THE ONES THAT GOT AWAY

PHANTOM MANDOGUITAR NAMM SHOW ORIGINAL PROTOTYPE

I am a fan of Vintage Guitar Magazine. It's probably like when you're a kid and you got the Sears catalog in the mail in about November and you just sat and looked at all the toys for Christmas and circled the ones you wanted. Dr. Steven Stone is a columnist for VG and many years ago he wrote a review of a Phantom MandoGuitar. The Phantom is a faithful recreation of the famous Mando-Guitar or Mini-12 made by Vox in the '60s. If you haven't seen one, they are half the scale of a regular guitar and strung like a 12-string, giving you the sound of a mandolin but played using the fingering of a guitar. George Harrison made them famous...well, maybe not famous, but at least known, and in recent years lots of country players have kept them in their arsenal to add a really nice, pseudo-mandolin sound.

They are solid body and shaped like Ren's (or is it Stimpy's?) head. They sound fantastic and really give you a different texture when recording. Plus, who's got time to learn to play mandolin? This will give you a good fake in a pinch. So, as I mentioned, Steven Stone wrote a review about a mandoguitar made by Phantom, who makes lots of cool Vox-style replicas and the guy who owns the company used the be the guitarist in Quarterflash...remember them? Later that year, I saw an ad (I think in VG) for a MandoGuitar for sale and I contacted the person. It turns out it was none other than Steve Stone and the mandoguitar for sale was the one from the review. He had liked it so much he bought it from Phantom and it had been the very first, NAMM show model that Phantom had made. It was a beautiful sunburst and had a yellow-orange/gold pearloid pickguard that really set it off. They never offered that gold pickguard on a regular model, so this was really a one-of-a-kind. It had two single-coil Bill Lawrence pickups and was very well made.

I really loved the MandoGuitar and kept it for many years. It always got some weird looks when I used it on stage each night and guitarists always came up after a show and asked about it. As I said, it really adds a nice sound in recordings. Not only can you capture a fake mandolin sound, you can even get a very chimey, almost keyboard-ish sound too. In fact, me not being the most amazing guitarist of all time, whenever our band recorded our CDs, our main guitarist extrordinaire Dave Quillen usually recorded all the guitar parts.

However, the one thing they let me do was record the MandoGuitar parts. I wasn't a complete loser.

There aren’t a lot of good photos or information at the Phantom website. So this band promo photo of me in the ‘90s playing mine is the only shot I have of this particular instrument. If you ever run across one I would highly recommend giving it a try. They are not easy to get used to...you folks out there with sausage fingers might as well forget it. But if you can manage to get your fingers in place and get used to the added string tension of the short scale, you can have a blast and come up with some very useful sounds.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AUGUST 9, 2008