gringopig's guitars
1964 Fender Duo Sonic
1964 Fender Duo Sonic. I bought this in Toronto in 1989 in a pawn shop on Queen street at the foot of Yonge Street. At the time there was lots of funky little pawn shops selling all sorts of stuff and this one shop had an entire wall of Dobros and National Resophonic guitars, Teisco solidbodies and, of course, this rather modified Duo Sonic. Not quite as it is today however as 1970's mod guy had been at it!
Click on gallery for larger version
My first vintage Fender. Someone had committed some terrible outrage on it, stripping the original olympic white finish and applying some awful poopy brown stain that looked like boot polish and replacing the pickup covers with Stratocaster style covers that exposed the pole pieces as well as adding Stratocaster control knobs. Luckily, everything else was intact and the pickups are stamped 1964 in yellow ink as they should be. The pickguard is original as well. I sourced correct pickup covers and knobs but it still was poopy brown™.
I gave the body to Chris Richards of 3R guitars and he stripped the poop off and gave it a correct nitro cellulose re-finish and aged it to be as it would have been through time without the outrage of stripping old finishes that seemed to be a popular pastime in the 1970's.
It turned out rather well!
An interesting feature of these guitars is that, in the middle position, the pickups are wired in series and the tone is comparable to a humbucker and has similar noise cancellation. It is noticeably thicker in tone than it is with individual pickups selected.
These pickups are essentially the same as Stratocaster pickups of the same era but with flat pole pieces.
The guitar is a 22.5" scale, which is 3/4 scale as marked on the neck heel. This scale was increased to 24" around the time of the Mustang and Duo Sonic II but the Duo Sonic and Musicmaster guitars up to 1964 had this shorter scale which requires a heavier gauge of string. I use 11-56 on this but you could go up to 12's maybe with flat saddles. The thinner grooves start to cause problems with strings heavier than 56 on the low E.
I have just bought and fitted compensated saddles as can be seen in the gallery above in the later photos and I think these have made a great deal of difference. With 12-54 now fitted to the guitar, the original bridge just can't hold the string thickness and these saddles have a compensated slot for each string. I had to buy longer 6/32" diameter hex grub screws for the inner 4 positions as the radius requires the middle barrel to be higher than the supplied grub screws allow. I got the saddles from Crazyparts in Germany and the grub screws from a company called Westfield Fasteners in the UK who seem to do all sorts of imperial and metric parts which can be used on guitar. Simple hardware sold by guitar parts suppliers is often extortionate and it's just simple hardware!
