My guitar collection - G&L
‘Cowhide’ is one of the initial 4 custom artwork guitars Johnny Garcia produced for G&L’s Custom Creations Department and completed in early-2010. January 6th for ‘Cowhide’ to be specific. Its swamp ash body as well as the front of the headstock are covered by real cowhide, except for a small area on the headstock to have the brand logo and model decal come through. Johnny carved his signature on the back of the body enhancing it using a soldering iron. The guitar further has 2 Jumbo Magnetic Field Design (MFD) pickups. It has the ASAT Special harness typical when an overwound (bridge) pickup is used with a 3-position pickup selector, volume control, and tome control. The (BBE-era) #1 (i.e Classic “C” profile with 1⅝” nut) hard-rock maple neck has a clear satin finish, 12” East Indian rosewood fingerboard, and Dunlop (Medium) Jumbo 6100 frets. All its hardware is in stylish black including the Saddle-Lock bridge, knurled volume and tone control knobs to the rear-loaded controls, neck plate, and Schaller closed tuning machines.
ASAT Special Deluxe ‘Cowhide’
The story behind this guitar
Year:
Serial number:
Neck date:
Body date:
Strings:
When originally offered through Martin Music Guitar in 2012, this was not a model particularly drawing my fancy. But when offered again in 2019 through Santa Barbara Loan and Jewelry, a pawnshop, this became an opportunity acquisition. My wife was afraid the hide would smell like real cows but that turned out not to be the case. It is meticulously glued to the body with beautifully finished edges. In contrast to ‘The Wrangler’, another of the original 4 Johnny Garcia art pieces, the signature on this guitar is deeply carved into the back of the body. ‘Cowhide’ is also lacking a CCD logo on the back of the headstock although it does come in a CCD tolex hardshell case like the other 3. As seen on some other prototype guitars on this site, the neck heel refers to director of manufacturing Steve Grom again. The measured DC-R value for the bridge pickup was quite the surprise, 12.05kΩ compared to 4.96kΩ for the neck pickup and about 2 times higher than the next highest value for such a pickup in my collection. Hence the guitar is loud and powerful. But by now one should know the drill. Just turn down the volume for heavenly tones. The date stamps demonstrate how long the guitar has been worked on. Johnny burned his date in the neck pocket. The completion date as listed on the (archived) G&L website is mentioned above and is several years prior to the 7/30/2012 date listed on the spec sheet.
The story behind this guitar
2010
CLF56578 (prototype, one of 4 built with artwork by Johnny Garcia)
none, marked ‘ASAT’, ‘see Steve’
OCT 30 2009, NOV 02 2009, engraved ‘J.G. #3 12-27-09’
