Eternal Guitars: "Blackie Tribute" S-Type demo with Gray Large
Since I began building tribute models to some of the most famous ever guitars used, the one that I'm most often asked about is Eric Clapton’s “Blackie”.
Our Eternal “Blackie Tribute” is a wonderful early mid-'50s combination of alder and maple finished in heavily aged nitrocellulose aged to mimic the battle scars and wear of the original guitar. The neck has a wonderful worn aesthetic and feel - broken in and comfortable but with the addition of medium-jumbo frets for an enhanced vintage feel, it’s accurate and a breeze to play - the perfect combination.The hardware is all Gotoh vintage repro with split-post tuners and a steel block vibrato bridge with bent steel saddles for THAT tone.Our “Timeless Blackjack” pickups are a perfect match and wired through our usual top-notch, highest-quality CTS, Switchcraft and CRL electronic components (there’s even a repro “Phone Book” paper in oil cap) for decades of hassle-free use.
I’ve recreated the heavily worn black nitro finish on a two-piece, 50s routed alder body and mated that to a truly sumptuous feeling one-piece maple neck with a soft but distinct “V” shaped back profile. A vintage correct 7.25” radius ‘board uses black dot markers beneath the heavily worn and lightly tinted nitro finish - there’s virtually zero finish left on the back of the neck and it feels broken in and well-used with rounded edges and a smooth effortless playing feel. The original guitar was re-fretted on numerous occasions so I’ve used medium-jumbo frets to aid string bending and offer a more definite, responsive feel.
Eric never used the original six-screw vintage vibrato, preferring to screw down to the body so I’ve used an excellent Gotoh reproduction and secured it firmly with a full complement of five springs tightened as far as possible into the body to ensure that it never moves.
There is very little actual documented information about how Blackie was wired but I assume it was as standard with the addition of a five-way sector to replace the original three-way, and most probably the small mod to wire the second tone pot to the bridge pickup.
The back of the one-ply pickguard has some additional copper sheet shielding added to reduce noise and undoubtedly a few small electronic parts would have been replaced during maintenance over the years. From the one or two images available, I believe that the original cloth-covered wiring has been replaced with plastic-covered wire (or the wiring loom is from a later period guitar) The pots are almost certainly approx 250k and an original ‘phone book” capacitor appears to be in situ, so I’ve replicated this as closely as possible but used cloth-covered hook-up wire as I much prefer it.
Things get interesting with the pickups, however. Both Eric and his long-serving guitar tech Lee Dickson always seemed vague on the subject of which pickups are in the original guitar, and the assumption is that they are a mixed set from the three mid-‘50s donor guitars - Eric having simply chosen the ones he preferred the tone from.
This makes perfect sense given that the neck and body are mid-50s but in my research, I discovered an anomaly: the pickups appear to be grey-bottomed. This is significant as grey-bottomed flatwork was first used in the mid-‘60s by which time Fender had swapped to using dark purple plain enamel pickup coil wire and the pickup winders at the factory were struggling to see it against the black fibre board. The solution was to use a light grey fibre board for greater visual contrast.
This is common knowledge but why significant? Well, just maybe all these glorious tones didn’t come from a set of Heavy Formvar wound ‘50s Strat pickups as has long been accepted, but just perhaps they were from a set of mid to late ‘60s Plain Enamel wound, lacquer dipped single-coils?
The timeline fits and maybe Eric simply preferred the brighter, louder tones that they offered. His friend Jimi Hendrix was using them after all and making some fairly decent sounds…
Another detail is that the original pickups appear to have black and white plastic lead wires rather than vintage cloth-covered. Okay, it’s extremely possible that a guitar this heavily used would have needed a pickup or two re-wound or repaired at some point, and it’s not beyond belief that a tech somewhere on the road would have suggested replacing old and worn cloth wiring throughout with more robust plastic wire - or maybe the pickups and wiring are from a later era guitar after all?
Without access to the original guitar, I would have to do what I felt was best and closest tonally, so I set about designing and building a bespoke pickup set that would nail the sweet, singing tone. A few prototypes later I was happy - so happy that I’ve decided to make this set of pickups available to purchase separately as part of my “Timeless” range and have named them “Blackjacks”.
Audio and video recorded and edited by Sam Bell.
