I've toyed with the idea of writing a few posts about some of the guitars I own. I started playing guitar about 36 years ago, and have collected a few along the way. I thought I'd start with one of my guitar constants - its the one guitar I return to time and time again, my trusty Levinson Blade
I bought this guitar back in about 1991 I think. It was quite expensive at the time £900 - about 2 months wages for me. I was about 19 and still living with my mum and dad so could spend all I had on it and not worry about bills, etc ! I over paid for it at the time, as I was young and not used to shopping around, haggling, etc.
Its a beautiful guitar, and these pics are not doing it justice. Its has a swamp ash body with a lovely honey burst paint effect, with a mirrored scratch plate and gold plated/gold effect trimmings. The fret/finger board is maple. I fell in love with it as soon as I acquired it, and even now when I look at it, I still feel the love for it ! Its ok though - I love my wife too - she only gets jealous sometimes !
It was designed and built by Gary Levinson and was quite advanced technically for its time. It was considered one of the first super strats which is interesting considering its not a Fender. In particular it has sperzel locking tuners which were new at the time, which stops it from going out of tune, a tremolo bar/bridge that goes into the body but is not floating, which also helps with tunning, and quality electronics. To be fair I was never a fan of the electronics, the pickups sounded thin to me so I got rid of them and swapped in some Seymour Duncan pickups to give a better and stronger sound.
I went to Aberdeen to buy it, as it wasnt that easy to get one back then. What astounded me is that after I bought it, I took a bus back home to where I lived - which I think was around a 7 hour bus trip. I put the guitar in the hold in its flight case, and when I took it out at the other end of the trip it was still in tune ! And its always been like that, this thing does not go out of tune ! Which really helps with my style of playing as I like dive bombs and I abuse the tremolo pretty heavily !
I came from quite a small town in Scotland, and news got around that I had bought it - which was a bit of a big deal at the time for someone of my age. Some of that included jealousy, and I even had a complete stranger come up to me one day to challenge me about it and how could I justify spending that much money on it. Heres my answer:
1 - my money, so da-fuk ?
2 - I've now had it atleast 30 years, so its cost me £30 a year over its life ! Its a quality piece and was built to last - and its still going strong,
3 - I've earned a lot more than £900 back from all the gigging I've done with it,
4 - The sheer amount of pleasure I've had out of it over the years has been incredible. Its still an awesome guitar, and when I show it to people they still think its an awesome guitar !
Its taken some heavy useage over the years. I removed some bits and also lost others, but I've spent so many hours playing it over the years that its very familiar. I dont notice the missing volume knob, or the top of the selector switch ! That just feels normal. The string tree is also gone from the top of the head, but that was just a pain anyway !
I also took the tremolo cover of the back and just left it off as each time I had to change a string it was a pain ! The other black cover you can see in the pic above was the battery for the active pickups - as said, I just didnt like them, so ditched that early. I still have all of the parts - I didnt get rid of them, I just took them off (apart form the couple of bits that I lost) !
I shudder to think about how many hours I've spent playing this guitar, but do you know, none of them were bad ! And even now when I have a other nice guitars, I will still often return to this one. When I was gigging (stopped now) I would take it most of the times to either be my primary or back-up guitar, because it was so versatile and always dependable.
And thinking about it, I dont have anything else that I've consistently used that is that old. Yes I have some things that are much older, but in terms of an everyday object, this is the oldest thing I own that I still use regularly.
Interestingly the company that made it is no more. Their guitars were expensive and just didnt sell in the volumes needed. The prices did drop and at one point you could pick up this guitar for about half of what I payed for it. You do still see them around for sale on ebay, but I'd never part with this one now.
Well, I thought I'd share my guitar story - and depending on how its received I may drop in some others from time to time !