Few electric guitars are as instantly recognisable as Eric Clapton's legendary black S-Type, assembled in the early 1970s from a collection of vintage instruments and subsequently heard on some of the most celebrated recordings and performances of his career.
This Eternal Blackie Tribute began with a deceptively simple idea:
How close could I get to the look, feel - and, most importantly, the sound - of the original guitar?
What followed became rather more of an obsession than I'd anticipated.
Because the deeper I looked into Blackie, the more I began to question some of the accepted wisdom about what was actually inside it.
Chasing the sound, not just the specification
There are plenty of guitars that look like Blackie.
That wasn't really the point.
I wanted this guitar to have the character I associate with Blackie at its best: that wonderfully open, woody neck pickup; the hollow, percussive in-between sounds; and the slightly wiry, vocal quality when the amp begins to work.
So, as with all Eternal builds, the starting point wasn't simply a parts list.
It was the sound.
And that led me down a particularly interesting rabbit hole.
The Blackie pickup mystery
Blackie is generally described as having retained pickups from the mid-1950s instruments from which it was assembled.
But while researching the original guitar, I began studying detailed photographs of its pickups - and noticed something rather curious.
They appeared to show characteristics normally associated with later 1960s pickups, including grey fibre baseplates, together with construction details that didn't seem entirely consistent with the accepted mid-'50s specification.
So were Blackie's pickups changed at some point?
Were parts from different periods combined?
Or is the history simply more complicated than the story that has been repeated over the years?
I don't pretend to have a definitive answer.
What I did have was a fascinating starting point for a set of pickups.
Rather than blindly reproducing what Blackie was supposed to contain, I began winding and experimenting with sets designed around what I could see in the photographs - and, crucially, what I could hear on the records.
The result became the Eternal 'Blackjack' set fitted to this guitar.
They have the clarity and openness you'd expect from a great vintage single coil, but with that slightly leaner, wirier character that I hear in Blackie: articulate when clean, beautifully hollow in the in-between positions and wonderfully vocal when pushed.
It's probably the most enjoyable bit of guitar-related detective work I've done in quite some time.
Hear it for yourself
Of course, there comes a point where descriptions of pickups become rather meaningless.
So rather than taking my word for it, Mike Bradley put the Blackie Tribute through its paces in a full demo.
Listen particularly to the neck pickup and the way the guitar responds as Mike moves from clean and dynamic playing into more driven sounds.
https://youtu.be/YrkuwGVlzNA?si=zGBUaxRw7JfvzjuX
Headphones recommended. Volume entirely at your discretion.
Building Blackie
The original Blackie wasn't a factory model or a carefully specified Custom Shop recreation.
It was essentially a parts guitar.
In 1970, Clapton reportedly bought a number of old S-Types from Sho-Bud in Nashville for around $100 each. Three were given to George Harrison, Pete Townshend and Steve Winwood, while parts from the remaining instruments were used to assemble the guitar that became Blackie.
That slightly mongrel nature is part of its charm.
For this Eternal tribute, I've tried to capture the character of the guitar rather than simply produce a shiny black instrument and attack it with sandpaper.
The body is lightweight alder, finished in an extremely thin coat of black nitrocellulose lacquer and carefully aged by hand.
The maple neck has the worn-in appearance and feel of an instrument that's spent decades being played rather than displayed, with the finish ageing, checking and wear all intended to feel natural rather than theatrical.
As always, the objective isn't to make a new guitar look artificially old.
It's to make it feel as though somebody else has already done the first forty years of playing it for you.
Specification
Body: Lightweight alder
Finish: Aged black nitrocellulose lacquer
Neck: One-piece maple with soft "V" back profile
Fingerboard: Maple
Fingerboard radius: 7.25"
Frets: Vintage-inspired specification
Pickups: Eternal Blackjack single-coil set
Controls: Master volume, two tone controls
Switching: 5-way selector
Bridge: Vintage-style vibrato
Tuners: Vintage-style
Nut: Hand-cut bone
Electronics: Premium CTS / CRL components
Weight: 7.8 lb
Ageing: Hand-aged throughout
Built: By hand in England
Case: Hard case included
More than a replica
There is an obvious irony in trying to recreate a guitar that was itself assembled from several other guitars.
So I don't regard this as an attempt to produce a forensic museum copy of Blackie.
It's my interpretation of it.
I've tried to recreate the things that made the original interesting in the first place: the simplicity, the slightly mismatched character of a parts guitar, the feel of an instrument that's been played relentlessly and — above everything else — that sound.
The Blackjack pickups came directly from researching this guitar, and the finished instrument has become one of my favourite vintage-style S-Type builds.
If you're looking for a pristine black guitar, this probably isn't it.
If you want something that feels worn-in from the first chord, has a genuine story behind its development and sounds absolutely glorious when you turn an amp up…
Blackie might be rather more interesting.
Available now - £3,400
Hand-built, hand-wound and hand-aged in England.
Includes hard case.
This is the actual guitar shown and played in the Mike Bradley demo.
