“It was also Gretsch’s first color consumer-focused catalog, and if you look at car pamphlets from the same period, they look very, very similar. So much of the Gretsch aesthetic was taken from the automotive industry, including their marketing tools Ed Ball “Take their famous 1955 Guitars for Moderns brochure: Catalogs usually just went out to music stores, but they put copies of this one in magazines that went out to consumers directly. “So much of the Gretsch aesthetic was taken from the automotive industry, including their marketing tools,” Ball continues.
The gold-sparkle truss-rod cover material came from Gretsch’s drum stock. In 1958, the White Falcon’s winged logo was replaced with the T-roof design. To see a brand-new one in the ’50s must have been blinding, especially with all that 24-karat gold!” White Falcons have an opaque white finish, and it yellows to a kind of ivory over the decades. “I can’t say I’ve had a White Falcon tested, but my guess is they would be the same. Research has shown that the paints were right off the DuPont automotive paint chip library. “They even named their guitars after cars: they had the Corvette model, the Streamliner and the Convertible, and they used automotive references like Cadillac Green in their color scheme. There’s a ‘cool’ factor, there’s an aesthetic factor, there’s a macho factor, and I think Gretsch saw a parallel there.
#1957 gretsch white falcon manual#
“Guitars and cars have always gone together,” says Ed Ball, author of Ball’s Manual of Gretsch Guitars: 1950s. Guitars and cars have always gone together Ed Ball If Fender’s and Gibson’s electric guitar designs embraced the styling of hot-rod culture, then the White Falcon – Gretsch’s “Cadillac of guitars” – embodied the zeitgeist of the 1950s.Īdorned in gold, and finished in a dazzling white automotive-style paint, it mirrored with equally lavish elegance the angular, futuristic geometry of dream cars through its Cadillac V emblem tailpiece, V-contoured headstock and truss-rod cover, and Grover Imperial stair-step tuners. “The ’58s are built like a brick,” Ed Ball says. This 1958 6136 features Gretsch’s reinforced trestle bracing system, introduced that year. “I’ve got a blackguard Tele and some other ’50s guitars, but there’s something about the White Falcon that conjures up that amazing time of rock and roll.” They really capture the ’50s era well, and there’s nothing else like it. I can’t imagine them being produced in any other era than the ’50s. The earlier ’50s ones generally have a body depth of 2¾ inches, but when Gretsch reduced it to 1 7/8 inches, the feel of the guitar completely changed. “I did have a ’60 thinline, but it didn’t seem to have the same magic.
There’s something about the White Falcon that conjures up that amazing time of rock and roll Anonymous British collector The other three in his collection – a ’58 mono 6136, a ’59 6136 and a ’59 stereo 6137 – were acquired from the United States. “So I bought it and was smitten from then on. “It totally lived up to my expectations,” the collector continues. The Madagascar ebony fretboard has feather engraved block inlays and goldsparkle binding.
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