GRETSCH WHITE FALCON INSTALL

The Bigsby vibrato tailpiece, optional in the day, and a period-correct addition here, retains smooth action over the Space Control bridge.

Space Control bridge and mechanical string mute.

Glued-in maple neck with bound ebony fretboard.

Arched top braced with parallel “tone bars”.

Fully hollow thinline single-cutaway body made from laminated maple.

Other features of the 1962 Country Club’s hardware and control set include individual pickup volume controls and a master volume (on the lower cutaway’s horn), but no tone controls, which were replaced, coincident to the arrival of the Filter’Trons, by a three-way tone switch on the upper bout, adjacent to the pickup selector switch. Relatively few players ever used the thing, and many removed it from their guitars either to save weight or to eliminate the rattling sound they sometimes produce, so it’s a rarity to find it retained here.

Given its body size, scale length, and electronics, this guitar is entirely comparable in sound and performance to the early ’60s White Falcon

GRETSCH WHITE FALCON INSTALL

This “bonus feature” hails from an era when it was apparently deemed worth cutting a couple of holes into the top of a perfectly good guitar to install a clunky device that would save you from having to palm mute the strings yourself, thereby producing that plinka-plinka guitar sound (and often slightly out of tune at that). One element of the design that many players today might rather dispense with is the mechanical string mute.Īlso found on other high-end Gretsch electrics of the day, it consisted of a bar covered with rubberized foam that could be raised up into contact with the strings between the bridge and bridge pickup by twisting a small knurled knob (the thing on the lower bout that looks like a miniature control knob, with a red felt protector ring beneath it). While they don’t offer the same midrange punch and easy grind as the slightly bigger, more powerful Gibson humbuckers, they do help the Gretsches that have them transition a little more easily from twang and jangle to crunched-up rock and roll. It evolved out of its DeArmond-made Dynasonic single-coil pickups in 1958 and into a pair of Gretsch-made Filter’Trons.ĭesigned by Ray Butts at the behest of Chet Atkins – and developed in the mid ’50s at a pace that rivaled Gibson’s PAF humbucker, which beat it into production by about one year – the Filter’Tron humbuckers delivered a crisp, bright performance that aimed to retain the existing characteristics of “that great Gretsch sound,” while effectively eliminating much of the 60-cycle hum. Electronically, the Country Club toes the line for upper-range Gretsch guitars of the era. Incidentally, Gretsch made the guitar a full-depth model again in 1964, and the Country Club never moved into the double-cutaway body that most others adopted in the ’60s.

Gretsch white falcon