By the end of ’67, they were being sold as the F-412 Special, a small batch of which were given Brazilian-rosewood back and sides – some solid, others arched and laminated like the F-512. Guild used double truss rods in many of their 12-string guitars, thus necessitating the large truss rod cover seen here.Īlso in ’66, Carlo Greco, the foreman in Guild’s woodshop, started building prototype jumbo flat-top 12-strings. By ’66, Gibson, Martin, and Guild were producing 12-strings with commercial success, but none with 17″/jumbo bodies. Guild followed in ’64 with the F-212 and F-312 – both 14-fret jumbos with lower bouts measuring 16″ and 15 7/ 8", respectively. Gibson introduced the B-45-12 in ’61 as a 14-fret slope-shouldered dreadnought, and by late ’62 shifted it to a square shoulders. That interest prompted Martin and Guild to start making 12-strings. Pete Seeger used a long scale/low-tuned 12-string jumbo flat-top and in ’63, when the Rooftop Singers recorded “Walk Right In” using two ’61 Gibson B-45-12s, the form rose in popularity and public demand increased considerably. Blues musicians like Leadbelly and Blind Willie McTell used 12-string flat-tops in the ’20s, but by the mid ’30s, the 12-string form had fallen into relative obscurity and would remain so until the folk-music boom of the late ’50s/early ’60s. Neither Gibson nor Martin produced a 12-string guitar until the 1960s, probably because there was a small potential market for the instrument. The earliest origins of the 12-string guitar in America remain murky, but it’s likely the idea originated with immigrants from Italy and Mexico both countries have a long history of instruments with double-string courses – the mandolin, tiple, and many versions of the Mexican guitar being great examples.īy the turn of the 20th century, Oscar Schmidt and Lyon & Healy were building 12-string guitars, the earliest marketed as “Mexican Style” – 12-strings with a longer scale (26″) and tuned three half-steps lower than standard pitch.
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