My guitar and bass collection
Collings
Keeping Austin weird but with a lot of tradition
The late Bill Collings (August 9, 1948 -- July 14, 2017) had a passion for building guitar. Starting out in the mid-1970s, he became part of the renaissance of acoustic guitar building, exemplified by people like Dana Bourgeois, Richard Hoover (Santa Cruz guitars), Jean Larrivée, Linda Manzer, and Bob Taylor to name a few. What all of these builders have in common is their drive to (re)create great flattops and/or archtop guitars inspired by the great instruments of yore whether they be Gibson, Stromberg, D’Angelico, or from that venerable company, now from Nazareth, PA, C.F. Martin. Instead of me rehashing Bill’s journey into the business, how he grew his Austin, TX based company, and expanded it into building a wide range of acoustic and electric instruments, why not just read this history and watch the video on the same page? But let it be noted Bill is responsible for one of the 22 archtop guitars in Scott Chinery’s Blue Guitar Collection, has built banjos and ukuleles, ventured into the 1920-1940 mail catalog flattop guitars with his Waterloo line (replicating simple but effective construction akin to the Harmony H169 Buck Owens), built his own cases, and is responsible for some of the most revered mandolins in the business. Fact was, Bill had an amount of energy hard to be matched by anyone else. However, during the first 5 years after his passing new GM Steve McCreary and his team had to make some business decisions to deal with new realities as well as the unexpected like the post-2020 COVID epidemic and its associated reduction in available workforce. During the 2022 Chicago Fretboard Summit, he summarized these changes: the production of Waterloo guitars had to be scaled back with allotment per dealer based on their sales numbers, Collings would no longer build their own cases even though they are a sight to behold, and it would focus on its core business of acoustics, electrics, and (less so) mandolins which implies at the time of writing only about 1500 Collings ukuleles are in existence. What still can be said though is no artist is paid by Collings to endorse the brand. So if you see ads featuring artists like Lyle Lovett, Bill Frisell, Audley Freed, Charlie Sexton, and even Julian Lage with his signature acoustic and/or electric model, they allegedly all paid for their instrument themselves.
Collings offers its acoustic guitars with several appointments with increasing sophistication indicated by a ‘1’, ‘2’, or ‘3’ in the model designation. The classy but simple 1-style appointments include tortoise body binding, dot fretboard inlays, and a walnut backstrip. The more luxurious 2-style appointments use ivoroid binding, herringbone top purfling, diamond and squares inlays, stained exotic ebony peghead veneer, and “zipper” backstrip. Finally, 3-style appointments feature a fully bound fingerboard and headstock, abalone rosette, “chevron” backstrip, golden Waverly tuning machines, and the absence of herringbone or fingerboard inlays. There are even more elaborate appointments like ’41’, ’42’, and ’45’ models which map straight to the equivalent Martin models when it comes to appearance. However, it is easy to confuse the Collings 1-style, 2-style, or 3-style with the tonewoods used on the model since a 1-style has mahogany back and sides by default while the 2-style and 3-style use Indian rosewood back and sides, in all cases combined with a Sitka spruce top. When other tonewoods are used, it becomes part of the model designation. Common examples, as seen in the variety of model designations of instruments pictured below, are ‘A’ for an Adirondack spruce top, ‘E’ for an Engelmann spruce top, ‘G’ for a German (European) spruce top, ‘K’ for a koa top and/or back and sides, ‘Mh’ for either a mahogany top on a model already with mahogany back and sides or for the use of mahogany back and sides on a model that would come with rosewood by default, and ‘RW’ for Indian rosewood back and sides on a model that would otherwise have mahogany back and sides. Other types of rosewood used for back and sides are Madagascar (‘MR’), Amazon (‘AM’), Honduran (fully written ‘Honduran’), or Brazilian (‘B’), the latter augmented with a number of ‘a’s (e.g. ‘Baaaa’) to indicate the grade. In other cases, the used species is written in full, e.g. ‘Cocobolo’, ‘Maple’, ‘Pecan’, ‘Walnut’, etc. However, a torrefied Sitka spruce top or an Old Growth Sitka spruce top is not reflected in the model designation. Other common specs found in the model designation are for a Hill Country build (‘HC’) or Traditional build (‘T’), is for the lefties among us (‘L’), whether it has a Sunburst finish (‘SB’), which incidentally can range from a light Western Shade to a orange/red 1-style Sunburst to a darker edged 2-style Sunburst to a Dark Vintage Sunburst, uses varnish (‘Varnish’) instead of nitrocellulose on the body, or a satin finish (‘S’) instead of gloss, has a cutaway (‘Cut’), uses a short scale (‘SS’), i.e. the same body size but with a 24⅞” scale length instead of the standard 25½” for a given model, uses a pre-war Vintage (‘V’) or updated Vintage Now (‘VN’) neck profile, both beefier than the standard Collings modified V profile, is a ‘12-string’ model, or has a different number of frets to the body as the default model (’12-Fret’ or ’14-Fret’). One also frequently finds ‘Custom’ as part of the model designation on the sticker visible through the soundhole, meaning it is a custom-order model. What is actually customized can vary and the usage of ‘Custom’ seems to be at the discretion of Collings. ‘Custom’ has been seen in conjunction with certain custom finishes, like Collings’ famous Doghair and Jet Black finishes, as well as guitars with a Deep Body, i.e. 4¾” instead of 4”. But ‘Custom’ has also been used for limited runs of instruments with particular (body) specs including tonewoods for top and/or back and sides, e.g the 6 guitars with tops made out of reclaimed Alaskan Sitka spruce or the 24 ‘Joe Henry’ traditional build 0002Hs. However, whereas the ‘Joe Henry’ triple-0s have ‘Custom’ on the sticker, other artist signature models do not. For instance, a Julian Lage Signature OM1 has ‘JL’ on the sticker and a Pete Huttlinger Signature OM1 ‘PH’. Check out the Collings Gallery, not only for some beautiful ‘Custom’ examples but also other acoustic instruments with interesting specs.
Serial numbers for acoustic guitars are stamped into the neck block during the production process when the guitar is put together. However, the S/N is already assigned at the start when the particular guitar is ordered into production. Collings uses the ship date as the authoritative datum for the birth date of a guitar. It seems the serial number sequence was reset somewhere around 2013-2014. Now owning several Collings acoustics, I thought to detect a (loose) “10-year” rule for post--2014 numbers where the year the guitar was shipped can be derived by subtracting 10 from the first 2 digits of the serial number. However, in communicating with Customer Support, they assured me serial numbers are assigned in numerical order and that any “10-year” correlation is purely coincidental. Contact Collings Customer Support if you want to know more about your particular instrument. They will respond within 48 hours, of not sooner!
Collings large sized acoustic guitars (L-to-R):
2008 SJ, 2010 CJ Mh ASB, 2004 D2HA.
Collings medium sized acoustic guitars (L-to-R):
2013 001 Mh, 2017 Pete Huttlinger Signature OM1, 2004 0002HA SB Cut.
Collings small sized acoustic guitars (L-to-R):
2010 01 E VN, 2017 02H 12-string SB, 2018 02H 12-fret T, 2018 Baby 1 Walnut G.
Collings folk instruments (L-to-R):
