Silvertone

these brands get confused, and Valco.

And Silvertone, Sears, right? Valco.

It was a hotbed.

Yep.

Yeah, they're marketed under a lot of different names.

Uh, go over some of these names, would you?

Depending on the catalog they were sold out of, they could be Silvertone.

Yeah, that's by Sears.

Still do, still out of the price range.

But I will say that, I think it was under $300, I went to a guitar center and they had a 1965 American Silvertone used.

got it realized it had the sound of all the records of the 50s and 60s i wanted and i just kind of never looked back you know i got i got some cool strats i got a cheap sg and and so forth and i love those as well but it just has such a nice tone to it and then I took it out on the road.

I was scared because it's my baby.

So this is, oh, this is

just as it was.

With Silvertone made these, it's like the volume knob.

When you turn the volume down, it turns the tone down.

Mm-hmm.

And then a vintage Silvertone, uh, Twin 12, which is, like, classic.

Um, and then guitar-wise, he really likes, um, he really likes Telecasters, so I have a vintage '67 Tele that he- we used, and a '70- '73 Tele Deluxe that we also used.

Um, and I think that was...

Yeah.

Whereas other things are very cool, but when I was growing up and into guitars and amps and things, if you wanted Fender and Gibson, you didn't want Danelectro, you didn't want Silvertone, and now those are cool, you know?

Yeah.

Um, this is kind of the, the cheesy obvious question, but is, has anything really surprised you in this process of pluming the recording archives and just something that really stuck out, like?

The thing I really liked about it is you don't see that a lot from companies.

You'll see companies offer Marshalls and Voxes, and you'll see them offer even stuff like, you know, Silvertone, Supro stuff.

But, like, I don't feel like you ever hear, like, an orange flavor drive in a box.

You know, you'll hear all these types of British things.

You're going to have to look into this.

It's really cool, and it has a really cool sound to it.

It kind of has that old, like, Supra Silvertone type of thing going on where it's got a little bit of, like, a rectifier sag struggling to keep up.

But I just thought the idea of, like, oh, this old projector.

And he said, you've got to do a concert before music majors.

But by that time, my old Silvertone had a hole in it.

So he took me downtown in Baton Rouge and bought me a guitar.

And it was my first concert before about 100 music majors.

Yeah, those little cardboard cases that they used to come in.

And these were the, you know, the original Sears, Sears Silvertone guitars, which we now call Dan Electros.

But, you know, they had been around for years and years, and they were like starter guitars.

They were something you'd get for a kid.

And he got into one of them to try to figure out what was going on.

He measured the gauge of the wires that were wrapped and He counted how many wraps, and he got the gauge of the wire, and he began building replica pickups.

And then one thing led to another, and he built a replica Silvertone, that electro guitar.

And somebody bought it, and so he made a couple more, and then pretty soon he was cranking these things out.

But then if you have a line of anything that you want a guitar for, we'll make it.

So Silvertone's made by Harmony, Kay at a certain point.

And then the Vanguard that I stole for our new model was a line called True Tone that was made for Western Auto Stores.

And the story I've been telling for the past couple of years, well, you know, again, looking at this thing for me, I never, I never want to just, tell the same.