TYPE
Electric Hollow Body Single cutaway archtop guitar
FEATURES
Spruce top, maple body and neck
Ebony fretboard
Two stereo Filter’Tron pickups
INFORMATION
Stereophonic was a magical word of the 1950s that carried the promise of stereo sound. Gretsch was the first luthier to develop a stereo guitar, thanks to the company’s main idea man guitarist Jimmie Webster.
Webster simply adapted the Filter’Tron humbucker pickups created by Ray Butts: he split the coils so that there were two sets of coils per pickup. So the stereo sound came about because the guitar’s signal was split: the sound from the top three strings came from one speaker, the sound from the bottom three strings from the other.
Gretsch proudly promoted its innovative stereo system as the Project-O-Sonic system. The showpieces of Gretsch, the Country Club and the White Falcon, were equipped with this new gadget and described in advertisements as “the guitars that open up a new world of sound for you”.
