O-hisashiburi

It has been a long Corona year, and there really is no good reason to stop posting guitar photos and occasional thoughts about all things related to Japanese instruments. Today I'm just going to add a few photos of some amazing Grecos. 

A rare pair of EGF-1800 Super Real Grecos

EG57-60 from 1982

52 Blackguard-style TL-800

The one that should have stayed: 1981 Greco SS-800

Under the hood: Maxon 1974 U-1000 Pickup

This 46 year old Maxon U-1000 showed up on Yahoo Auctions needing a new home and a new pickup lead wire. I though the U-1000s started in 1975 but the stamp on this one shows a 1974 date.





Thankfully the pickup coils were both intact and there were no shorts. There are the remains of a "Maxon" sticker that would have looked like this:

You can see that Maxon did a decent job of replicating the good old PAF design with the wooden spacer and the metal bar. The magnet is probably Alnico 8 if it is in line with the typical U-1000 design.

A little bit of soldering action later we have a nice vintage U-1000 reading a bit over 8k in resistance.

Now to find a guitar to put it in....

Get your Ace Frehley on! Greco EG-600PR

Ace Frehley and Kiss have been big in Japan since the 70s and still make waves today. The current Ace-less KISS incarnation just finished played the Japan shows on their latest farewell tour.

Back in the 70's when Gibson's glory days were behind it and Japanese guitar makers were building on years of experience to produce excellent handmade Gibson models even Ace had to see what all the fuss was about. There are photos of him playing the Mick Ralphs model and a special AK-1400 flying V model during live shows in Japan.

Ace with Greco AK-1400 Flying V model -  Key Music Limited

Ace with a 1977 Greco MR-1000

There have been many Greco homages to Ace's famous three-pickup "Budokan" 1974 Gibson Custom over the years starting in the mid 70's with a few Greco models. I just acquired the very clean 1981 EG600PR below from everyone's favorite music store Ishibashi. It is a fairly light one at 4.2 kg and has a nicely matched 3-piece top. The U-1000 pickups are ceramic and work very nicely as open pickups. While the 1980 Super Real catalog has this model listed as having an ebony fretboard ("エボニー") it does not, and I've never seen one that does from the Super Real era and I'm pretty sure that was an unfortunate error in producing the catalog. I'd love to get am EG800PR which has an ebony fretboard and MOP inlays but they are fairly rare. 

Grecomania strikes again

Aoyama Oyaji has been busy lately with what else but some new Greco golden age guitars. 

Not much to report in detail, just some new pictures of old guitars.

1980 Super Real Custom. It came with DRY-Z but in a moment of stupidity they were sold.

1981 Super Real EGF-1800? It came with a Super Real case but no pickups.

EGF-850 Super Sound. No, really! PU-2, veneer flame, MOP inlays, and "Super Sound" on the headstock.

Good old 1980 EGF-850 "Super Real". Double white PU-2 pickups.

1983 Mint Collection EC57-60. Oddly light at 4.0 kg.

1986 EG60-180 equivalent. It has "Custom Order" in the pickup cavity, solid flametop, 1 piece back, and real nitro with finish checking.

1990 solid flametop with nitro finish. 2-piece back and neck heel make it an odd high-end model.

Why do those Dry Zs sound so good? - About those Super Real Pots

Greco Super Real Custom 1980 with split block inlays

I admit it. I did something bad with my 1980 Greco Custom. I sold the Dry-Z pickups and replaced them with some PU-2 pickups. DRY-Zs are the bees knees but PU-2s are dear to my heart as well and I guess needed the money that the sale brought in.

So out came the Z's and in went the PU-2s. Sounded great, if lacking the upper mid bite of the Zs. Then I got to thinking why not replace the stock Greco volume and tone pots with 500k pots and wire it 50's style. You are probably thinking "why?" at this point since of course the Super Real guitars had 500k pots like the old Gibsons.  But did they?

Bye bye Zs, hello PU-2

For some reason Kanda Shokai went with the odd combo of 300k volume and 100k tone pots for the Super Real series. As far as I have seen this was the way it was until late 1981.

The catalog says the 300k volume pots "have a smooth volume change" while preserving the highs and the 100k tone pots "give a sharp tone change." My experience is that they definitely do give a sharp change from having a nice balanced high end at 10 to pretty much no hi-end at 8.

