Mike Savage guitars

19/03/2022

I might as well call this post "Mike's guide to buying scrap guitars from marketplace/ebay" , talking you through the pros and cons of buying sub £75 musical istruments.
Disasters don't just happen, they are a chain of critical events...so, I am on holiday and see this lefty Yamaha for sale in the next village for £45 in "good condition, just needs some strings replacing". Just as I assumed it was in pretty terrible condition with missing parts, but I handed over £40 knowing that is fair for a decent lefty neck with Indian rosewood board. It really only needed a strip down, clean, feed the bare wood and rebuild the bridge with better saddles. After this I checked and secured the electrics and put it back together ready for a full set up. Total bench time was just over three hours, and parts cost of £12.

So what did I end up with for my £52 investment;

Cons:
The body is a bit beat up and no reasonable amount of bench time is likely to improve this.
Bench time, this would be a £100+ Luthier's Bill.
Needed parts, which is an easy way for these projects to become expensive or difficult.

Pros
This is a box-ticker for most modern players; very slim, comfortable neck, light weight (6.4lbs), super low action (I've got this slammed down to 0.8mm at the 12th on the treble side). It is a solid wood body (I think Ash), a serious piece of smooth and consistent rock maple for the neck and rosewood fingerboard sporting jumbo frets.
The HSS pup configuration with a 5 pos switch and master v/t controls is versatile and to the point.

Conclusion:
This is actually an amazingly good guitar for my modest investment, in fact, a good guitar is a good guitar regardless of price and this knocks a Fender player strat for playability and build quality without question. I may well have inadvertently replaced the only crappy part, which was the saddles, the rest is workable.

18/03/2022

My most recent project was this KCC P bass, an apparently unmissable Facebook marketplace bargain at £40 of our great British pounds complete with matching amp and a lead! It was in a "shed find" sort of condition but all I saw was the figured maple neck and decided it was a worthy project.
I'm guessing its a late 90s to early 00s Korean bass, but that is just a guess and it is hard to date barn finds by their condition. Cleaned up very nicely too, I was very pleased with myself right up until the point I went to adjust the neck and saw the problem. The issue is that beautiful figuring, as a Luthier I should have known that figuring is basically cranky wood grain and you have to pick just the right piece and use it correctly to avoid the neck warping, twisting or, like this, compressing at a soft point and leaving a 30 degree + kink around the 10th fret. I tried swapping necks but the one I had didn't look right so I got to trying a repair on the original neck, firstly I tried steaming it straight but cranky grain is a powerful force and it refused to fully correct the kink. Ok, so the only ways around this are to pop the frets and plane the fingerboard or replace the fingerboard. I got home from an 11 hour shift and got frisky with my fret pullers, planed the board and, in a spontaneous moment, made the decision to make it into a lined fretless. 2:40am I downed tools and had the job virtually done with just a setup remaining. With £40 and an evening spent I have my first ever fretless bass and turned a 7.25lb piece of fancy but useless wood into something my playing collection needed.
In my whole life I figure I had clocked up about 10 minutes on a fretless, needless to say the experience wasn't instantly forthcoming with rewards but it sounds great. It is amazing how lazy and sloppy playing a fretted bass makes you.
N.B please leave ripping out frets to professionals or maniacs.

