The Guitar Diaries Part 1: Encore Hunter 644 (August – September 1997)

After a small amount of internet research, it turns out that my first guitar was an Encore Hunter 644, a cheap Superstrat copy.  If my knowledge of this guitar seems limited, it’s because I only owned it for six weeks. I bought it from Marie who was a friend I worked with at a part time job. I’d been thinking about getting a guitar for a few months, having lived through the Britpop era. Initially I only wanted to get an acoustic, but Marie persuaded me to go electric, probably because she wanted to shift this axe. Along with the guitar I also got a cheap solid state amplifier to go with it.

My friend Andrew from college helped me out stringing and tuning the guitar and getting a few extra accessories. On this guitar I learned my first basic chords and songs. The first time I ever played a song all the way through was when I managed Oasis’ ‘It’s Good To Be Free’ after maybe two or three weeks of practicing.

Marie loved 80s hair metal and also things like Metallica, and being about five years older than me had got the guitar in her early teens. Looking at a few pictures on the internet, it seems it had the usual Superstrat layout of three pickups (Humbucker in the bridge), and it also had a Floyd Rose type tremolo. I knew none of this at the time, but looking at the pictures now I can remember it.

This guitar’s day were numbered on 28^th August 1997. I had gone to town to buy tickets for a U2 concert that evening in Leeds. I was there too early for the tickets, so bought a guitar magazine and sat on a bench in the town centre. In these pre Internet days (or at least before it was widely adopted), magazines, especially ‘The Guitar Magazine’ were the main sources of information about pricing and availability. I knew that the Encore didn’t suit my aesthetic and was incredibly uncool in the Oasis era, so I then began to think about getting a Les Paul. A Gibson would be too expensive, but the reviews were saying how good quality the Epiphones were… I also had a little walk around the music shops (they would be seeing a lot of me over the next year) and looked at what they had in the window, and amongst other things it was the first time I ever saw a Rickenbacker 330 – a 12 string, red with black binding. More of Rickenbacker later.