Review Demo - Guild S-200 T-Bird

Read the review: http://www.premierguitar.com/articles... Once upon a time, the original Guild Thunderbird—like its mythical namesake—seemed to only exist in legend. It was crazy rare, and probably most familiar to record collectors who gazed upon the gatefold of Muddy Waters’ ’68 Electric Mud. My own fascination with the instrument was born admiring Zal Yanovsky in old Lovin’ Spoonful video clips and snapshots of Jorma Kaukonen, who allegedly used a Thunderbird to record Jefferson Airplane’s masterpiece, Surrealistic Pillow. Those artifacts aside, there wasn’t a lot of information out there for a curious young guitar archeologist. What was this odd Frankenstein fusion of Fender Jaguar and Gibson SG? And how could a Guild—this wasn’t the product of some fly-by-night garage operation—be so flipping impossible to find? The fact is, the S-200 was never an easy sell. The styling was too bizarre for an upmarket instrument in the mid ’60s. Even when Guild’s DeArmond subsidiary (Guild was then owned by Fender) revisited the S-200 with an affordable and beautifully built reissue called the Jet Star in the late ’90s, the marketplace responded with indifference. But now, with interest in electric guitar history’s odder threads at an all-time high, the S-200’s time may have come. And the latest incarnation of Guild is giving the model a new lease on life with a faithfully executed, Korean-built version (now officially known as the T-Bird) that’s devilishly stylish and full of sonic surprises. Even in these more open-minded times, the S-200 body profile—which evokes the offspring of a Fender offset and a non-reverse Gibson Firebird glimpsed through a funhouse mirror—will likely continue to polarize. To more open-minded beholders it cuts a strikingly curvaceous figure. The mahogany body looks splendid in the carefully executed three-color sunburst. Fit and finish are excellent save for a few exceptions: most notably what looks like traces of adhesive cleanup where the nut meets the rosewood fretboard. For a guitar with this much mahogany content (the neck is also mahogany), the S-200 is relatively light. It’s certainly less weighty than my ’90s DeArmond reissue or the memory of the one vintage S-200 I’ve had the pleasure to play. (Then again, it does lack the latter’s ill-conceived, built-in guitar stand that made the guitar an object of derision for many.) To continue reading the review, visit: http://www.premierguitar.com/articles...