Epiphone Circuitry

[Alan Peterson]

Gavin Wilson's fantastic guitar blog (guitarz.blogspot.com) is featuring a 1962 Epiphone Riviera with a remarkable switchplate attached. See it at
http://guitarz.blogspot.com/2011/07/196 ... emolo.html

The plate contains a TonExpressor, which we can surmise is an L-C varitone wired to slide switches instead of a rotary dial. But there is also a trio of knobs for controlling tremolo and reverb - the details of which escape me. For a 1962 instrument, this is the equivalent of stuffing a Fender preamplifier stage inside a guitar body. I mean, you can get away with it today with a $19 Spin Semi FV-1 reverb chip and a pair of batteries, but this is 50 years prior!

The web's not much help to me today. Does anyone know if this truly was a miracle of early space-age technology, or if this was just a basic controller for an external batch of commonly-available circuitry?

[Chris Lounsbury]

Indeed the pickguard-mounted controls actually operate the relevant features on the compimentary amplifier. I refer you to a pair that went through 12th Fret in Toronto a short time ago...

http://www.12fret.com/content/2011/12/0 ... -amp-1963/