Another Alfa, with a story: I got this guitar from a friend for a bottle of vodka. He used it in his punk band during the 80's. He told me he got it from a friend's mom, who was working in a concert hall 20 years ago and that it originally belonged to a big Estonian schlager star. The guy used it a lot because the frets and the fretboard are almost not present any more. It's been painted probably more than 5 times. I can see some candy apple red, some glittery stuff, some pink and dark green on the edges, where the white finish has faded. But I think that red is the original color. The body is glued in three parts and it's pretty light. The guitar must have had a lot of electronics inside because the area, which lies beneath the pickguards is empty. Both pickups are single coil and I don't think that neither of them is original. The neck pickup is actually from an acoustic guitar and the other one looks like an old jazz pickup. The bridge pickup looks weird: you can see the magnet, there's no covering. As you can see on the pictures, the original Alfas had pickups with sliding screws. The truss rod is pretty shitty, but after 20 minutes of trying, it miraculously started to work and I managed to fix the neck. The neck is bolt on with 4 bolts. There's no neck plate. The control knobs look cool, except for the middle one, which probably belonged to an old radio. The other knobs are for volume and tone, but the old radio knob doesn't work. The tuning heads are crappy too. The guitar gets out of tune all the time even without touching the tremolo. But the repositioned tuning head looks cool. My friend drilled a hole into the headstock and moved it to the other side. I don't know why.
It sounds like a usual good old cheesy guitar including total lack of sustain etc…
The action is low and the guitar is playable but the frets need changing.
The Alfa logo on the headstock is so faded that it's almost invisible. I discovered it when I tried to take a close up photo of the headstock.
I'm kinda sad that the schlager star pulled out all the original electronics and put new pickups and pickguards on. The original look is really cool.
All in all, I think that the vodka was worth the guitar. I would pay 2 bottles for an Alfa in original condition.
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Here are some blowups of the guitar pictured above:
body
headstock
"Alfa" logo on the headstock - actually, we could not see any logo on this picture, but maybe you will - cheesyguitars
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