I think I spent less than $1500 on the whole project. Mine were a bit of a strange story - I bought a mutt for about $750 that turned out to be a '58 neck on a '63 or '64 refin body and a load of changed parts, so I was scouting for original parts and found a 50s original finish body and the gold pickguard then six months later I spotted a '63 neck and thought it'd be nice to reunite it with an appropriate body, so I bought that and assembled a second one with the spare body from the first. I wouldn't want them as my only guitars but I used to used them in a particular band where the other guitarist liked really swampy, murky neck pickup tones and my little Duo Sonic would suit comfortably above him in the mix, so they had a useful role for me for a while and I still play them every now and then. I think they struggle a bit in standard tuning with the super short scale - 10s feel too floppy, 12s the tension is probably right but they feel like telegraph poles on such a dainty neck - so I keep one of them with 9s tuned to G rather than E and the other in a kind of quasi tenor guitar tuning in fifths. I have two of them, a '58 Duo Sonic and a '63 Musicmaster with the single pickup. But it wasn't even a functional instrument with the tuning stability so atrocious. like AVRI fender, and a JV fender, and some other stuff. The overall feel of the guitar seemed to beat the other newer guitars in that price range. However clearly these were intended to be cheap guitars, but not sure what their list price would have been compared to strats and teles, and what their list price would be calculated for inflation.Ĭould this guitar be a good investment? And could it be an actual player if the tuners were replaced? Or is there a reason these guitars are 10% as much as a desirable refinished strat from 61? (most 61s I have seen on reverb are around 25k refinished whereas this duo sonic was about 2400) And it was actually something I could afford. Ultra light weight, nice neck and fretboard, great looks, pretty good sound, all original but refinished. But that was just because there wasn't enough wrappings.Īside from tuning stability, it seemed like a great guitar. Now I've seen my own guitar with vintage gotoh tuners do this one time, when I accidentally trimmed too much off the high e. Every time I bent the e and b strings, it would knock it several cents flat, like way bad out of tune. Then I did some testing of the tuning stability. Plastic knobs and hard to get it tuned up. Intonation was good, but tuners were bad. I put it back in standard and did some testing. I gave it a try and it was in open tuning. So today I went to a music shop and a guy was playing a 1961 fender duo sonic.
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