I was living in New York with no possessions and a lot of boredom and my guitars were back in England. So I made the decision to go out and get a guitar. It was a pretty random “Yeah, that looks nice” decision really, I could have ended up with anything.

It’s only now, 20 years later I try to research what this thing actually is.  Various forums seem to think this was an in house brand for Sam Ash. Trying to find where it would have been on a map eludes me, but it was a street that seemed to have many music shops there.

From the photos I am willing to believe it’s a Brownsville Choirboy from Sam Ash!

Construction wise I don’t think it’ll win many prizes, the hollow body has a plank of plywood down the middle to mount the pickups on. The pickups seem to be toaster style single coils (I had assumed from the look they’d be humbuckers).

It suffers from some very mixed reviews on Harmony Central.

How would you describe that colour? Pinky red salmon?

This guy describes his as:

• Semi-hollow single-cut guitar with 3 single coil alnico pickups, 5-way switching, bolt-on maple neck with rosewood fingerboard

The pickups can be seen more clearly in this facebook post:

• Appears to be a hot wound strat pickup with a bar magnet. One add says the magnet is Alnico. So, I would describe the construction as a Strat meets Firebird coil in a DeArmond/Rickenbacker cover.

Playing wise, it seems harder work than my Yamaha, so I only ever play this when I fancy a bit of a change.

​I’ll be making some videos specifically one this guitar later, so they’ll appear on this page.

​Following picture borrowed from a link above, but will be replaced soon…