Deke, you've pawed my perfect guitar for a minute, a few years ago, IRRC.
My perfect guitar is my 1962 Guild Manhattan X175. Hans Moust, the world's leading Guild expert, has copies of the actual Guild ledgers, and was able to tell me it was finished december 26th, 1962.
It's a 17" wide, 3 1/2" deep laminated maple body, laminated spruce top, with a 24 3/4" two piece mahogany neck with a Brazilian rosewood fingerboard.
It has fancy diamond shaped Kolb tuners that still work fairly well after all this time, and are just plain beautiful:
The pickups on it are Guild's version of a P90 pickup, made by the "Franz" company. These are quite a bit brighter than the typical Gibson P90, and lower output, though by no means mellow or wimpy.
The one drawback of these is that in their stock configuration, they're insanely microphonic (you can talk through them!), but some parafin wax and thirty minutes work took care of that.
The trebly, angry pickups balance out great with the warmth and thump you get from the guitar's big body. The lead pickup gets Grady Martin twang or spiky Johnny Guitar Watson blues. Both pickups combined get a sound that could be mistaken for a single coil Gretsch, and is fantastic for Travis picking, rockabilly, or clean-ish arpeggio rhythm playing.
The neck pickup is in a class by itself on these. Clean, and with tone and volume full up, it can do a pretty convincing "Rebel Rouser", but it also gets tones that are a lot like a strat's neck pickup - plug it into a blackface Fender amp turned up to "blues", and you get shades of Hendrix or SRV, I kid you not!
Roll back the tone knob on the neck pickup just a hair, and the guitar morphs into a great Swing- and Jump blues machine - think classic 50's Gibson P90 tone.
I think some of the magic of the neck pickup has a lot to do with where it's located : right under the "24th fret harmonic", where a neck pickup belongs.
The controls, btw, (two volumes, two tones) are wired "decoupled" from the factory, you can turn down either pickup all the way without it affecting the other pickup.
The top and back on the guitar are not as thin as on a similar era Gretsch or Gibson, making it fairly immune to low end body rumbles and feedback at my typical "twin 6L6 Fender amp turned up to six" levels. It will get out of control with a 100 watt amp, but I have no use for those.
Things I changed about it:
-It came to me stock, with a rosewood bridge and trapeze tailpiece. I changed those to a Gotoh Abr-1 tune-a-matic copy and a Guild-branded Bigsby that I put a Chet handle on.
-It's been re-fretted twice since I got it, with medium jumbo wire. (12" radius)
-I wax-potted the pickups, and had to replace both volume pots over the years, the originals were worn out.
-I made a vanity pickguard for it (have the original in a zip-lock baggie) that I had engraved at the local trophy shop.
It's a great player, insanely stable guitar. Only touched the truss rod once or twice in the nearly ten years I've owned it, and it gets played on a hundred shows a year on average. I've taken it from the Arizona desert to literally inside the polar circle in Norway, and it refuses to warp, crack, or fall apart.
I love this guitar so much that I eventually got its twin, another 1962 Manhattan.
Sorry for the stupid long post.
