people would have sent it back, but the seller had it priced correctly for a 2nd.  The sale also included an original Guild hard-shell case and free shipping.  As the positives outweighed the negatives I decided to keep it.

Here are the photos:

I ended up setting it up in two stages.  First, I gave it a quick set-up and string change.  It was already set-up pretty well, but I gave it a few tweeks to my liking.

Today I put her on the bench and did a little more in depth work.  I made sure to take photos so I'll go over the work I did with the corresponding photo.  Here's my bench.  Yes, I know.  I need to clean it up a bit.

The one thing I wanted to do was change out the resistors.  They had cheap metal film caps in there so I upgraded them to Tropical Fish caps.

Here's the before shot with the original caps.

And here is the after shot with the new caps.

As I mentioned earlier it came stock with Seymour Duncan 59' pickups.  Something I like to do is change the Alnico 5 magnet of the neck pickup to an Alnico 2.  It's an inexpensive way to change the sound without having to buy a new pickup.

The thing I hate about changing magnets is taking a cover off the pickup.  They are serious about soldering it on there.  It's not hard to take it off, it's just time consuming.  I don't want to destroy the pickup.  After a bit of time I successfully changed out the magnet.

One thing I noticed when I originally set the guitar up was that it had been fret-dressed at least once, and possibly twice.  There's not much life left in the frets so I'm going to have to perform a complete re-fret in the future.

But for now she's a fun guitar to play with.  I've got everything set up how I like it.  Again, it just comes down to needing a re-fret down the road.  I played a short sound test, and liked what I heard.  But this means I'm going to have to put the foot down on myself, and hold off buying guitars for a long time.  Let's see how successful I am.  Probably not much.