Preloved – Grand Concert – 70, $5,400
This is a special guitar that was built for John Schroeter who wrote the book, Between the Strings: The Secret Lives of Guitars. The guitar was built in 1996. It was featured on the cover of his book. The design features include a bridge with added mass and height, the neck angle set with an elevated fretboard tongue to meet the saddle. This results in higher string height above the sound hole and greater volume. You can read about it in the letter from John to its new owner. The guitar is now being listed for resale.
This GC-70 features a beautiful inlay pattern that was done by Don Gallagher. The woods are select choices of East Indian Rosewood and Sitka spruce. It has a slotted headstock with the Gallagher “G” and Bellflower inlay. The guitar was recently given a new bridge with the same design of the original one (it had cracked with age).
This is a rare find.
Here is a description of the book based on the listing on Amazon.com (a copy of the book comes with this guitar along with the letter written by John Schroeter):
BETWEEN THE STRINGS: THE SECRET LIVES OF GUITARS is a collection of more than one-hundred selected short stories, each with a guitar at its center. A veritable compendium of the world’s greatest guitarists, from BB to ZZ (B.B. King to ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons, that is), the stories are inspiring, uplifting, illuminating, humorous, stirring, and edifying. Some of the stories are simply entertaining in the way they take unexpected twists and turns. Others are biographical. Many involve a guitar that was received, given away, lost, stolen, recovered, offered to its player a special song, or was pivotal in a personal relationship or life experience. Each of these stories reveals something of the human spirit, as well as something of the supernatural that sometimes makes its way into our ordinary, everyday existence. But in every case, the variety of experiences, settings, and remarkable outcomes are linked by the common celebration of life with the guitar. To paraphrase Ann Petry, “Everything you ever had, everything you ever lost. It’s all there in the guitar- pain and hate and trouble and peace and quiet and love.” There is so much more to music than meets the ears. To discover that, one needs only to read “between the strings.”
FEATURES: Les Paul, Don McLean, George Benson, Andy Griffith, Bob Weir (Grateful Dead), Peter Frampton, Doc Watson, Christopher Parkening, Eric Johnson, Earl Klugh, Jack White (White Stripes), Rick Derringer, Taj Mahal, Chet Atkins, and more than 100 artists in all.
