… at least I couldn’t. I swapped it off a guitarist pal here. It’s a Starfield battery-powered self-amplified guitar. An internet search throws up plenty of Starfield guitars, but apparently this model doesn’t exist, or is the only one. The serial number on the back of the headstock (F207711) tells me it was made by Fujigen Japan in 1992. Fujigen has some connection with Ibanez, and In spite of the Jetsons styling it’s a beautifully made (and surprisingly heavy) little guitar, quality woods and finish, with an absolutely true neck and perfect intonation all the way up to that 22nd fret. The body is curved to fit under the arm and into the hip, and it’s well-balanced on the strap. It’s also playable through an amp, but I haven’t tried that. The whammy bar is missing (isn’t it always?), and the upper pot switch (a weird on/off and two position pickup tone control) looks like a replacement. Going by the three (count ’em!) positions, it might have been a blade switch rather than a pot. The lower aluminium pot is volume, and lifting it up a notch kicks you right into heavy gain mode, with screaming pinched harmonics and crunchy chords. There are two (count ’em!) speakers and it’s loud enough to drown out conversation in the house next door. It’s a massive fun generator, and you can sit with it in your lap and play along with your favourite records at a good volume and pretend you’re sitting in with the band. And, apparently, it’s the only one ever made, unless I’m dreaming it.
Here’s something you won’t find on the internet …
by 69 Comments
Tip to tail, 34″
I believe a certain Mr. Stephen King owns Starfield guitar serial number F207712
He can F0FF.
Great find – such a weird little monster.
Has there been some structural fiddling about in its past? The truss rod cover seems to be missing a screw, but there’s no apparent hole in the stock beneath where the screw would have fitted? I wonder too if the pickup and its plate/switch are non-original – the two outermost screw heads look in slightly shinier nick than the rest of the visible screw heads. Maybe the volume control knob was once a clone of the flanged tone control, rather than a simple cylinder?
The world of Mekong busking possibilities opens before you, HP. No Stairway!
Ah! That three position on/off tone switch flange knob is numbered 1-10, so seems an obvious aftermarket mod to me. Also, it sits a little unhappily over the edge of the pick guard plate (Itself a thing of beauty, redolent of finest Neapolitan accordion craftsmanship). The pickup plate (thick aluminium) and switch have the look and fit of factory build, albeit of bonkers design. The truss rod cover looks like laziness to me. One screw does the job as well as (therefore better than) three, was the thinking here, I’m thinking. The screwheads throughout are consistent and original, the difference in finish due to sweat corrosion. So I think you’d agree with me that it’s all original except the flanged knob.
I’m going to flip the thing over and have a poke about – I’ll post graphic closeups – I think you’ll be rather excited by the battery compartment.
What doesn’t come across is the beautiful soft sculpting of the body, complex curves at complete odds with the angular flying saucer control panel design of the fittings. It’s a lovely thing to fondle.
The range of tone is quite impressive – from mellow jazz moods – mm, nice! – to screaming dizbuster with howling feedback. I fell in love with it on sight. I swapped it for my Burns Red guitar and a Kustom portable amp, which I never played. But this is so easy to power up, with the convenience of fingertip controls and distinctive contemporary styling that bespeaks of the owner’s sophisticated taste.
Impressive in that it is the ugliest guitar I have ever seen.
This, from you?
Show me an uglier one.
Whatever you do don’t google ugly guitars. You’ll thank me my eyes are seared with pain.
Too late!
Two strings? One too many.
A Russian rock n’ roll rebel saw this in a Moscow shop window and saved up for it and took it home and dreamed of a new life. It was a beautiful thing to him.
I’m sure there’s a Japanese joke about wrong way round jack sockets.
I love it. I could imagine Marc Ribot playing it. However I believe (as others have said) that this is someone’s ‘all spare parts’ project, a very cool hack guitar. I would definitely buy this if I saw it.
The spare parts project seems possible (even if nobody else has actually said it). The neck and headstock carry the Starfield logo and etched-in serial number but no other branding is visible (there may be something going on under the back plate, I’ll get to that tomorrow). The thing that seems to work against that is the fit of the (superbly sculpted) body and neck – they’re made for each other. What strikes me as more plausible than someone’s bench project is a factory-made prototype. It’s just possible this is a one off that never (for some reason I can’t begin to imagine) reached production. I’ve spent some time on Google, using various combinations of brand and type of guitar, and come up with zip-a-dee-doo-dah. I agree with you that it is a cool-looking item – Eno would certainly have posed with it. Whatever its provenance (and I’d love to know) it’s the most bonkers fun guitar I ever owned. Plus, the set-up is impeccable, faultless. It’s an actual, real, musical instrument.
The backwards jack socket (to me) is there to emphasise the cyberpunk feel: if it was a factory prototype it would be the right way around. I think…?
In the meantime, let’s bask in the beauty of this thing. I bet it sounds amazing.
