1975 Guild F50R

17 September 2015

I moved to Adelaide, South Australia in early 1976 to become a singer/songwriter. At the time I had a Maton FG100, which was a damn good guitar, and soon after I got to Adelaide I bought a 12 string FG150 to go with it.

But soon after that I saw the Guild display in Allan's Music - about a dozen guitars ranging from around $500 (for a D25) up to $1300 for this F50R which was the top of the line in those days. This guitar put everything else to shame at the time - Gibsons, Martins, Ovations, all were terrible in the '70s and I just couldn't find one with decent intonation. The Matons I had were great but were more like the Guild D25 sound and quality.

side view

I went into Allan's pretty much every week for the next year or so, playing those Guilds over and over, and this one was a clear favourite but was totally unaffordable. You could get a good car for $1300 in 1977, in fact my first car (a '60s Fiat 2300 sedan) was only $250 in 1975! My parents bought a brand new Holden Gemini sedan for $4753 in 1977. Average weekly wage in 1977 was about $180 (Bureau of statistics) so mine would have been a good bit lower than that. You get the idea - $1300 was a LOT of money.

One fateful day one of the sales guys told me they were clearing their Guild stock and taking offers. Somehow (I can't remember how) we came to an agreement of $800 for the top of the line model (the one that was supposed to be $1300). It was too good to turn down so I put it on layby and had to immediately go out and get a job. The job I got was planting spinifex grass in the sand dunes at West Beach. Never been so cold in my life and it was completely futile because the spinifex died within a few months. Anyway, sand dune conservation paid for my first kick ass serious guitar.

back of the neck

A few weeks later I found out that the model below mine (the maple F50, normally sold for $1100) was sold for $50 more than my one!

Guild F50R bridge
That nasty scratch to the right of the pickguard? The guitar was less than a year old and I was practicing at home. I was also cooking something. I had to check the cooking so I went into the kitchen with the guitar still hanging from my guitar strap, bent over to get something and whacked the guitar on a red cupboard door. Not happy.

Back and sides are solid rosewood, top is spruce. The neck is padauk, which is apparently a fairly oily wood. This caused a problem in the mid '90s when the varnish began flaking off the neck. So at that time I had the neck re-finished, replaced the fingerboard binding that was also breaking off, and had the frets replaced. This cost me $800, which is what I paid for the guitar in the first place. But when I got it back it was better than it had ever been. The guy who did that work was a bloody genius.

See caption below
Me recording with this guitar in November 1978

At other times I've also had the bridge re-glued and some of the body binding re-glued. So in many ways it wasn't the most perfect guitar, but it sounded fantastic, played like a dream and still looked a million bucks 35 years later. It still had the original gold Schaller tuners. The bridge pins in the photos are new brass ones.

For about 30 years I thought this was the best guitar I had ever played, but then in 2008 I discovered a Goodall.

I sold this in February 2010 to a guy in Brisbane who had already owned a couple of Guilds.