Recording King by Regal Archtop Electric

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For sale one Recording King by Regal archtop electric, all original, in good condition. Pickup and volume and tone controls work. Beautiful tone. V neck. Mother of Pearl inlay on fingerboard. Brazilian rosewood peghead overlay. Brazilian rosewood fingerboard. Trapeze tailpiece. The guitar comes with hardshell case shown. From the pickup design described below, the guitar appears to have been built prior to 1940, and perhaps as early as 1936.Wikipedia states: The Charlie Christian pickup consists of a coil of copper wire wound around a black plastic bobbin. The coil has a rectangular hole in its center, and the coil and bobbin fit around a chrome-plated steel blade polepiece. Attached at right angles to the bottom of the polepiece are a pair of five-inch-long (13 cm) steel bar magnets, which remain out of sight inside the instrument. These magnets are secured to the top of the ES-150 by the three bolts visible on the guitar's top. The entire assembly is about six inches (15 cm) long, and weighs nearly two pounds (900 g). There were three different varieties of Charlie Christian pickup produced by Gibson, and all three are distinguished by the polepiece: The first of these was produced from 1936 until mid-1938 and had a plain blade polepiece. The coil was wound to about 2.4 kΩ resistance using AWG 38 enameled wire. The second type was introduced on ES-150s built from mid-1938 onward, and featured a polepiece that had a notch cut out below the second (B) string. This modification was made to lower the volume of the B string, which sounded significantly louder than the other strings. At this time the coil was wound with a finer wire (AWG 42) resulting in more turns and an approximately 5.2 kΩ resistance, which gave the pickup a higher output. The third pickup was available on the Gibson ES-250 , which was available beginning in 1939. The blade on this pickup had five notches, each located between the strings. This pickup also had a more compact internal design. It featured a cobalt steel slug that was small enough to sit directly under the pickup. The sound this pickup produced is clear—thanks to the narrow string-sensing blade—and powerful because of the relatively high resistance of the coil. Uneven magnetic flux within the steel magnets could cause some distortion in the signal. Electromagnetic hum was a big problem with these pickups because of their large surface area and utter lack of shielding. After guitar production resumed following World War II , the introduction of ceramic and alnico magnets made it possible to build a smaller, lighter guitar pickup, but continued demand among jazz guitarists for the then-legendary Charlie Christian pickup led to it being fitted on custom order guitars throughout the 1940s, '50s and '60s. [citation needed ] The first production model to feature the pickup since 1942 was the 1978 Gibson ES-175CC, 489 units of which were shipped with "recreated" Charlie Christian pickups. The Gibson Custom and Historic Department began offering Super 400 model guitars with the Charlie Christian pickup in 2000.In 2007 the Gibson Custom Shop released an "Inspired By" guitar based on John Lennon 's modified Les Paul Junior that featured a Charlie Christian pickup in the neck position. [1 ]A number of independent guitar pickup manufacturers offer recreations of the Charlie Christian pickup. (Wikipedia entry on Charlie Christian Pickups)Vintage Recording King guitars were built from 1929 to 1943 and were the house brand of Montgomery Ward. Recording King guitars were built by Made by Gretsch, Kay, Regal and Gibson. Source: Gruhn's Guide to Vintage Guitars]The Regal Musical Instrument Company, established 1908 in Chicago, produced thousands of student-grade and high-quality custom instruments. Musicians who wanted something really stylish had instruments built by the Regal custom shop. Regal was one of the world's largest instrument manufacturers during the 1930s through the 1950s. /museum/... read more

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