Inside the Gretsch Custom Shop: The George Harrison Model and More
The Gretsch Custom Shop occupies its own little second-floor enclave at the Fender Musical Instrument Company (FMIC) facility in Corona, California. "We're in a mezzanine," Gretsch master builder Stephen Stern explains. "I have my own woodshop up here. We do our own style of guitar."
It's a style that recreates all the best attributes of Gretsch's historic mid–20th century heyday, when the factory was located in Brooklyn, New York, just across the Williamsburg Bridge from Manhattan. This was the time and place that gave birth to immortal Gretsch electric archtops like the 6120 Chet Atkins and 6136 White Falcon, and chambered-body classics like the 6128 Duo Jet.
The Custom Shop, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, is a kind of fantasy factory, offering a high-end, American-made counterpart to the production-model Gretsches currently built in Japan. The shop's hand-wrought renditions of classic Gretsch models look, feel, and sound like something that might have rolled out of the Brooklyn factory in 1957, albeit on a really good day, because, as every vintage guitar enthusiast knows, original mid-century Gretsches are notoriously inconsistent. Some play like a dream; others sport questionable construction and are nearly impossible to keep in tune. Part of the Custom Shop's brief is to ensure that all the latter-day classics it produces are equal to, or better than, the finest of Gretsch's historic heyday.
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