John Lennon Rickenbacker 325 Tribute

John on the second Ed Sullivan appearance

In 1964, the Beatles burst onto the world stage when they appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. John was playing a black Rickenbacker guitar that had been his mainstay since he bought it in 1960 from a music store in Hamburg.

It was a 1958 Rickenbacker Capri model 325. When purchased, it had a natural finish, huge "stove knobs" on it and a vibrato that didn't work very well and made the guitar go rapidly out of tune. A little known fact about this model is that is has a scale length of only 21" as compared with the 24-3/4" Gibson standard or 25-1/2" Fender standard. When you fret chords, it feels like playing a regular size guitar with a capo on the 3rd fret. You need to fit this with heavy .013 gauge strings to get the right string tension when you tune it to standard tuning.

For incarnation 2 of the guitar, John replaced the stove knobs with four radio knobs, replaced the vibrato with a better one made by Bigsby and replaced the bridge at the same time. Once Brian Epstein started managing the band and got them all wearing stylish suits, he encouraged John to paint the guitar black to go with George's dark Gretsch guitar and Ringo's black pearl drum set. John also changed the knobs again to match those Paul had on his Hofner bass whihc became incarnation 3. The 4th incarnation replaced the knobs once more with Bourns knobs. This is the incarnation that John played on their first Ed Sullivan appearance.

I was looking to create a replica of John's guitar. Rather than buying an actual Rickenbacker which cost several thousand dollars, I bought a cheap Chinese knock off of a Rickenbacker 325. Rickenbacker aficionados derisively call these "Chickenbackers". It had the black paint and a Bigsby style vibrato, but not the Bigsby bridge that John had. unlike the guitar John played on the first Ed Sullivan Show, it came with a white pickguard and headstock logo with an unlicensed Lennon autograph on the upper pickguard. It came with pickups that looked like the original "toaster" pickups, but were humbucking.

Like most cheap guitars, it needed fret leveling, fret end dressing, truss rod adjustment and intonation adjustments. I do these on all the guitars I buy, build or refurbish and it can really make even cheap guitars play like the high-priced models.  

So I set about making the Chickenbacker look and sound more like John's original.

• I bought both a gold pickguard and a gold headstock emblem. I tried two different headstock emblems before I got one with the right gold color and texture. The pickguard I bought was also the wrong tint, but fortunately was clear plexiglass painted on the bottom. I used Goo Off to remove that paint, and then repainted it with some water-based gold leaf paint from Amazon.

• I added the Bigsby Sorkin bridge like John had. These bridges are too wide to place them properly, so I needed to file off one edge where it abouts the pickguard. They also have a weird rocking feature that is supposed to assist when using the vibrato, but it makes the bridge tilted, so I filed off the rocking edge on the bottom and tightened up the bridge post holes with a thin sheet of metal rolled into a cylinder.

• I kept the "toaster" style pickup covers and replaced the pickups inside them with single coil pickups like the original had which are much brighter in tone.

• There are rumors that Lennon disconnected the middle pickup on the guitar. One theory is he did because he didn’t like hearing the amplified clicks when he would strike it with his aggressive rhythm guitar picking. Another theory is it was because Rickenbacker had a really weird pickup switching system. Rickenbacker permanently wired the neck and middle pickups together so the switch allowed neck + middle pickups in one position, bridge pickup only in another and the middle position would be all three pickups. Wiring the pickups together in parallel makes their overall output go down when they are combined which results in some pretty weak output for two of the three positions. It's entirely likely that John disconnected the middle pickup for either or both of these reasons. In order to give the option of the original 1958 model 325 wiring plus provide for the option of a disconnected middle pickup, I added a push-pull volume pot for the neck/middle. When down, it disconnects the middle pickup and when pulled up, restores it. This gives 5 unique pickup combinations (bridge only is the same no matter the position of the push-pull).

Tom's tribute to John Lennon's Rickenbacker 325