My guitar and bass collection

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 peghead, 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 model designation of the 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. 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, has a deep body (‘DB’), 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’).

Collings large sized acoustic guitars (L-to-R):

2008 Collings SJ, 2010 Collings CJ Mh ASB, 2004 Collings D2HA.

Collings medium sized acoustic guitars (L-to-R):

2004 Collings 0002HA SB Cut, 2013 Collings 001 Mh.

Collings small sized acoustic guitars (L-to-R):

2010 Collings 01 E VN, 2017 Collings 02H 12-string SB, 2018 Collings 02H 12-fret T, 2018 Collings Baby 1 Walnut G.

Collings folk instruments (L-to-R):

2009 Collings MT, 2015 Collings UT1, 2011 Collings UT1K, 2009 Collings UC1 prototype.