Fred Mangan's Aesthetically Crazy Guitars
At Electric Guitars by Fred Mangan, you're going to find a lot of guitars that look and sound very different. Fred takes an unconventional approach, noting that a lot of guitars sound relatively the same because of relatively little differentiation between parts.
To prove his point, Fred shows us a guitar he built out of a 35mm film reel. It does have its own distinct tone and even some super cool built in wah effects.
FRED MANGAN: Hi. I'm Fred Mangan and I'm on Gearwire.Com, and I'm here to show off the Reel Guitar, which is the second freakish guitar that I put together in a long line of freakish guitars.
[FRED MANGAN PLAYING ON THE REEL GUITAR]
The reason I built them this way is because I'm of the opinion and experience that when you change the littlest things, sonically it makes all the difference. You take a piece of wood and cut it 2" thick or 1-3/4", throw a couple of humbuckers in and put it into the scale of a Les Paul, most guitars will sound exactly like a Les Paul. I start out with things that are aesthetically pleasing to me. I started this out to make people laugh and make them happy, and then I noticed that when I did put these crazy things together that they sounded completely different from a normal kind of a guitar.
[FRED MANGAN PLAYING ON THE REEL GUITAR]
This one's built with an actual 35-mm film reel, the Goldberg Brothers. It's probably like 30 or 40 years old, and I used an aluminum billet in the middle to house everything or mount everything. The pickups are '70s era Alembics, the first time I've ever tried active pickups. They sound really good.
[FRED MANGAN PLAYING ON THE REEL GUITAR]
This is like when I was making it with up as I ran along, I used a stock neck that I had laying around and fastened it together, tested it out, and it sounded like [EXPLETIVE], so I had to pull it apart and figure out why, and one of the reasons was there was a hum that was going on that I couldn't figure out. I was playing with my band and this nasty hum would keep appearing and I realized it happened at the bottom of the film reel. As you would hit the strings, acoustically it was vibrating and it was causing a distortion. So what I did was I mounted these bolts strategically throughout the thing to stop the thing from buzzing, and it did that.
With the aluminum and the active pickups, you get a metallicky kind of sound. There was a secret pleasure that was involved that when I wired it up that was -- this was set up for like a wah wah.
[FRED MANGAN PLAYING ON THE REEL GUITAR WITH BUILT IN WAH EFFECT]
I believe it has its own sound because I chose odd objects and fasten them together. I got pretty standard amps to test these out with: a 1963 Princeton that's completely up to spec and a 1950-something Supro amps so I've got the dirty amp and this clean amp. Can I beat this and what do you guys think?
[FRED MANGAN PLAYING ON THE REEL GUITAR]
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