Guild S-200 Thunderbird reissue?

[Pilgrim]

This is billed as a Guild Thunderbird - looks like a guitar version of the DeArmond Jetstar bass. Evidently Muddy Waters played a Guild Thunderbird...and DeArmond (whoever owned them) decided to copy the body look for the bass in the 90's. I had one of the DeArmond Jetstars for a while.

Huh. Now I've learned about another little juxtaposition of instrument names...Thunderbird has been used on guitar and bass.

It has enough switches and pots to make guitarists happy, I guess:
https://reverb.com/news/video-guild-s-200-thunderbird-reissue?_aid=newsletter&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=1323e66c4f-rn160814_content&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5889ed6702-1323e66c4f-54920862

[slinkp]

Fun fact - for a little while I had John Sebastian's Veilette-Citron baritone guitar based on the the Guild Thunderbird shape. 
I was in a band with his son and he loaned it to us while we were looking for a baritone-ish instrument of our own - we couldn't find an affordable one in the early 90s. Eventually I cannibalized a short-scale Univox bass and hacked it into a six-string that basically did the job - it sounded great but looked awful compared to the Citron. 

That Citron was a really cool instrument. This photo has to be the same one, ten or fifteen years before we got our hands on it:

[dadagoboi]

Muddy Waters worst album...and ugliest guitar.

[Rob]

Muddy Waters worst album...and ugliest guitar.

AMEN TO THAT!

[Pilgrim]

I find the body rather appealing in a Gumby-era way....

[Alanko]

Nice to see them honour the Gumby design. I really cannot make my mind up about it. I owned a Dearmond Jet Star II bass for a while. It was a '90s reissue in a pinky-purple sparkle finish. It sounded like a really weak Jazz bass and I never got it to sound right, even with modifications galore. The design could look sleek and stylish one minute and clumsy and stupid the next... it really depended on what angle you looked at it from.

Shame they didn't reintroduce the stand in the back, even if they kept the weird wiring scheme intact. A bit too much going on there with a complete 2nd bank of controls to contend with. Not my idea of fun, but better than the half-assed reissue that Dearmond came up with.

I got my bass cheap as the original knobs were missing (one was intact, but smashed) and the back plate was missing. If I had the bass today I would probably try and find authentic knobs and spend a bit of time making a good backplate. Back then I didn't have the money or the attention span to do either (I was studying for a Masters) so I bodged a cover for it out of a DVD case and called it a day.

I still have a piece of it in my collection (!). I stripped the pink paint and ultimately tried to refinish it using white floor paint. My plan was to goop the paint on thick enough that I could level and buff it to a gloss finish. Right? Idiot move. The piece I have is slathered in white paint, though the grain still shines through. There is some plugged holes and other bodges present. It is, approximately, the rear 'wing' from the bass side of the instrument and sits on a high shelf like a shark fin. I'm an idiot.

[Pilgrim]

This one was mine...it is no longer with me.

[Alanko]

A better colour and even the knobs are intact! I've noticed that the chrome inserts on the knobs have a habit of going for a walk.

How did you find the pickups?

[Pilgrim]

I didn't find anything the bass did for me that I couldn't get from other basses. I'm not one who changes basses around - I play them the way the manufacturer designed them, with the factory pickups. I thought these osunded OK, but not especially distinguished or powerful.  I satisfied my curiosity about how it played (fine) and moved it along. I had other basses I liked more.

[Dave W]

Never cared for the shape. Looked like Bo Diddley's guitar got left on top of a radiator and melted.

DeArmond Rowe was a pickup company, supposedly the first to specialize in pickups. They eventually were bought by Guild. The DeArmond name was never on guitars until Fender bought Guild in the mid-'90s. It was an attempt to have an import line of Guild models. Unfortunately they never sold well enough to suit Fender.

The Guild name was bought by Cordoba a couple of years ago. I can't see the new Thunderbird selling any better than the originals, but I don't think Cordoba plans large-scale production anyway.

[exiledarchangel]

Those single coil pickups are typical cheap china made crap, only good about them is they look cool and different from your typical jazz bass pickup set. You can read some interesting things about them here: http://curtisnovak.com/pickups/repairs/TurboJet-Bass/

[Pilgrim]

I remember seing that page when I had the DeArmond bass.  I decided not to spend the money, but I thought it was a good idea.

[Dave W]

Those single coil pickups are typical cheap china made crap, only good about them is they look cool and different from your typical jazz bass pickup set. You can read some interesting things about them here: http://curtisnovak.com/pickups/repairs/TurboJet-Bass/

DeArmond Rowe pickups were made in the USA. If you're talking about the Fender/DeArmond pickups in the '90s Jetstar bass, those were made in Korea.

I didn't care for the way they sounded, but I wouldn't agree that they were crap just because Curtis Novak thinks they are.

[amptech]

I didn't care for the way they sounded, but I wouldn't agree that they were crap just because Curtis Novak thinks they are.

Curtis makes fine pickups, but he does say things about magnet wire I do not always agree to. 43 AWG wire is not equal to thin 'anemic' sound; many great pickups are made with thin wire. And ceramic magets does good things too, in some designs. I had to look twice at a pickup he calls the 'Charlie Christian P bass pickup'. It's just a tall coil P bass pickup with 38 AWG wire. I know the thick wire was used on the very first version of the bar pickup, but the narrow sensing area of the bar polepiece (as well as the cobalt steel magnets) contributes much more to the sound than just the wire, he's gotta know that... The later CC units with normal wire still sound like CC pickups.

Anyway, I do agree with him that most of the mass produced asian single coil pickups made on a plastic bobbin with glued on ceramic magnets (and whatever eire they use) lack the ability to reproduce a good guitar tone. But they are also the reason I sell quite a few homemade strat pickups, so I can't complain!

[Pilgrim]

Well, I cut Curtis some slack for sales hyperbole. He has pickups to sell. But I agree with Dave. The pickups I heard on my DeArmond weren't bad at all, just didn't inspire me to keep the bass because of any unusual sound qualities.