The jack socket thing I don’t have an answer for. The body is too well-built to be made by somebody who doesn’t know which way up the jack socket goes. Anybody who’s seen even a picture of a guitar would know this. There seems to be a discrepancy between body/neck (which are as I keep saying beautiful in shape and finish) and fittings, which show idiosyncracy bordering on clinical mania. I’m thinking the woodwork was handled by a craftsman with considerable skills, then passed to someone either in a mental institution or on a watch list, for installation of components. The result is – YAY!!
The machine heads seem original high-quality Grover-type, smooth, and suffering only a very little from the brightwork corrosion that comes as standard in a tropical climate.
I think I just figured out the jack socket conundrum. If it was the “right” way up, the wiring would come out right behind/into the bridge/tremolo unit. There is no room for it. This way up (check the picture) it is directed directly into the void for the pick-up. Voilà!
I suspect it’s so you can more easily use a right angled jack plug? People have been known to put them on the other way round so they stick out rather than recess for the same reason.
It’s for easier wiring, like I said – otherwise it would require routing through the bridge/tremolo cavity. I’m sure the arrangement has other advantages, too, like using a right-angle wheelbarrow valve.
When you consider that guitarists usually loop their leads around where the strap attaches, so that the weight of the lead isn’t on the plug, it makes sense to have the socket that way round.
Yup. A detail which the back room boffins at the Stetch Research Laboratories considered the final chef’s kiss touch to their futuristic design.
It’s so you don’t accidentally pull it out by standing on the lead.
Yup. And because it’s the only way to wire it up without having to thread it through the whammy bar cavity. Glad we got that sorted. What still remains a mystery is the three position upper knob. The on-off function is clear, taking up two of the positions, but the third seems to be “one louder”, which the presence of an actual volume control (the other knob) makes unnecessary. Explain that, Twang!
But Shirley, the fact that you have now posted on here means that I will now find it on the internet…….
D’oh!
Don’t call him Shirley!
Not necessarily. Saucey’s photo of dais guitar is just a big white blank to me.
And now it’s not.
I reckon you could make a tidy profit selling this to that half-Colombian guitar madman what plays wiv Roxy Music, it’s right up his exotic Manzanera street.
I’m seeing Mr Manzanera next month I’ll ask him.
Remind him that he still owes me £20, Hubes – ta!
I’ll see what I can do Fitz, just remind me why.
Could make for an interesting Q and A session at the end.
Well, I got a couple of rounds in – then his phone goes – it’s only bloody David Gilmour! Phil borrows £20 for a taxi and runs off to hold David’s hand in the studio – and I’m £20 down. He’ll remember!
I had that Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno in the back of the cab once…
Well Mr Manzanera said he’d never seen one like it, which to be honest isn’t a surprise. I promised to let him know what it is.
Sorry Fitz I forgot to ask about the £20. Maybe next time.
You really, really, showed my guitar to Phil Manzanera? I am astonish. In case you didn’t read the relevant comments (too busy blowing snort in the celebrity toilet), it’s a Stetch K64 with a Starfield neck. Please also tell Mr. Manzanera that I’ve also replaced the gold plastic Welsh Hat knob with an altogether better knurled black metal doohickey. Partial to the knurl, I am.
Alas I couldn’t remember all the details be assured the relevant details will be passed on.
I blame it on blowing Snork from Banana Splits.
Messaged passed on.
WASSUP GUYS!!!! I have a YouTube© channel devoted to minor improvements I’m making to this guitar. The ten minute video on the tone control knob change is a little blurry as it’s filmed in macro mode from too far away and I keep dropping the phone lol also the lack of sound doesn’t help like subscribe comment😀😀😀😀😀😀
I reckon you should record a short clip for us all to hear – Smoke On The Water maybe, or the intro to Badge?
Yes, demo please! That’s a beauty.
This is my much more common Pignose from 2012.
Want one.
They’re such fun.
This is very cute. I had (and maybe still have) a Pignose amp somewhere. I tell you what, though, Twang, my Starfield has a considerable edge in terms of tone variation, thanks to its circuitry being designed and installed by a madman.
The thing about these guitars is you can’t see one being played without wanting to have a go yourself. “Go on Twang, gizza go!” “No. Fack orf.” “Aww come on Twang you spaz I borrered you me air rifle!”
You could always try selling it to home-mad guitar fan B. May
Then again May B. not
Oh, v good.
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
Here (I hope) is the back view:
… and opened:
Nothing to see here, folks – move right along.
Dismantling the front to show amp/speakers, let alone mantling it, is beyond me.
But – a lot of work went into shaping the body and routing out the voids to accept the components, also fashioning the pick up plate (solid aluminium) and pick guard. Because of this, I’m leaning more towards it being a prototype made at Fujigen than a hobby project. If you were fooling around with a let’s-see-if-this-flies attitude, I doubt you’d spend as much time shaping and finishing the body, which is a beautiful piece of work (with bonkers fittings). If the serial number is accurate, it’s from 1992, the last year Fujigen produced Starfield guitars in Japan. It could have been a Hail Mary effort to create a new market. The fact that it’s nowhere on the net seems to say it never reached production.
You’ve convinced me: it’s a prototype.
Hello. This is not a Starfield prototype. It is a Starfield neck on a Stetch K64 body.