For all the mystique of DRY-Zs and how they sound so good, please remember that if you are listening to them through 300k volume and 100k tone pots on "10" it is more or less equivalent to a 500k volume pot at 8.5 and a tone control on 6.5. That is a sweet spot for some nice tones on an LP and the DRY-Z works well in that zone. Change the pots to 500k all around and it opens up some nice tonal areas for the neck and bridge and also gives a bit more output on the volume.

From 1980 Catalog

Just in case you came this far and still need some more proof, here are some pot-shots for you with meter readings....

Tone measuring in at 90.3K fully open

Volume measuring in at 331K fully open

Tone pot: Here the leading "1" means 100K

Volume pot: Here the leading "3" means 300K

New catalog added: The Mint Collection 1982

Just click right here to get to it.

DRY-Z Part 3: From the blog of Jun Takano

Sorry, finishing this translation of Jun Takano's blog posts on DRY-Z development slipped my mind. Better late than never!

Part 3 of the blog entry of Jun Takano regarding the "Z-DRY" development. Translated from the original Japanese.

Part 2 here.

Part 1 here.

The factory cost of the pickups we had developed up to that point was higher than the popular imported Dimarzio pickup of the time and it didn't make any sense to put them in the lower-priced guitar models so they were used only on the high-priced models.

Many guitars that had the pickups installed were passed to foreign artists. Among them were some people like Andy Latimer who didn't want a guitar but only wanted to have the pickups.  

Of course, I was still not 100% satisfied with what we had accomplished up to that time. I wanted to improve the specifications but I was unable to successfully negotiate this with the factory side and so the road for being able to suggest further improvements became closed.

I was able to improve the bobbins at the time of the Mint Collection ramp-up but that was the end.

Some time after the new bobbin was introduced the specifications were changed for the worse. The stock of wire ran out and they switched to plain urethane wire but I never had any report of this.

After that rich tone was completely lost, it never came back.

From http://ameblo.jp/ktguitarresearch/entry-10475069153.html

Well played, and still going 1979 SE-600J

Here is a recent acquisition: 1979 Greco SE-600J. This was based on a customized strat Jeff Beck used during the 1978 Japan tour "Jeff Beck with Stanley Clarke." Even thoughJeff didn't seem to use this strat exclusively after the tour Greco was soon to issue their own versions along with similar models from Aria Pro II, Fernandes and Navigator. I have had a couple of these including a light mint condition 1981 SE-500J Spacey Sounds model that was about 7 and a half pounds. This one from 1979 looks like to wild older brother compared to that one and has a ton of honest play wear in it. It weighs 9 and a half pounds which is more than a good number of Les Pauls.  Check out the fretboard wear at the first few frets. All in all a nice (if a bit heavy) natural relic that sounds and plays great.

Fatboy Pickups "Super Dry" DRY-Z Clone

Has someone cracked the secrets of the Maxon DRY-Z pickup? The "Super Dry" Fatboy humbucker set sounds to me like the secret is out.

Dry-Z : From the blog of Jun Takano Part 2

Part 2 of the blog entry of Jun Takano regarding the "Z-DRY" development. Translated from the original Japanese.


At the time I had a pretty close relationship with a music promoter who also played guitar and consulted me regarding foreign musicians' guitars and gear more than a few times.

Or course, whenever he had problems with equipment of foreign musicians (such as needing emergency repairs) I would always deal with it on an emergency basis so I had come to the point where I had gained his strong trust.

So, when I showed him the guitar with the prototype pickups he told me that he wanted to borrow it so he could show it to some foreign musicians.

There was no particular plan to put the guitar for sale on the market so I agreed and left the guitar in his hands.....

After a few days had passed word came from my friend that he had shown the guitar to Don Felder (Eagles) who really liked the sound and wanted to have one himself.

After that we sent out a newly built guitar with a set of pickups installed. We were both pretty happy to have the pickup get some recognition.

However, there was still some way to go yet. While it was close to the essence of the sound that I was aiming at, there was still a substantial gap to overcome.

On the occasion of the next business trip to Matsumoto I had another meeting with the previously-mentioned Ushimaru-san.

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Photo of a winding machine from 1981 Greco Catalog: "The R&D Department; continually developing and building prototypes. The passionate pursuit of sound using the know-how accumulated over the years has given birth to pickups like "DRY", "Screamin'", "The Groove" and "Baby Gang."

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Ushimaru-san firmly grasped the sound I wanted and we resolved to change the specifications of the magnet.

Around that time I was personally pretty well connected with the music business. There was a very big name in the music business (who everyone probably would still know today) who was a busy producer and studio musician so I passed one of the guitars to him.

A few days later he let me know that he was really satisfied with the guitar. At the time he was playing on a prime-time TV show and had ended up using the guitar all the way through the whole show.

