At the bottom of a picture I have of the first page of the copy of the sales log for Commemoratives which Dale Hyatt took with him shortly after his retirement there is an entry for #29. It was entered “11-18-91”, invoice “#4890”, #2 neck with rosewood board, with at least #28 also being part of that invoice. For both there is a cryptic “Y + P” in the purchase order column. Clearly not the guitar you see here since this #29 has the more common maple fingerboard. I was in for an even bigger surprise when I took off the neck. Turns out this one was assembled May 1993, the last week of official production for this model. Reminds me of the lower S/N’s for the Broadcasters, which were used just before production ceased either for instruments built for specific people within G&L and/or artists. Is that the case here? Not likely. In talking with G&L researcher Gabe Dellevigne I learned that it was not uncommon for G&L to repurpose a neck plate if an instrument was e.g. rejected by a dealer and returned. But something more serious is suspected here. S/N #29 falls into a sequence of maybe 25 guitars or so where the neck plate shows dashes, i.e. “#-of-1000”. These dashes are clearly absent here, indicating this is not the original neck plate. So it is more likely the original #29 was destroyed and this guitar is a rebuild, similar as what happened to Trinity #1 only this time while preserving the original serial number and with slightly different specs. Otherwise it definitely is an original neck plate, not one of the “# of 350” plates that BBE Sound, Inc. had in its possession at that time already. Otherwise this instrument is identical in look as my ASAT Classic Commemorative Edition w/rosewood fingerboard but with a couple of small differences. The #29 has a particularly beautiful piece of swamp ash for the body and the #2 neck with 7½” fingerboard is more curly flame than Bird’s Eye maple, and has gold G&L branded Schaller closed tuning machines.

Greg Gagliano features his maple fingerboard Commemorative on his ggjaguar.com website. For more, one is referred to the ASAT Classic Commemorative Edition Rarebird page in the Registry on the Guitars by Leo website for additional information on this Rarebird.