12/11/2021

An interesting Hohner project

I found this old bass in an eBay auction, everything about the listing details made me cringe, the photos did nothing to change that preconception either! Those who know how it goes with buying "as-is" with a normally poor description to go by will know what I mean...so when you see a term such as "needs a new arm as this one is broken on the top" the mind begins to boggle at just what you are going to recieve! So, I walked away...not exactly, I thought it would be either a laugh, a challenge, a project base or at worst some original vintage parts. Yes, I invested £60 into a broken bass covered in paint, decals and stickers (like I said, this listing was one red flag after another).
The initial work went in two main phases;
1) dismantling everything, examining its condition and noting missing bits.
2) removing all artwork and cleaning everything back to wood or black.
This was accomplished in a day and to my amazement the body and fingerboard all cleaned up beautifully as did the chrome parts. The electronics were an easy fix too, two solder joints and some switch cleaner and all was good with the original pots and pickups.
The neck deserves its own chapter really, firstly because the "arm" appears to have been professionally repaired and that was the least of this necks worries. When I say professional, the tuner ferrules were not glued in, there is no clamp or glue marks and the head is solid...Good enough for me.
The neck is what makes this interesting because the nut is 42mm like a p bass and it also has smaller frets than any of the other examples of this model which all have 38mm j bass nut width and med/jumbo sized frets. I concluded this must be an earlier neck which suggests it was made at the beginning of the 1978-85 production range, another reason to double my efforts to save it rather than get a replacement neck.
Next hurdle with anything vintage and Japanese is the dreaded truss rod, and this one was seized in place with zero movement outside of that horrible sound of creaking. So I set it up best I could for a while and enjoyed it as it was, albeit with a little higher action than I would have liked.
A couple of weeks ago I got serious, took the neck off and pulled a few luthier's tricks out of my hat (more like Dutch courage really). Eventually I freed the rod and steamed the ski jump out and bringing the rod into play properly. My goodness did it make a difference to the neck, which is now a fast and easy player, and all that was left to complete the bass is making a scratch plate. Well, im not entirely happy with this one yet, but it compliments the 70s vibe well and makes a tidy looking vintage bass out of a worst case scenario!

09/10/2021

New bass day, a little eye catching number with a little known brand name. So a new toy and a bit of research for me too. The information I managed to find suggests the brand name was used in the 1990s for instruments sourced directly from various oriental manufacturers for the SMIRA (Scottish musical instrument retailers association). From the same post I gather the instruments were a mixed bag in terms of quality depending on which manufacturer was involved.
It turned up and I immediately took it to pieces, fed, adjusted the neck and gave it a good fret polish. The bass in not ridiculously light, nor overly heavy, the neck is pretty much like classic p bass or lawsuit era Japanese copies. It has jumbo frets, Rosewood fingerboard and generous proportions and fingerboard radius.
Plugged her in and, yeah, sounds great too!
If I had to guess at a maker I would suggest the Seinn (Shine) company in Korea, though this is more of a hunch than based on any solid evidence. Regardless, quite a pretty thing to brighten up the Saturday of anyone in earshot.

10/01/2021

For sale.
This is a 2007 left handed Mexican standard Fender Jazz bass in midnight wine. The bass is in good condition, there is a couple of dings but very little playwear and the frets look like new. I have added the pickguard which is a perfect fit and cut it a new bone nut. The pickups and electronics are stock and unmodified.
These mex standards are nothing short of great, they are to many quite a bit better than the player series that replaced them. This one is not only in an uncommon and discontinued colour but also has a proper Rosewood fingerboard. The only thing on this one that got past QC was the nut, which i replaced with a bone one, otherwise I see none of the classic alignment issues I have grown to expect.
I have checked the bass over fully, adjusted the truss rod and set it up to a high standard, it is ready to go and free from issues. Comes in the case pictured, which is a bit tatty, unlike the bass.

24/12/2020

Early Hohner basses
In 1978 Hohner introduced their first bass guitars to the UK market, the line consisted of four models, all made in Japan at the Moraida (apologies if this is misspelled) factory. There is practically no information about these available, even in the day and age of google! The only glimmer of info I managed to turn up was a product list which stated the HG421 and HG450 were two pickup models (i assume Jazz bass style) and HG455 and HG456fl as one pickup (precision style and fretless). I assume the 421 is the sunburst and 450 is black, but that is a pure guess based on what I have seen. Pictured is an early example of what I assume to be the HG450 with medium frets and an HG455 Precision type. These models were all made between 1978 and 1985 according to the one source. Over the years I've had a few of these basses, it never ceases to amaze me how under-appreciated these are, OK, the 455 tends to weigh a ton, but they sound great and anyone looking for a vintage feeling bass complete with that feeling of history that only older instruments have is heading for a bargain with one of these...if you find one in good playing condition of course.

22/03/2019

1920s Regal parlour

22/03/2019

Mike Savage guitars is now a member of reverb, so far seems to be a much better platform for advertising my wares than ebay... I can add pictures for a start!

Feel free to check out my listings.

20/03/2019

1930's Kay arch kraft archtop guitar

20/03/2019

20/03/2019

New, better pics of the '57 congress

20/03/2019

So, we are back on ebay after losing patience with the site some time back... And, I'm very nearly there again already as spent the morning trying unsuccessfully to add pictures to the listing! All I can say is thank goodness I'm a better luthier than I am with technology. So if you end up here from one of my listings, hello and welcome!