A Slice Of 70s Chic?

Guild’s second wave of electric solidbodies were little more than cynical copies of Gibson’s SG. Yet how do the originals compare with Guild 2018? Dave Burrluck investigates…

- Dave Burrluck

We feature a lot of vintage beauties throughout our pages but most are them are certainly out of my budget. Like every other guitar player, I hanker after that glorious old Gibson, or fabulous Fender from the ‘golden age’ of the electric guitar but, yes, I might have to dream on. Yet step away from the classics and you might find other vintage slices of history at sub-£1,000 prices.

Researching this review, I did just that. A casual search for “Guild electrics for sale” brought up lots of current Newark St. models and the occasional semi from yesteryear. And then I found the model down from the S-100, the S-90, with twin full-size humbuckers on a ‘batwing’ scratch plate and two controls, instead of four. A round-trip to Suffolk later and I was the proud owner of my own slice of Guild history: a 1976 (according to Hans Moust’s The Guild Guitar Book) S-90 for around 20 per cent less that the advertised price of our reviewed S-100.

Like any 42-year-old it has some baggage. Aside from the wear, its nitro finish had a heavy layer of gunk (probably from various polishes and usual playing grime) that took a while to clean off but gradually the blue-y sheen was removed revealing a brighter, more translucent deep cherry. Although the pickups are original, someone has clearly fitted something different in its past – there’s an extra hole in the scratch plate between the two bass-side screws on both.