Re: My G.A.S. - Hamer Special Korina Jr. - PICS!
Re: My G.A.S. - Hamer Special Korina Jr. - PICS!
OK, it's been a couple of weeks. We've completed the "leave us alone" stage of the relationship and I'm ready to share my thoughts and feelings on this girl, I mean guitar.
The first think you notice is that it’s somewhat plain looking - no figured top, so burst finish, etc. And it’s only got one pickup.
Then you pick it up and you notice that it’s really lightweight. One of the lightest electrics I’ve ever held. You look at it some more and you see a few interesting things. The wood is natural korina (white limba). No mineral stains. Very light color with uniform, tight grain. And a one-piece body. That’s right, one-piece body. Custom three-ply tortoise pickguard. The neck is three-piece. Hamer does something where they laminate the neck in pieces where the grains oppose in such a way that it prevents twisting. I think I got that right. And the fingerboard? Chocolate-to-dark-purple Brazilian baby! .
Then there’s the bridge. It’s not the typical Wilkinson wraparound they normally use on a Special Korina Jr. It’s a one-piece cast aluminum
Pigtail wraparound set up on TonePros posts and studs. If you’re into that sort of thing, this is one of the coolest features of the guitar. You look at it again and now it's not so plain looking
Then you strum it acoustically and you hear and feel how resonant it is. The notes just ring. And the neck and body vibrate for a long, long time.
Then you plug it in.
That resonance and timbre that you hear acoustically translate totally to the plugged-in sound. The notes really ring, especially the low-E. Jol Dantzig described it like a piano. Now I know what he means. I’ve never really experienced that kind of a tonal response in a guitar. But this has it.
Of course, being that this is a one-pickup guitar, it has one limitation. You only have one pickup. So I wouldn’t call this a tonally versatile guitar. Though, with the volume and tone controls you create several distinct usable tones.
Another thing I noticed about this guitar - for such a lightweight, small-bodied instrument, it’s chunky. The neck is nice ‘n fat. Even things like the depth of the fingerboard and the hunk of bone they use on the perfectly-cut nut seem just a few thousandths heftier than what I usually see. Even the neck feels around ¾” longer than normal. Oh wait, it is. That’s right. I ordered it with 25 ½” scale length. That’s what I’m used to and I wanted to make sure that this was a no-compromise custom instrument, built to my exact specifications.
I jammed with it at a house party Saturday. The piano player was Chuck Wild from Missing Persons, Zappa and Liquid Mind. He was playing an 8’ Baldwin grand and I was playing the Special Korina Jr. through a silverface Princeton Reverb and an Analogman-modified TS-9 Tube Screamer. I was totally confident with the tone of the guitar. And I got a lot of compliments. I thought I might have to put some more turns on the stock Antiquity dog ear P-90 to compensate for the longer-scale neck, but I didn’t. I nailed it right out of the box.
My girlfriend even remarked, “I really like the sound of that new guitar. Maybe that should become your main playing-out guitar.” Little did she know that it already had.
I’m going to post some photos shortly. Stay tuned.
This is truly a great guitar. When I say, “great,” I mean that if anyone - Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Les Paul - walked into my office and asked to pick up that guitar, I would have 100% confidence that they would be truly impressed by this instrument (and they’d probably ask me if I was willing to part with it - which I’m not).
I’ve visited the Hamer factory three times. Each time, I was left with the feeling of “I really need to get a Hamer.” I’m so glad that I did. I just wish I hadn’t waited so long.
Thanks to Jol Dantzig at Hamer for sending me the photos of the guitar in progress and for suggesting the Pigtail/TonePros bridge.
