ISO: Hard Tail Fly

[Augustonian]

Hey all,

I'm looking for a hard tail After missing that '93 VJManzo listed, I'm on the prowl.

Only one I see right now is that beautiful Jazz Select, which is a pricier than I'm looking for *sigh*

[vjmanzo]

Yeah, @Augustonian! Good luck with the search!!

The hardtail Flys are just great! They do come up, so I’ll help keep an eye out

[jb63]

Aren't there several on Reverb right now?

[Augustonian]

@jb63

I saw 2: the afformentioned Jazz for $4.5k and a black Deluxe for about $3k. I messaged the person w/ the $3k but haven't heard anything from them after a few days.

[jb63]

https://sfbay.craigslist.org/nby/msg/d/ ... 21274.html

no affiliation, but here's one. needs some neck paint work.

[Noodler]

https://sfbay.craigslist.org/nby/msg/d/ ... 21274.html

no affiliation, but here's one. needs some neck paint work.

That poor fly looks like someone tried to DIY a Bondo repair on it. There's no telling just how bad the damage actually is to that guitar.

The Fly Jazz (I own a 2000 model) is a "wolf in sheep's clothing". Labeled as a "jazz" guitar of course, but the overwound pick-ups they used to get the "warmer" tones also are much higher output than the typical Flys. So it hits the front-end of your signal chain much harder and can lay down some real tight chuggin'.

[mmmguitar]

Per VJ, Dimarzio (likely Steve Blucher) and Ken confirmed that the “Jazz” pickups were just Gen 1s with gold screws. It’s been my experience that some Flys certainly seem to induce more voltage in the pickups than others (and I’d hope a hardtail Classic would resonate differently from a Deluxe in floating mode).

I’d seriously consider that Bondo’d white Fly for refinishing practice, if only it was a trem model.

[Noodler]

Per VJ, Dimarzio (likely Steve Blucher) and Ken confirmed that the “Jazz” pickups were just Gen 1s with gold screws. It’s been my experience that some Flys certainly seem to induce more voltage in the pickups than others (and I’d hope a hardtail Classic would resonate differently from a Deluxe in floating mode).

I’d seriously consider that Bondo’d white Fly for refinishing practice, if only it was a trem model.

The amount of windings (resistance) is easily measured with a multi-meter. You've made me more interested in actually measuring the differences in my Fly pickups. I think it would also be interesting to see some Fly folks post the measurements of their instruments too. You seem to be implying there was a level of variability (not sure if it's just over the span of years or different generations).

[mmmguitar]

A single pickup’s ohmage can fluctuate quite a bit with room temperature. On any given day, I can measure the same model pickup installed in most of my guitars and get resistance measurements with variation of up to .5k or so, relative to how close each was to the floor vent in my music room. Then again, I live in a region with intense temperature swings.

What I was referring to pertained to the amount of energy individual Flys reflect back into the strings. The more an elliptically vibrating string disturbs the magnetic field of a typically constructed pickup, the more voltage/signal is induced. When it comes to resonance, Flys are superlative: Each Fly I’ve owned has resonated differently. I don’t mean that in a cork sniffer way - I mean that some Flys literally vibrate so much when I strum a chord that the upper horn resonating against my sternum can cause my teeth to chatter. Others have not been so dramatic.

Let’s be somewhat fallacious, for illustration’s sake, in presuming that a Fly pickup’s DC resistance measurement is the bottleneck dictating the limit of the pickup’s resonant peak. An individual Fly, reflecting more or less energy back into the strings than an otherwise identical Fly, would hypothetically seem darker or brighter than its “twin”, based on how much of the signal was peaked against the ceiling dictated by the voicing of the pickup (though, in reality, there are far more variables at play). I really tried and failed to work in a joke about a resonating Fly’s potential as a marital aid resulting in the Spanish Fly; so I’ll just claim to be above such tomfoolery.

I guess my point was that this “variability” exists guitar-to-guitar, rather than on a larger scale of SKU or generation. The only guitar brand I’ve observed that really strives for consistent resonance on a material level is Aristides. Everyone else is just varying degrees of picky about the weight and moisture tolerances of the wood blanks they use.

[vjmanzo]

Each Fly I’ve owned has resonated differently. I don’t mean that in a cork sniffer way - I mean that some Flys literally vibrate so much when I strum a chord that the upper horn resonating against my sternum can cause my teeth to chatter.

I’ll just add a somewhat related anecdote—@Ken Parker tells this wonderful story about him overseeing the creation of two Fly Deluxes with the intention of making them “identical”; this was sometime in the late 1990s when production was cranking. Ken handled every aspect of the instruments’ creation, and, as you might guess, after the last string was tuned and the pickup heights were adjusted, one Fly was snappy and in your face and the other was mellow and subdued. Go figure!

Sometimes I hear/read people swearing that “only the pickups matter” with regard to tone; it’s shocking, to me, how uninformed that opinion is! Even two guitars made exactly the same way with the same materials can function/sound different from eachother.

[mmmguitar]

I remember being amused by Ken trying to come up with some sort of onomatopoeia to describe the one Fly, and somehow settling on “sultry” (of all words).

I’m a broken record when it comes to this, but it bears repeating: Guitarists are generally not “big picture” thinkers (more like postage stamps); and will fetishize one aspect of their gear at a time while assuming that all other variables remain constant. As cool as Ken’s ideas and their implementation in a production capacity were/are, they’re going to exhibit the same variation as anything else produced by a lumber guitar factory (QC notwithstanding). They’re exceptional specimens, but by no means a different species.

[vjmanzo]

Well said, Marc.