George Barnes Acousti-Lectric model and Carlo Greco

You may have seen one of Carlo Greco's guitars floating around the internet in the past 6 or 12 months; it's basically a resurrection of the George Barnes Acousti-Lectric design but with Carlo's uniquely flamboyant visual styling. The guitar was on Reverb for a while; then it ended up at a Guitar Center, which kept lowering the price until finally I bit the bullet. It should ship today, and I hope to get it by the end of the week.

In the meantime, I'm trying to gather all the info I can about the original Guild Barnes model. Hans said in his book that "The acoustic sound would come out through the cut-out areas around the pickups"; does this mean that it had at least a passable acoustic tone and volume? Were these ever shipped to dealers like other models or were they exclusively a custom-order model? How many were built in total? I've read that Carlo built the original prototype for Barnes; did he built all the others as well, or were they more of an assembly-line product?

nmiller said:

You may have seen one of Carlo Greco's guitars floating around the internet in the past 6 or 12 months; it's basically a resurrection of the George Barnes Acousti-Lectric design but with Carlo's uniquely flamboyant visual styling. The guitar was on Reverb for a while; then it ended up at a Guitar Center, which kept lowering the price until finally I bit the bullet. It should ship today, and I hope to get it by the end of the week.

In the meantime, I'm trying to gather all the info I can about the original Guild Barnes model. Hans said in his book that "The acoustic sound would come out through the cut-out areas around the pickups"; does this mean that it had at least a passable acoustic tone and volume? Were these ever shipped to dealers like other models or were they exclusively a custom-order model? How many were built in total? I've read that Carlo built the original prototype for Barnes; did he built all the others as well, or were they more of an assembly-line product?

Click to expand...

From this thread in April http://www.letstalkguild.com/ltg/sh...uot-Guitar-in-F-quot-!/page2&highlight=barnes

parker_knoll said:

A nice comment on the above video:

"Alexandra Leh3 years ago
hi! i'm george barnes' daughter, and this is the only time i've heard another acousti-lectric...sounds terrific! i sold dad's prototype to a NYC collector in 2010...he's having it refurbished to include in live performances for the transmedia project i'm producing, the george barnes legacy collection. btw, according to carlo greco, the guild luthier who worked on the prototype, maybe only 10 of these were made...it was a very expensive guitar to produce."

Click to expand...

Barnes' daughter is commenting on a video posted in the thread I linked.

I had an Acousti-Lectric in the '70's for about a year. It was a wonderful instrument. I bought at one of the stores on 48th street in NYC. A guitar player from Spain, on tour in the USA with the "Spanish Tom Jones" (you can't make this stuff up, can you?), traded it in for a 335 or something like that. I paid 900 for it.

Great guitar, wonderful overtones in the sense that you could easily play a harmonic while you were chording. Never thought it couldn't be heard or that the acoustic sound was too small. Pickups mounted on a dowel/stick that presumably went through the body from neck block to end block. The small Guild pickups didn't have the presence of the larger Guild or Gibson hum buckers as they were adjusted at that time. If I had the guitar now, I would crank the pickups a lot closer to the strings.

I bought it to get it to my first guitar teacher, who was a student of George Barnes, but that's another story.

How many were made? I don't know. Norm from Norm's Rare Guitars has one, There was George's, mine, the blonde one in youtube vid, There's another one on the West Coast and finally, a member here who was a Dentist in Maine has one. Sadly, that guy (Jim?) hasn't shown up on any guitar forum in 2 years, so at the very least, he's missing in action...

At any rate, I can think of about 6, so there are probably others out there somewhere.

I don't have any pictures of mine (too broke to own a TV back then, even a camera; sorry). My teacher wound up with it. I checked with him a few days ago and he doesn't have any pics, either. He sold the guitar on the West Coast, so it may still be out there.

But any way, don't worry about the acoustic volume thing. You're gonna have a blast.

Oh, they do feed back, yup, they surely do. Have fun!

My guitar teacher in FL, the late Frank Mullen, had a George Barnes model - I can’t recall too many details about it (this was like 1979 and we didn’t have camera phones). - but at the time he said there were only 4 made. He’d had it outfitted for a Condor Guitar Synthesizer, but I don’t believe I ever heard him play that. It was a beast! Flat wound strings. I want to say a dark Sunbusrt finish and a big headstock with a mother of pearl inlay saying “George Barnes” (maybe “custom”? or just “model” - wish I could remember more)

I had a George Barnes in the ‘70s. It belonged to The Man that was ‘The Guitar Player’ guitar for the ‘Tom Jones’ of Spain!
I bought it for my guitar teacher who had been a student of George’s. He traded me two ‘70s ES-175D Gibsons for it, a fair sale price at the time, if not especially imaginative.
It had a dark burst finish, a very good
re-fin and Guild mini-buckers that weren’t set especially close to the strings, but should of been.
If one ever pops back up, please think of me. one of the few guitars I truly regret selling.
It had an incredible ability to make harmonics spring out of the guitar.
Thanks for jogging my memory, Clay.