Another proposal came from Ushimaru-san. 

There was a small amount of US-made wire that was a sample (for prototyping).  Right away we went to making a third prototype......

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Winder picture from the 1981 Greco catalog: "There is a dedicated prototyping production line in the Greco R&D Department.  With all the machines needed ranging from those for prototyping bodies to the coil winders for numerous coil and pickup combinations,  refinement of sound goes on until it it is completely acceptable."

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The result came out to be extremely close to what I wanted. 

Santana ended up trying it out and wanted a set so a few days later I sent them off.

Up to that time the pickup had more recognition by foreign musicians than within Fujigen itself and more and more foreign guitarists gave good feedback.

At a planning meeting it was decided to put the pickup into production.  It was now time to name the pickup as a crystallization of the efforts we had made. I really didn't like the inorganic names like U-3000 and PU-2 that had been used up to that time. Respecting that "the name should demonstrate the voice" it was given the name of "DRY" to most closely match the tone. This was way before Asahi Beer did it mind you!

Part three to follow.

Dry-Z : From the blog of Jun Takano

There is a lot of speculation on what makes a DRY-Z sound like it does. Nobody really seems to know what that is except perhaps the persons who designed it way back in 1979. 

Jun Takano (高野順)was one of those people and is well-known today as a boutique winder for K&T pickups.

Jun Takano from http://www.musicland.co.jp/content/ktr/img/about/takano.png

Fortunately, he wrote a few pages about the development of the DRY-Z. There are unfortunately no secret recipes revealed. The following is translated from the original 2010 Japanese language blog entry of Jun Takano.

Z-DRY
It's been already 30 years since the birth of that humbucker. It is pretty well known that I had a close relationship with Greco at the time and is not a secret so I am going to tell it like it happened. 

At the time Greco guitars were made by Fujigen Gakki, now known as FUJIGEN. I was making regular business trips to Matsumoto for development and improvement as a non-regular employee.

I was younger and had a lot more stamina back then.:-)

The person who best understood my demands and offered his collaboration, while also matching my arrogance and self-centeredness, and with all the respect due to him as a top engineer, was the "hard-working genius" Ushimaru-san.

More than being limited to woodworking, Ushimaru-san had a deep knowledge of electronics and was second to none in skill, as shown by his development of the GR guitar synthesizer.

It was the summer of 1979 when Ushimaru-san and I started prototyping a new pickup. Even now the memory is fresh of the brilliant green of the rice fields of Matsumoto.

Fujigen factory (from http://www.fgnguitars.com/images/history/11.jpg)

We took this up during a one week business trip. At the end of so many meetings that it was getting to be too much, the pickup we made ended up looking from the outside like a regular humbucker.

We put the prototype we had made into in an original shape solid guitar and had it sent off to Kanda Shokai. That became unit #1.

That was the beginning of a very busy time in many different ways.

Part Two to follow.

DRY-Z Innards

I have a couple of DRY-Z that came with plastic shielded leads and changed them over to the braided wire yesterday and took a few pictures along the way.  According to the seller the pickups were from an ESP strat, hence the plastic shielding to avoid problems with accidental grounding.

Up to now I had the Zs in my Tokai LS-150 and they completely lived up to their reputation for clarity and responsiveness. So why take them out? I have a nice set of Seth Lovers that I wanted to used in the LS-150 and I want to use these Zs in my Tokai LC-100 or Greco EC68-80. To deal with the lack of gold hardware I also traded the polepieces and covers with those from a set of PU-2s in gold I got from Yahoo Japan recently.

After measuring the resistance I realized that the one that had been in the bridge (with a shorter lead) has lower resistance at about 7.7k compared to the neck at 8.3k. The bridge needs a bit more volume so I switched them around.

From the numbers on the baseplates these pickups were made about 5 months apart. 210509 should be May 9, 1981 and 201106 should be November 6, 1980 if I am not getting things confused. The "2" is a production line number as far as I have read and doesn't indicate the model. These were not made They could have been purchased as after-market parts which may explain the different dates.

Here are some pictures to show the innards of these pickups.

With polepieces and bobbin screws removed

Outer tape layer removed.

Double black bobbins.

210508 with bobbin removed. Maple and mahogany spacers?
Note light wax potting and polished roughcast magnet.

Back of the magnet showing some rough edges.

Wax potting and very rough magnet surface. I didn't take this out to see if the back was the same.

Back of the bobbin of 201106

Ready for installation in the Greco EC68-80.