Category: Guild

The Fascinating Guild S-200 Thunderbird

GAD 14 Comments

I’ve never been a huge fan of the Guild S-200 Thunderbird because (hang on to your hats Guild fans), I think they’re goofy looking. They’re nicknamed “Gumby” for a reason, after all. I’m not without my fair share of curiosity, and I’m always willing to be proven wrong, so when a fellow LetsTalkGuild member asked me to work on his, I jumped at the chance. This particular specimen was certainly not mint, but it was structurally sound and played fine with one minor problem – two of the control pots were either dirty or had failed. Since I apparently have a reputation of caring about my work and not being “just some guy”, I was given the opportunity to fix a guitar that was nearly as old as me. My price? The ability to fondle the guitar and write this article based on my discoveries. Read on to discover how my opinion of this Guild classic went from goofy to fascinating.

If you’re looking for the Newark St. S200 T-Bird, check out my review here.

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Guild Full-Sized HB1 and SD1 Pickup Variations

GAD 62 Comments

One of the questions I see on the guitar forums quite a bit is, “What kind of pickups does this Guild guitar have?” Since I’ve posted in many of these threads, I seem to get a lot of emails with the same question. I thought that I might write up a quick summary of the differences as I know them. I originally wrote this article in 2011, and have updated it in 2014.

For Guild AntiHum and LB1 Little Bucker mini-humbucker pickup information, check out my article on them here.

First, let me say that I am by no means the expert on Guild guitars. That honor goes to Hans Moust, author of the excellent book entitled The Guild Guitar Book. Much of what I’ve learned about Guild pickups, I attribute to Hans helping me via email and through forum posts. If you’d like to learn more about Guild guitars, I heartily recommend that you pick up a copy of his book.

To the best of my knowledge, there are two types of Guild HB1 pickups – the mini humbuckers (affectionately called “mini-hums”), and the full-sized humbuckers. This article focuses on the full-sized pickups, which, for reasons that should soon be clear, are often confused. We’ll be looking at three different pickups, all of which look very similar from a distance, and some of which look identical from the front. I’m not entirely sure of the correct names, but for the sake of this article, I will call them Guild HB1s, Seymour Duncan SD1s, and Fender HB1s. There are some others in there as well. Read on to learn more.

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