Missed this the first time around – thank you for the sterling internet sleuthery which has put fevered brains to rest across the planet!
I see you insert your pick under the higher strings.
I insert mine under the lower ones. They’re thicker and hold better.
More to the point, I like that guitar. Good job it’s not a Fender or Gibson. They’d ‘relic’ it and charge all comers £5000 for it. Imagine paying more for a guitar with some paint knocked off.
The longer I look at it, the less sure I am of what I’m looking at. The neck is clearly 100% Starfield, but that body…
I showed that picture to an acquaintance who truly does know about such things and he drew a blank too, noting that it didn’t looking like anything in any of the Starfield catalogues in his archives.
Apart from the neck, nothing about it looks anything remotely like any of the other guitars Starfield made – the body looks more like an old Teisco or something and I find it hard to believe that anyone was seriously expecting to flog anything like that in 1992. And that wacky mismounted jack socket doesn’t look like anything Starfield did either – all the pictures of their guitars I could find had their jacks tucked away on the side. I assume the angle of the pickup is to compensate for the limitations of those speakers. Do the strings go over the top of the pole pieces? It’s hard to tell from the picture.
My vote would be for something knocked up at the Fujigen factory for reasons unknown from whatever parts they had to hand. They’d been making guitars for all sorts of people for years, from Starfield/Ibanez to Fender and lord only knows who else, so god only knows what was in their parts bin.
I’ve got a Fujigen Epiphone of similarly vague provenance, which I’ve owned for – counts – 41 years, more or less to the day. Nothing about that one really makes much sense when you look closely either.
Very useful response, Yorkio, and I think it’s the answer – a combination of random Mad Scientist and Fujigen facilities. No, the pickup isn’t positioned exactly right under the strings, and this echoes the general wonkiness of the fittings. It’s the discrepancy between body/neck and fittings that makes me think the guitar was built by a woodworker, not an electrician, who did the best he could with what he had. A kind of private end-of-term project, maybe, as the brand died at the factory.
As to expecting it to work as a commercial proposition – maybe there was a misguided intent in this direction. “Hey, boss – what about this?” Who knows? For me, the mystery lies in the body, which looks like no other guitar that I can find, and is beautifully sculpted, perfectly balanced, obviously made to fit the neck, and saddled with parts found in the discard pile.
It’s a mongrel, a mutt, and as such has found its true home here, where pedigree is just a brand of food I never buy.
The body shape kind of reminds of the Charvel Surfcaster, which was being made in Japan at about the same time. The thing that puzzles me is how the upper half of that lovely offset body, with its pearloid scratchplate and porthole speakers, looks very smart in its own very idiosyncratic but coherent vision-of-the-future-as-envisaged-in-the-past sort of way, but the business end, with its Strat bridge and jack plate, and pickup and dog ear surround that look like they’ve come from an old jazz box, looks like it was slung together in a garage by someone’s dad, who was vaguely aware of what guitars looked like but had never played one in his life.
It would be kind of interesting to completely pull it to bits to see if there are any clues as to its lineage hidden on any of the hardware. That wouldn’t really achieve very much thought or make it any better a guitar. Best just to love it as it is.
If I can get it together (man) I’ll do a Twang-O-Vid© on YewChewb to demonstrate its awesome capabilities with my arthritic fumbling, but first I have to wait for my fingernails to grow back after their weekly shearing. No requests until the encore, please.
Play some old!
@h-p-saucecraft
Sound of silence!
Here’s a tune written in 1847. Hell of a time signature.
**applauds time signature joke**
Your retro-futurist plank would look great resting in the trunk of my car as I cruise the Red Planet highway on my way down to the local ice-cream parlour at the Mars Settlement.
Thats not a car it’s a futurist kazoo.
The neck is a Starfield and the body is a Stetch K64. It is not a prototype, but a cool mix for sure
FANTASTIC!!!! I did a Google image search and – there’s mah baby! So far everything’s in Japanese, but I’ll keep digging. Upside-down socket correctly in place.
Also, that flange knob is clearly a replacement for the twin of the knob in the pickup plate.
https://yahoo.aleado.com/lot?auctionID=w1115379468
I wonder what the story was on somebody putting the neck on this body. Stetchs and Starfields aren’t very common guitars. Two rather rare guitars were parted out to make this thing. It’s very cool. I was surprised to come across this actually, I can’t recall the last time I saw a Stetch outside of Japan’s side of the internet.
Japanese internet is obviously another internet entirely, with its own computers and everything. And it’s written in code!
In other news, I’ve discovered that playing this in overdrive mode with a slide is totally, like, awesome.
THIS JUST IN:
Found whammy bar in guitar shop drawer, and, amazingly, it fits! Space-age sounds au-go-go!
Beyoooyiiingg!
I’m pretty damn sure I never had a guitar that pushed the fun needle up to eleven as instantly as this one. I’m going to have this cremated with me, I think. Not just yet – best wait until I’m dead – but I’d like to take it with me, Egyptian Rajah-style. I’ll play Jimi Page’s unforgettable riff to Smoke On The Water as I pass through the Pearly Gates, full gain.